I believe in standards based grading, and think it has great power to help teachers give students the autonomy to be accountable for their own learning. As my school transitions from a traditional grade book to standards based learning, I have been looking for ways to make my formative assessments better aligned to this type of grading. The Plan My students are currently working on a summative project where they have been tasked to design an exhibit for our local science museum about light and/or sound waves. In order to check their progress, I asked students to turn in a rough draft of their exhibit proposal, and include with it a self-assessed rubric of how well they think they have met the performance outcomes (basically longterm learning targets) for this unit, and why. The Results I received a wide range of data from my students, which was intriguing to piece through during my weekend grading. The literature states numerous benefits to this type of formative assessment, some of which I observed and some of which I did not. About half of my students were honest with their self-assessment, marking themselves at or below grade level expectations for their project so far. A quarter of my students clearly paid no mind to the language in the rubric, and instead claimed to be meeting grade level expectations despite the lack of evidence to support this claim. A final quarter of my students were confused by the assignment and their self-assessment didn't actually follow the guidelines of the assignment. The Analysis My students are used to numbers and easy input-output grading styles. "I do this work with a certain level of effort, I get this grade," type of grading. Some of them are used to skating by with barely passing marks on summative assessments and relying on effort-based work like homework and classwork to get them a C in the class. Standards-based grading takes away this model and offers instead an approach that is simpler in some ways and more complex in others: did this student demonstrate he/she/they reached or exceeded grade level expectations for the standards? I think that this assignment was confusing for students that aren't used to being asked questions like this. They are used to rubrics that are check lists -- did you write in complete sentences? Did you include an introduction, body and conclusion paragraph? Did you make a 3D model? -- rather than more abstract inquiries into the learning that happened throughout the unit. This is going to take time and repetition for my students to get used to, as well as careful modeling and presentations of exemplars. For the students that found success with this assignment, however, I saw a high level of reflective thinking demonstrate in their self-assessment rubrics. Those that understood the goal of the assignment paid careful attention to the depth of knowledge language in the rubric and were able to provide me with a quality analysis of where they are at so far. I am going to ask a few of these students if I can use their rubrics as exemplars to help my students who are struggling to understand this transition in grading styles. Moving Forward I learned a lot from this formative assessment about how well my students understand our new standards based grading system. Hopefully, the feedback I provided them in this formative assessment will help guide them towards better understanding how to meet the performance outcomes in their final product. I know this will be a year long task for me of reiterating the point of these kinds of self-assessments in order to help my students transition into standards based grading. At times, this feels a little redundant for a group of 8th graders that next year will move on to high schools that don't use standards based grading, but my hope is that this one year of standards based grading might help them connect deeper to their own learning for years to come. References Essays, UK. (November 2013). An Essential Component Of Formative Assessment Education Essay. Nicol, D. J. & Macfarlane‐Dick, D. (2006) Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice, Studies in Higher Education, 31:2, 199-218, Spiller, D. (Feb, 2012). Assessment matters: self-assessment and peer-assessment. Teaching Development.
