posted by:
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Mack McCary
on March 21, 2000
at 3:47AM
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subject:
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Student understanding and grading practices
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More on lessons learned thru MIPS: Math Improvement thru Problem Solving K-8. Another lesson we've been learning is the crucial role of classroom assessment and grading practices in changing math instruction to promote inquiry. Prior to and simultaneous with the grant, we had engaged representative teams of teachers in our district in identifying "essential skills," what teachers believed to be the most important (essential) skills in the curriculum for success at the next grade level. At the beginning in math, these skills were focused much more on mastering procedures (objectives) than on conceptual understanding. Once these essential skills were identified, the focus shifted to how to assess student progress and mastery, especially how to judge whether the student had reached grade level standards. This led to a healthy tho difficult dialogue, as teachers, especially in grades 3-5, discovered that simply averaging grades did not necessarily produce an accurate judgment of mastering skills. Once the myth of simple averaging was taken away, teachers struggled with how to assess mastery and how to assign a grade. At first they designed a report card that tried to assess mastery of every skill every nine weeks, which proved to be overwhelming. We engaged them in a TQM process that considered the different customer needs for a report card, and those changes distinguised between a simpler summary for parents, and a more detailed teacher classroom assessment system which kept up with student progress. They began to see the importance of a portfolio and observational records to support their judgment on report cards. Though still in progress, the Trailblazer materials and the report card have shifted the focus of reflection meetings to "What do students understand, and how do you know?" It has restored teachers' confidence in using observation and questions to make judgments of student performance, rather than relying solely on objective measures. The group meetings and reflection on student work are essential in developing this confidence, promoting the idea that you cannot escape the need to make subjective judgments based on observation, but that these judgments need to become more consistent across teachers, and need to be a "theory" subject to revision as the teacher makes more observations, as well as tests and tasks, and the student produces more work. Emphasizing that grades should rely primarily on work collected nearest to the grading decision, rather than simply averaging grades across the entire grading period, has helped. But the biggest help has been organizing regular teacher reflection on student work, exploring together what is the evidence of student understanding. This is still a work in progress, and we have barely begun to explore the role of formative feedback in math (we're further along in writing). We are discovering that students are really motivated by feedback on their reading which helps them clearly see their current level of performance and what they need to do to improve. We've been using the Accelerated Reader concept of reading level (Zone of Proximal Development). It is absolutely amazing how excited kids get to see posted evidence of their progress, and how elated they are when they achieve improvement..even to flying down the hall clutching evidence of their improvement, to seek out the principal or another staff member to celebrate how they have improved not compared to everyone else, but to where they began.
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