EDU6613 Standards Based Assessment: End of Course Reflection

When I began this quarter, I thought this class was going to be about standards based grading.  I thought it was going to be a review of what I already knew to be positive for students.  What I did not expect was to get to think deeply about a unit and see how the standards I think I am teaching actually align with the formative assessments I am planning.  I also did not think I would get to think through all of the formative assessments for a unit.  During this quarter, I created a Learning Progression of a Calculus unit.  I was able to think through the progression of the standards for limits and continuity, put them in order, and decide on the formative assessments that go with each learning target.  I also created a Formative Assessment Rubric.  This rubric took one learning target and its formative assessment.  I then broke it down into the different levels of achievement and possible differentiation techniques depending on student level.  While thinking through the formative assessment rubric, I also created a document of Student Misconceptions.  This document forced to me to think about student misconceptions before they happen.  While I know this is what is best for students, in my time crunched teacher life, I do not take enough time to think about misconceptions before they happen.  In the future I would like to create a student misconception list for each unit I teach.  I think this would be helpful for new teachers coming into a subject but also for daily use.  This work spoke to Standard 11: Utilize formative and summative assessment in a standards based environment.  Like I said at the beginning, coming into this class, I thought this standard was talking about only standards based grading.  Through the activities that are linked above, I have learned why it is necessary to assign standards to everything we do.

The other large piece of this class was our Assessment into Action Project.  For this project, I chose to focus on providing effective feedback to my students.  In the first five years of my teaching I did not focus on the type of feedback I was providing for my students.  I thought the way I had received feedback growing up would be sufficient.  I would write notes throughout the assessment and provide a score at the top of the work at the end.  Through this class and our book Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam, I learned that, "the effect of giving both scores and comments was the same as the effect of giving scores alone" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 109).  All the work I was putting in to give students "effective" feedback was not helpful.  In my Assessment into Action Project I looked specifically on how to give students feedback that did not include a score.  This aligns with Wiliam when he says, "The quality of the work of the students who had been given comments had improved substantially compared to their work in the first period, but those given grades and praise had made no more progress than those given absolutely no feedback on their work" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 110).  This class reading drove my research for my project.

Based off of my Assessment into Action Project, I have a few new goals for the school year.  First being to give less scores and more task-involving feedback, second being to modify my rubrics to give students more useful feedback, and thirdly to help students learn how to give each other effective feedback.  When thinking about my first goal, giving less scores, I will be using Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam, The Conscientious Consumer: reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning by Richard Higgins, Peter Hartley, and Alan Skelton and Response To Assessment Feedback: The Effects Of Grades, Praise, And Source Of Information by Anastasiya A. Lipnevich and Jeffrey K. Smith.  As I come into this school, my three goals will be at the front of my mind.  To help meet my first goal, I need to continually remind myself that, “[f]ormative feedback comments can only be effective if students read and make use of them” (Higgins, Hartley, & Skelton, 2002). I will be focusing on how to provide feedback that students will actually use. I will also be working on the quality of my feedback because, “[a]mong those students who believed they received their detailed feedback from the instructor, those who were given a grade showed substantially lower scores than those who were not” (Lipnevich & Smith, 2008). As I process my second goal, modifying rubrics, I will be looking to Your Rubric Is a Hot Mess; Here's How to Fix It by Jennifer Gonzalez. She talked about modifying rubrics to being a single-point rubric. The standard you are assessing is the middle column, then the left column is what students need to work on, and the right column is what students are already doing well. When Gonzales was talking about the way she modified her rubrics, I felt that it was a simple shift I could make to help students grow.

“Instead of detailing all the different ways an assignment deviates from the target, the single-point rubric simply describes the target, using a single column of traits. It’s what you’d find at level 3 on a 4-point scale, the “proficient” column, except now it’s all by itself. On either side of that column, there’s space for the teacher to write feedback about the specific things this student did that either fell short of the target (the left side) or surpassed it (the right)” (Gonzalez, 2014).

Before I was creating the rubrics Gonzales is talking about.  For my second goal, I am going to work on modifying my rubrics to follow this template.  Finally as I think about my third goal that came out of this class, peer feedback, I will be using Descriptive Feedback and Some Strategies by Pat Sachse-Brown and Joanne Aldridge.  This resource provided simple ways to help students give each other feedback on their work.  The strategy I am going to try this year is, “Select two highlighters: one colour to highlight “what is working” (green) and one colour to highlight “what needs improving” (pink) and highlight each student’s work in relation to the criteria” (Sachse-Brown & Aldridge, 2004).

References

- Gonzalez, J. 2014. Your Rubric Is a Hot Mess; Here's How to Fix It. Retrieved August 06, 2017, from http://www.brilliant-insane.com/2014/10/single-point-rubric.html

- Higgins, R., Hartley, P., & Skelton, A. (2002). The Conscientious Consumer: Reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning. Studies in Higher Education,27(1), 53-64. doi:10.1080/03075070120099368

- Lipnevich, A. A., & Smith, J. K. (2008). Response To Assessment Feedback: The Effects Of Grades, Praise, And Source Of Information. ETS Research Report Series,2008(1), I-57. doi:10.1002/j.2333-8504.2008.tb02116.x

- Sachse-Brown, P., & Aldridge, J. (2004). Descriptive Feedback and Some Strategies. Retrieved August 6, 2017, from http://standardstoolkit.k12.hi.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CCR.Protocol_1.Descriptive_Feedback_Strategies.pdf