My Reassessment Queue
We’re almost at the end of the third quarter over here. Here’s the current plot of number of reassessments over time for this semester:
I’m energized though that the students have bought into the system, and that my improved workflow from last semester is making the process manageable. My pile of reassessment papers grows faster than I’d like, but I’ve also improved the physical process of managing the paperwork.
While I’m battling performance issues on the site now that there’s a lot of data moving around on there, the thing I’m more interested is improving participating. Who are the students that aren’t reassessing? How do I get them involved? Why aren’t they doing so?
There are lots of issues at play here. I’m loving how I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with new ways of assessing, structuring classes, rethinking the grade book, and just plain trying new activities out on students. I’ll do a better job of sharing out in the weeks to come.
While I came down hard on personalized learning last week, this is the sort of problem that really demands some kind of personalization solution. It’s just unreasonably hard for a single teacher to give every student a good assessment on an arbitrary topic at an arbitrary time. I don’t like most of the solutions I’ve seen so far, but this needs one.
Most people have crafted their own solutions in some way – many of them are analog. As I say here, despite the work I’ve put into this digital solution, it’s still messy and time consuming. I still expect to look at everyone’s papers because I value the assessment information I get from them. The time that takes is non-negligible. It’s also something I’m not willing to outsource to a computer at this point.