Sept 8, 2011 Initial responses (student and parent)

Overall

Every day that passes I like this system more and more.  It just feels so much clearer than the percentages and numbers.  The students are starting to get the hang of it too.  It’s been rough over the last couple weeks deprograming the students to look at progress instead of points but I feel it’s getting better.

 

Student Response

Honors has taken their first assessments and they have been returned.  I have one student already requesting a retake and his/her formative grades support that decision.  I had several students also comment that they like the system now.  It all make more sense.  The grades are clearer to them.  They actually mean something.  Gen chem seems to be getting used to this idea of practice too.  They’ve stopped asking about points and due dates and instead are focusing on what they know and what they need to improve.  The incentive of being able to work on other homework once they prove mastery works will with this group.  There are always a few who refuse to work but I do not think it would be any better in the points based system.  They don’t do their homework now and wouldn’t do their homework in points either.  But, this system allows for a quick turn around.  There’s no worrying about points to make up or past zeros dragging you down.  In this mastery based system, it’s all about the learning.  It’s all about mastery!  And the students seem to be responding well to it.  Gen chem has their first test next week. . . we’ll see how it goes!

Parents

Communication with parents is still my greatest concern.  The students are with me every day and here me say and say again how this system works, how to deter mine their grade and how it will all fit into SIS.  Despite the letter I sent home, the parents I talked to on Meet the Teacher night and the personal emails, I feel like there is still a lot of confusion about this system.  It takes away the ability to just look at a percent and determine how a student is doing.  You actually have to open the class and look at the pattern of the scores.  Since our online grade book looks at everything as percentages (4/5), the percentages that are present are wrong.  I will have to override them at term.  Again, I sent home the scale that I will use and it's avaliable on my website as well.  However, that is a huge problem and I know that.  I respect and even encourage the parents who use grades as a means of reward or concern.  But the original percentages used in the past meant nothing.  It was a conglomeration of every topic and behavior since day 1 and does not reflect student learning at all.  A student could do all their homework, do the extra credit and complete test corrections to get an A in the class regardless of whether the student learned anything or not. With this system, I feel like grades are clear: here is the standard and here is where you are.  I hope it will all become clearer as the semester progresses. 

After school note:  I had a student stay after school because he looked at the pattern that was emerging from his homework in his folder and said “Ms V, it doesn’t take a genius to see that 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 don’t get a 5 on that test!”  And I was over the moon.  He looked at the pattern and saw that he wasn’t progressing and needed a little extra help/confidence.  I think it is much easier for students to see their progress with the streamlined 5-4-3-2-1 system.  Another student stayed after school for a similar reason, stating that her homework grades weren’t getting any better.  Overall, they seem to be responding really well to the idea of progress as opposed to do or die one time grades. 

Sept 2, 2011 Grading, first thoughts

Overall

I am still pleased with this sytem. The summative tests taken today in honors chemistry match up well with the data gathered so far from formative assessments.  In one case, a student didn’t do as well as the formative assessment suggested he/she should and thus has a case to argue for a retake of that section.  As a mastery-based system, I feel compelled to allow retests, particularly if the formatives support that decision.  I think I will do the retake in sections according to the substandards instead of having the student retake the entire test.  The test was divided that way to begin with.  I still need to come up with a better way to arrange my grade book.  It is difficult to track a student’s progress on a particular piece of a standard when it is all jumbled together by date.  Even in the online grade book, while it is chunked by standard, the sub-standards are all mixed together.  In my paper grade book, I think I will mark off sections for each sub-standard and if I don’t use all column, I will mark them out later.  I need to organize based on sub-standards as well as standards.  It's all about the patterns.  

Tests

Honors chemistry took the first test today.  It had multiple parts.  The first part was regular old pencil and paper.  I chunked it into the sub-standards, so all of the questions pertaining to 1.a were together and all the questions pertaining to 1.b were together and so on.  The number of questions varied.  There were 6 questions for a, 12 questions for b, 5 questions for c and 2 questions for d.  It proved very difficult to come up with equal numbers of questions.  Also, it was difficult to categorize the notes.  So many of my standards are math concepts, configurations, dot structures and the like.  It is providing difficult to categorize vocabulary.  It would seem I will have to add that standard in next year.  I originally had a standard specifically mentioning mastery of pertinent vocabulary but took it out last minute. 

The second part of the test is a considerably more applications based assessment.  It will be given its own score.  It contains tasks that require the student to apply his or her knowledge of the standard instead of simply answering a black and white question.  (Ex: 1.b required students to design an experiment, 1.c asked students to draw a line of 2.54x10¹¹nm in length with a metric ruler)

Grading the Test

Since the first part was a multiple choice test, the answers were either right or wrong.  Before I began grading the test, I decided what score would equal a 5, a 4, and so on.  This kept me from being biased towards students.  Each section was scored independently resulting in four different scores for this part of the test.  I recorded them all separately in my grade book but only the average of the 4 scores will be recorded in the online system as the summative grade for standard 1. 

I intend to create a rubric to grade the second assessment since it is less concrete than the first.  It should make assigning scores easier. 

Communication

 I am concerned about parent understanding of this system.  I explained the system in detail at Parent Night and also sent home a detailed parent letter to be signed and returned.  If it was not returned, I emailed the parents personally explaining the system.  However, it would seem that there is still quite a bit of confusion.  I think the system will be clearer to students after this first test is completed but I still worry about the interpretation from home.  I hope the folks who have difficulty understanding the grading system will email or call me.  Parents are the backbone of the whole education system and without their support, typically my success is hamstrung as well.  So I hope this system will spawn more communication between teacher and parent.  At Parent Night, those parents that were there expressed a great liking towards this new approach to grading and I am hopeful that most parents will agree.  I think, overall, this system will clarify student progress in the course.  It allows me to show quite distinctly though numberical data, which by virtue of being data is unbiased, how a child is doing in the course and what kind of progress he or she is making.