What Else Ya Got?

I know that there are many who are questioning whether or not to make the jump to standards based grading for whatever reason.  But the more I think about my own children's education, the more I realize that anything else is crap.  My wife and I are probably going to homeschool our boys next year and you know what our main question is?  What do we want them to learn? 

That's it. 

Grades?  Nope.

Due dates?  Nope.

Packets?  Heck no!

Homework?  That'd be kinda redundant.

Finish when you finish.  Learn when you learn.

Sure, in our classrooms, we have to teach things because we have deadlines imposed upon us and we have to work within them.  Kids' learning doesn't give a rip about our deadlines. 

So when you decide how you're going to do it next year ask yourself this question:

How would you want your own kids to be taught?

Brain Dump

Problems vs. Exercises
Today, I threw this problem up in front of my 8th graders and they looked like they'd seen a ghost.

I like this problem because today it was an opportunity for them to show their problem solving skills.  They have all the tools they need to solve this problem, but they need to figure out which tool to use and when. 

• find a common denominator
• add fractions
• divide fractions by inverting and multiplying 
• reducing fractions

Tomorrow it won't be a problem solving opportunity.  Tomorrow it becomes an exercise.  It may be a complex exercise, but it's an exercise nonetheless. 

Now that they've seen this problem and know how to work it, I have to view it differently.  It has to carry less weight if it finds its way on an assessment because now the problem provides its own context for them. 

Assessment
I think that in order for a student to be considered an expert, she needs to demonstrate the ability to do something with the tools beyond what she's been shown.  When students encounter a problem on a test that makes them say, "but he didn't show us how to do that in class," that's a good thing.

It's true that standards based grading in math can be more than just reporting specific snippets of content knowledge. (there ya go Matt) It has to be more than just skills because I don't have a problem posting my skills online with examples of how to perform the skill.  I don't mind showing them what they need to know and them assessing them on that content.  I do mind stopping there.  The skills are the floor, not the ceiling. 

How we best help students realize they need these skills is a great conversation that I'm looking forward to seeing fleshed out.  But I think that there is also a need to discuss not only what exactly we need to assess but how.  I'm not of the opinion that we should assess behaviors like organization, responsibility, etc.  I do think that we should assess skills that may be consistent throughout our content area but not limited to our specific course.

This leads me back to the assessment question I asked in my previous post. How do I assess this ability to know when and how to put the tools together?


Do I treat it as a skill/standard and allow the score to change as students demonstrate their ability throughout the year?

Is it enough to involve my students in activities that promote problem solving and simply grade them on what I observe in class?

Does it show up in a summative assessment testing multiple skills?  If so, do the other "skills" that are on the test tip the student off as to the context of the problem at hand?

Do we use projects for students to demonstrate the ability to put a string of skills together in order to create their own meaning? 

Alright, brain's empty.  Time to go home.

Why Not?

I've had a few interesting conversations regarding skills students need in order to be successful but don't actually make it into the gradebook.  You know, the homework-organization-studyhabits-notetaking type skills also known as "soft skills."  I noticed that Shawn Cornally has "Investigation Standards" he uses in his class which makes me question the existence of a third set of skills that aren't necessarily content driven nor are they "soft."  I suppose one could argue that investigation standards are appropriate to a science class as they are often times embedded into the content skills.  But are there skills that are embedded into a math classroom that may or may not actually be figured into the grade of a student who has a teacher using SBG?

Where do things like: applying problem strategies, using multiple representations (Rule of 4) or showing multiple ways to work a problem fit into the grade book?  These are the golden threads that run through all of our math courses so why wouldn't we measure them?

Do they deserve their own place in the gradebook?  If so, how many of them are there and what are they?

ExamView and Summative Assessments

I use the phrase summative assessment very loosely because as long as my class and I have some time together, they can continue to improve upon weaknesses.  But with most of my assessments covering one skill at a time, there may be a need for assessments that check for retainment of concepts (ie. benchmarks, finals, etc.)  Now that I have created assessments for each skill, I want a way to create assessments that combine multiple skills and, ultimately, culminate into and end-of-course-test.  Fortunately, I don't have to re-create the wheel. 

The process is actually pretty simple. 

Export Skills Tests to an ExamView Question Bank
Simply take an existing test and export as a question bank.  This will allow you to use these questions in the creation of future tests. 

Choose Method for Selecting Questions
For this test, I chose to select questions while viewing.  I have a good idea of which skills/standards I want on the test, so I want to be able to look at the question before selecting it. 

Switch Banks to Select Questions
Now that I can view the questions, I just need to be able to switch from one question bank to another. 

And...

Done!
Did I mention, that I'm kind of a fan of this thing?

Learning

Joe works too fast.

Joe doesn't show his work.

Joe ends with the beginning in mind.

Today Joe took a test on being able to identify the graphs of quadratic and cubic equations. He bombed it.

Joe came back to my desk while the rest of his class was finishing their tests and had some good questions. He said he didn't know how to set up an input-output table so I showed him. I plugged in one x and found y. I plugged in a second x and asked Joe what the y-value would be. Joe did the rest himself.

Joe and I graphed his results. I asked Joe to graph a simple parabola with coeffieient of 1 on the same set of axes.

Joe said, "Hey Mr. Cox, if the number in front is bigger than 1, then it grows faster."

"And what if the number is a fraction?"

"Then it grows slower?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"It grows slower."

"What if the number is negative?"

We turned the paper upside down.

Joe gets it.

His grade is different than he thinks it is.

Update (can I update a post I haven't published yet?)

Joe just informed me that a cubic with a positive coeffiecient will end up in the 1st quadrant and one with a negative coeffient will end up in the 4th. Yeah, better get on that grade change.