What Worked?

A few people have asked me what worked with the grading I tried last year. Here is an attempt at a summary.



Incomplete instead of zero.

As mentioned in earlier posts I decided at a point last year that I would give incompletes rather than zeroes. This made sense to me since in my experience a zero had never resulted in what I wanted. I was operating under the assumption that every student would do what I had done when I was a kid. If I had received a zero I would have done something about it--immediately. But I had found over the years that giving a zero was not the motivation that I thought it would be. Most of the time (and I mean 9 out of 10) kids would do nothing about a zero. They would especially do nothing if a zero had only made their grade an 83 rather than an 87. But I also had many students that would do nothing even if said zero made their grade a failing one.



I found that giving incompletes worked to give the result that I had always wanted zeroes to give. In the past I saw zeroes as a symbol that meant, "Look at me! This is bad! Get work in!" But kids did not see it that way. They saw the number as a done deal that they couldn't do anything about. Giving incompletes sent the right message and I saw results from it. It worked in two ways. First, when it came out on bi-weekly progress reports it made students come to me and ask what they had done wrong. I would tell them over and over that the piece of missing work was so important that I could not give them a grade without it. [As a teacher in the real world I had to make judgements on which assignments truly met this standard. What I did was simply think in my mind if I could truly say what a student knew and understood without a particular assignment.] Second, when an incomplete was given on a report card it sent a clear message that something needed to be done. Students would often come see me right after report cards were handed out. This is somewhat due to the novelty of the incomplete grade but it also shows that it works as a signal for--"You really need to finish this work."



Grading work by section.

Grading each section of a paper or test to the standard that it was created to measure is one of the more successful ideas that I tried. It seems so logical but I had never done it before. If I gave a test I would just lump all of the various questions together and give one grade. I never had much of an understanding of what the student knew about specific standards I only knew how they did on an overall basis. Grading by section I was able to see exactly what the student did or didn't know. I was able to see where they knew the work and where it may have come apart for them. This was an amazing insight. As I graded papers and tests I would see a progression leading to the point where their understanding faded away. I could look at individual students and truly know what they needed as a next step. I don't know why I never thought of doing this before--it just seems so obvious. This allowed me, after the test, to focus in on specific knowledge for each student. If Sueta knew how to graph but did not understand the parts of the atom I would have her work on understanding the atom--not on more graphing.

Comments.
Our electronic grade book (IGP) is not set up to lend itself to easy standards grading. It is a tool that seems amazing because it can crunch lots of numbers but it really is a tool that guides how we grade not a communication tool that allows us to explain what students do and do not know. (More on electronic grade books to come.)

Our grading program can be forced to do some of the things that I want it to. In a perfect world I would like to see a program that allows marks on levels of achievement versus certain standards and narrative sections to match. I was able to force a passable mimic of this using IGP last year. I relied heavily on the comments section to do this. I spent a great deal more time writing both group and individual comments and I spend much more time explaining to students how they should use them. Every 2 weeks I would print out a sheet for every student and bring it to their attention. Usually I would go around while they were doing a lab. I could keep an eye on what they were doing and give them a quick update on what they needed to do.

For group comments--comments that were the same for the whole class--I would make a spreadsheet note that explained what we were working on that unit or quarter and give a reminder of what the level scores meant. (5=Wow!, 3=Got it! met standard, 2=nearly there!, 1=oops!) I would also outline what the big goals for the unit were. I forced myself to keep saying these goals aloud and to keep pointing to them so that we tried to keep focused on them. For assignments I would give descriptions, page numbers, where the work was located online, etc. This allowed students to have the information on how to finish the work if they did have an incomplete.

For individual comments I would keep running lists of comments for individual students. I tried to keep a balance between positive and negative. These comments were short but they were truly individualized. I felt that the comments helped in a couple of situations. If I had a student that was a hard worker who was not meeting the standards I was able to write to them and say that their work ethic was good and that they should keep up that kind of work. I still gave them an honest assessment of where they were in regards to the standard but the written comment gave me a chance to also say something about how they were attempting to reach the standard. Used another way the comments gave me a record of student work ethic. Often I would check homework but instead of marking a grade for it I could record something about it in the comments section. When I looked back over these for a student who never did homework I could compare their performance versus the standard to the amount of work they had done. If they did not meet the standard and had not ever done the homework or classwork then I had the explanation for their mark.

These are the big 3 that really helped me become a better teacher last year. These were the ones that made me know my students well enough that at the end of the year I felt like I would have been able to write a page about each of them telling what they knew and what they needed to work on. In the next post...some of the things that did not work.