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Annotated bibliographies and literature reviews have a close relationship with some differing features. Each can play an important role in telling the story of a particular field of research, and can even occasionally go hand in hand. What's the difference between an annotated bibliography and a literature review? Annotated bibliographies provide a list of sources paired with a description that provides a general overview of what the reader will find in each source. Literature reviews, on the other hand, take information from various related sources and compile that information in document that synthesizes the information by connecting similar points and contrasting differences from source to source. How have I used both tools throughout my MAE work? For some people, these two documents are stand-alone, unique finished products. For me, the annotated bibliography is an important step towards completing a final literature review. Whenever I write a literature review, I start by compiling a list of sources in a Google Doc that sound like they might be relevant to my topic. I find more than I need because I know that some of them might not actually be helpful after reading through. Once I have a list of sources, I read each one and as I am reading, I write a summary of the main ideas in each source in that Google Doc, underneath of each corresponding source. When I am done, I have a rough draft of an annotated bibliography. I can then go through and pull overarching themes out of my annotated bibliography, and use these to create an outline of my Literature Review. Here is an example of this annotated bibliography document, that I used to write my Literature Review rough draft during our summer courses. Why do I use this technique to organize my thoughts? I have tried other techniques like taking notes, making tables or mind mapping in the past, but I have found that creating the mind map actually slows down my progress and taking notes/making tables creates an extra step. I am a very linear thinker and prefer to synthesize my thoughts in a linear manner. Making this annotated bibliography is great because if I write my summaries really well, then I can actually copy paste language straight from my summaries into my final literature review. I have to be extremely careful, for this reason, that I am not lifting language directly from the source. I have to resist the urge to copy and paste or paraphrase with similar tone/word choice, because I could forget that I did that later on and accidentally plagiarize the original author's writing in my final product. If I read something in the article that I can't find a way to paraphrase well, I will label it as a "notable quote" in the document and then paste it in with quotations and a page number. This is another great technique because then when I go to write the literature review, I have the page number already and can quickly in-text cite my quote without having to slog back through the original source. One downfall to my technique is that sometimes I look back over my work and realize that a source I summarized doesn't make any sense and I can't actually include it in my literature review. It takes me 10-45min to write one of these summaries depending on the length of the source, so sometimes I find myself having wasted almost an hour trying to understand and summarize a text that I won't even actually use in the longterm. I try to remind myself, in these instances, that even though my work won't be used in the final product, it could be helpful in the future. I don't delete summaries from sources that I choose not use from my annotated bibliographies -- I just mark them on the document in a way that tells me, "hey, don't use this." That way, someday in the future when writing about a different topic, I can always go back and look through my sources to see if maybe one of my old sources could be useful. I am always open to learning new methods of organization, especially ones that work well for a linear thinker like myself, but for now I feel I have come up with a system that works well for me. What system do you all use? References Buttram, C, MacMillan, D., & Koch, R.T (2012). Comparing the annotated bibliography to the literature review. UNA Center for Writing Excellence. In this week's Leader Module, we explored how to use technology to enhance leadership in our classrooms. I chose to evaluate the Tech Tool of making video projects found on the Edutopia Technology Integration Blog Page. In their Edutopia article, Corcoran and Ahrens state, "As teachers, we walked away realizing video is not a reward, it’s an entry point for today’s students to communicate their ideas and tell their stories." Their goal was for students to improve empathy skills, practice their storytelling skills and improve their technology abilities through the lens of creating a personal video. They named the project "Every Kid Has a Story to Tell," and culminated in a public film festival to showcase the videos. These teachers had a lot of success getting kids to engage actively in their own learning and create a project with an authentic audience, which are both extremely important aspects of effective technology education, especially for underserved students. As found by Gencer & Yavuz (2016), leadership style is not directly related to technology competency, so even students that differ in leadership skills can find a voice through digital media projects like video production. I am hoping for my students to participate in a video production project for our space science unit. I want to take my kids to the Farmington Planetarium to see a space documentary, and then have them create their own planetarium-worthy space films. In this particular case, creating videos seemed to be an especially useful tech tool for improving literacy and empathy skills, but the writers couldn't speak specifically for addressing scientific content. Therefore, if I were to recommend this tool to other teachers, I would emphasize its use would be most effective in the ELA classroom. I will update with my experiences implementing this in the middle school science classroom once I have given it a shot. One disadvantage to this tech tool is that in the context that Corcoran and Ahrens used it, the authentic audience that attended their film festival event was composed of parents/guardians. That is better than just a teacher audience of one, but this tool could be improved if the audience attending the event were more specific -- in my case, this could look like middle schoolers creating educational space videos for elementary students. Overall, creating videos as a project could be extremely beneficial for students in developing 21st century skills. It is a great tool for teaching effective communication, since students need to have organized communication skills in order for the video to make sense. It can also have global connections if teachers choose to upload the videos to the internet, which opens up the possibilities for reaching people all over the world. References Corcoran, B. & Ahrens, M. (July 30, 2018). Project: Every kid has a story to tell. Edutopia Technology Integration Blog. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/project-every-kid-has-story-tell. Zielezinksi, M.B. (May 19, 2016). What a decade of education research tells us about technology in the hands of underserved students. Gencer, M.S. & Yavuz, S. (August 19, 2016). Leadership styles and technology: Leadership competency level of educational leaders. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 229, 226-233. |
Emma BooneFirst year 8th grade PBL math/science teacher and graduate student, wondering a bunch and figuring a few things out here and there. Archives
December 2018
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