Scaling up SBG for the New Year

In my new school, the mean size of my classes has doubled. The maximum size is now 22 students, a fact about which I am not complaining. I’ve missed the ease of getting students to interact with simple proximity as the major factor.

I have also been given the freedom to continue with the standards based grading system that I’ve used over the past four years. The reality of needing to adapt my systems of assessment to these larger sizes has required me to reflect upon which aspects of my system need to be scaled, and what (if anything) needs to change.

The end result of that reflection has identified these three elements that need to remain in my system:

• Students need to be assessed frequently through quizzes relating to one to two standards maximum.
• These quizzes need to be graded and returned within the class period to ensure a short feedback cycle.
• There must still be a tie between work done preparing for a reassessment and signing up for one.

Including the first element requires planning ahead. If quizzes are going to take up fifteen to twenty minutes of a class block, the rest of the block needs to be appropriately planned to ensure a balance between activities that respond to student learning needs, encourage reinforcement of old concepts, and allow interaction with new material. The second element dictates that those activities need to provide me time to grade the quizzes and enter them as standards grades before returning them to students. The third happens a bit later in the cycle as students act on their individualized needs to reassess on individual standards.

The major realization this year has been a refined need for standards that can be assessed within a twenty minute block. In the past, I’ve believed that a quiz that hits one or two aspects of the topic is good enough, and that an end of unit assessment will allow complete assessment on the whole topic. Now I see that a standard that has needs to have one component assessed on a quiz, and another component assessed on a test, really should be broken up into multiple standards. This has also meant that single standard quizzes are the way to go. I gave one quiz this week that tested a previously assessed standard, and then also assessed two new ones. Given how frantic I was in assessing mastery levels on three standards, I won’t be doing that again.

The other part of this first element is the importance of writing efficiently targeted assessment questions. I need students to arrive at a right answer by applying their knowledge, not by accident or application of an algorithm. I need mistakes to be evidence of misunderstanding, not management of computational complexity. In short, I need assessment questions that assess what they are designed to assess. That takes time, but with my simplified schedule this year, I’m finding the time to do this important work.

My last post was about my excitement over using the Numbas web site to create and generate the quizzes. A major bottleneck in grading these quizzes quickly in the past has been not necessarily having answers to the questions I give. Numbas allows me to program and display calculated answers based on the randomized values used to generate the questions.

Numbas has a feature that allows students to take the exam entirely online and enter their answers to be graded automatically. In this situation, I have students pass in their work as well. While I like the speed this offers, that advantage primarily exists in cases where students answer questions correctly. If they make mistakes, I look at the written work and figure out what went wrong, and individual values require that I recalculate along the way. This isn’t a huge problem, but it brings into question the need for individualized values which are (as far as I know right now) the only option for the fully online assessment. The option I like more is the printed worksheet theme that allows generation of printable quizzes. I make four versions and pass these out, and then there are only four sets of answers to have to compare student work against.

With the answers, I can grade the quizzes and give feedback where needed on wrong answers in no more than ten or fifteen minutes total. This time is divided into short intervals throughout the class block while students are working individually. The lesson and class activities need to be designed to provide this time so I can focus on grading.

The third element is still under development, but my credit system from previous years is going to make an appearance. Construction is still underway on that one. Please pardon the dust.

P.S:

If you’re an ed-tech company that wants to impress me, make it easy for me to (a) generate different versions of good assessment questions with answers, (b) distribute those questions to students, (c) capture the student thinking and writing that goes with that question so that I can adjust my instruction accordingly, and (d) make it super easy to share that thinking in different ways.

That step of capturing student work is the roughest element of the UX experience of the four. At this time, nothing beats looking at a student’s paper for evidence of their thinking, and then deciding what comes next based on experience. Snapping a picture with a phone is the best I’ve got right now. Please don’t bring up using tablets and a stylus. We aren’t there yet.

Right now there are solutions that hit two or three, but I’m greedy. Let me know if you know about a tool that might be what I’m looking for.