A cool and somewhat funny thing happened in one of my physics classes yesterday. I had asked the class why we/they do quizzes. The answer I was hoping to get to was “so we can demonstrate what we’ve learned.” However, the most popular answer that was shouted out was, “they’re for practice!” I thought that was pretty cool. On the other hand, it was also funny and a bit confusing because I don’t know what ultimate goal they think they are practicing for.
It had been about ten weeks since I started teaching fulltime and I thought I should reflect on how my classroom assessment is going. I am constantly thinking about assessment but sometimes I think it helps to write things down in order to get better clarity of whatever it is I’m thinking about.
My overall assessment plan is different for my senior physics classes and my grade 9 science classes. For physics I have implemented a standards based grading scheme, whereas for the grade 9 I am using a more standard model.
