{"id":58,"date":"2016-10-30T22:41:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-30T22:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/?p=58"},"modified":"2016-10-30T22:41:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T22:41:28","slug":"revised-and-revising-assessment-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/2016\/10\/30\/revised-and-revising-assessment-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Revised and Revising Assessment Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not only have we chosen to completely restructure our lessons and where are questions are sourced from, we’ve also gone a new route in summative assessment. We still have lots of formative assessment that looks pretty typical, but at the end of each unit, we’re giving a two part test. On the first part we are asking knowledge and communication questions that are more procedural and where students can use a calculator, but no other resources. On the second part, the questions are typically application and thinking and are more probing in nature. For this part, they can use their composition book. This book is where they do their homework, take notes on the approaches their classmates have taken, and anything else that they think may prove valuable on the test. This obviously means that most of the questions in\u00a0part 2 are not replicas of questions that we’ve done in class, but they do require or would be aided by a similar skill set or approach.<\/p>\n

Ok, so far nothing terribly revolutionary right? The biggest shift for me has been that after\u00a0they write part 2, we give qualitative feedback, mostly questions, on their work. We then give them another 30 minutes the next class to add more to their solutions and respond to that feedback. I can anticipate some of the flares that may be going up in your mind right now because they certainly came up to me when I heard about this approach, again from Carmel Schettino\u00a0(who has a survey on her website right now asking those interested in PBL about what kind of PD would be helpful to them – check it out!).<\/p>\n

But that means that they could “cheat” because they could go home and figure out how to do the problem from their classmates or online or from their parents and then change it so that they get it right!<\/p>\n

But that means that they could all get perfect because you show them how to fix all their mistakes!<\/p>\n

But that means you have to mark all their tests twice? That’s way too much marking!<\/p>\n

I think my greatest argument for this form of assessment is this: why should I care whether my students know how to do a question on Monday or Wednesday? Why should I care whether they learn it in class or from their peers or the internet or their parents? My goal in the end is that they are able to demonstrate understanding. Period. So far I haven’t had a whole class of perfect tests, I still have a similar range of results to what I would expect for a mixed-ability classroom, even in my enriched class there is a smaller, but still significant range.<\/p>\n

Here are three examples of student solutions, my feedback (in orange), their second attempt (in purple) and my final feedback (in blue).<\/p>\n

\"file_000\"<\/a>\u00a0\"file_005\"<\/a> \"file_004\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And the marking really isn’t that bad. The first round, I’m only writing commentary and asking questions. I have to read through their solution, but I don’t have to assign a grade. When I see their second draft, I’ve already read most of what is there and I get to see how they’ve responded and corrected. We have them write the second draft in purple pen so that we can tell what they wrote the second time. We don’t evaluate those answers any differently, but I think it’s important to be able to see what they were able to clarify.\u00a0Considering that the other option we looked at was\u00a0allowing multiple re-tests (which have to be done on our and the students own time), I’m happy to go through the tests twice.<\/p>\n

I should also mention that we’ve done something called “spiralling” the curriculum. This means that we’re developing multiple curricular strands at a time rather than focusing on one topic area. The test that my Grade 9’s just wrote had a patterning and algebra problem, a geometry problem and some exponents questions. The reasons and pros and cons of this ordering is whole other post though. Maybe the next one!<\/p>\n

Our next step is to add a rubric for communication so that we don’t take marks off an application question for organization or mathematical conventions. I think these aspects are still extremely important to develop so I want to show that we value it, but separate it from the individual questions. To come up with the categories for the rubric, I modified a couple rows from the Ontario Curriculum Grade 9 and 10 document (see table on page 22) and added a row that I revised from Carmel’s rubric<\/a> that deals with revision. We’re still taking a look at any possible changes to this, but I’ll post it soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not only have we chosen to completely restructure our lessons and where are questions are sourced from, we’ve also gone a new route in summative assessment. We still have lots of formative assessment that looks pretty typical, but at the end of each unit, we’re giving a two part test. On the first part we … Continue reading “Revised and Revising Assessment Strategy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/bethnichols\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}