October 21, 2011 and Reassessments

October 21, 2011

Artifacts

I am still struggling with this idea of artifacts.  After talking with students, it is apparent that many of my students do not need the large amounts of practice that I hand out.  By requiring homework to be turned in for a grade, it is punishing the students that get the concepts on the first try.  That is one of the greatest arguments for standards based grading and assessment for learning.  Man I love the chemistry systems of grading/reporting.  Anyway, I had originally told my students that they needed to choose an assignment each week to turn in as a homework grade.  After discussion with other teachers, I decided to require the artifacts once a week to make sure students weren’t procrastinating too badly.  However, with the ABC block schedule that my school uses, I do not see my students every day to remind them and here we are on Friday and I have received nothing.  So I’m attempting to rethink this. . . . here’s my new idea:  artifacts will be comprised of 3-5 exemplary problems from the chapter being studied.  A student must complete three of these artifacts before the chapter test.  These will be the homework grades for the chapter.  The chemistry students (both honors and general), most of whom are younger than the physics crew, have surprised me with the amount of homework they do and practice they complete without the worksheets being taken for a “grade”.  I’m hoping physics will be the same way.  I will still assign homework and suggest that they turn it in for me to grade for correctness but only the artifacts will be taken as grades.  They are to be completed alone and without the help of notes, etc, effectively making them like little quizzes but they can be completed at the student’s leisure. 

Assessments

Thus far I am pleased with my retake tickets.  We will see if this alters the number of retake requests I get because this does require the student to do more work before I will allow them the retake opportunity.  I do believe this will force students to study and review the material before they attempt the retake which is definitely a good thing. 

Overall

I still feel like this whole venture has been supremely successful at taking the emphasis off points and refocusing everything on the learning.  The students and parents have also adapted far better than I ever could have hoped.  I think the main difficulty for anyone attempting this venture would be to remain flexible.  As I move through the school year, I am constantly finding things that I do not like, ideas that are not having the desired effect or suggestions that fall flat entirely.  One has to be able to take that failure in stride and come up with a new idea fairly quickly.  All it takes is persistence.