For my assignment, I am designing a course in Google Classrooms that can be used with Grade 4 students to teach expository writing. This is my reflection on the process so far.
Alberta Grade 4 Language Arts Curriculum shifts the attention of student writing from narrative writing to expository writing. General Outcome 3 states that “Students will listen, speak, read, write, view and represent to manage ideas and information.” These are the most relevant curriculum outcomes:
3.1: Focus Attention
- use organizational patterns of expository texts to understand ideas and information
- develop and follow a class plan for accessing and gathering ideas and information
3.2: Use a variety of sources
- locate information to answer research questions, using a variety of sources, such as maps, atlases, charts, dictionaries, school libraries, video programs, elders in the community and field trips
3.3: Organize information
- organize ideas and information, using appropriate categories, chronological order, cause and effect, or posing and answering questions
- record ideas and information that are on topic
- organize oral, print and other media texts into sections that relate to and develop the topic
Record information
- make notes of key words, phrases and images by subtopics; cite titles and authors of sources alphabetically
- paraphrase information from oral, print and other media sources
Google Classrooms is a district-wide initiative this year that all teachers are being encouraged to utilize. For me, it was important to take some of the material I was already covering at the Grade 4 level, and leverage Google Classrooms to make the material a little more student-centred. As I start with this introductory module, I can see that formative assessment especially should be easier to accomplish using Google Classroom as opposed to what I was doing in a traditional delivery. For example, I have included a simple online Google Form as a quiz to see what they already know about expository writing and how well-able they are to write an expository paragraph. This is probably not something I would have “slammed” them with so early on without the capabilities of Google Classroom.
Assessment in general will be a little different using Google Classrooms, and I think this is a good thing. Gibbs and Simpson (2005) quoted a 1985 paper that found “A review of 150 studies of the relationship between exam results and a wide range of adult achievement found the relationship to be, at best, slight” (Baird, 1985). Gibbs and Simpson also go on to discuss the importance of course work as opposed to summative tests for long term learning. So, do teachers need to mark everything that a student works on as part of a course? “It is argued that you have to assess everything that moves in order to capture students’ time an energy” (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). Not necessarily so! There are other ways to generate student engagement, including peer- and self-assessment. I am still playing around with the idea of how students could do a little self-assessment as a video to upload, or how they could use online apps to sort the information they’re pulling from multiple sources.
Tony Bates in 2014 noted that “The form of assessment should also be influenced by the knowledge and skills that students need in a digital age, which means focusing as much on assessing skills as knowledge of content. Thus continuous or formative assessment will be as important as summative or ‘end-of-course’ assessment” (Bates, 2014). I think this Google Classroom course will have an appropriate focus on the skills students need for gathering and presenting information. In the past, I have debated whether to allow students to pick their own topic for study. It would be so easy to tell everyone that they were supposed to write about Alberta settlers, just to help ‘get through’ the Social Studies content. By shifting the focus to a needed skill set, I think there is a much higher level of student engagement.
Many introductory modules (and course syllabi at the university level for decades) have had a detailed percentage break-down of summative assessment grading. At the elementary level, there has been long, deep discussion of the types of grades students receive. We are currently using only EX, AB, AC and NY (excellence, above average, acceptable and ‘not yet’), with no percentage descriptors. Students receive feedback and individual discussion of their progress, but no percentage grade. I felt it was useful to explain the difference between formative and summative assessment in a Grade-4-friendly way, but there is no table showing that some assignments are worth more than others. I think there is value in leading them through the process of writing and presenting an expository piece without picking out one part of the process as more important than another.
References:
Alberta Education Programs of Study (2000). English Language Arts K-9. Retrieved from: http://www.learnalberta.ca/ProgramOfStudy.aspx?lang=en&ProgramId=404703#635484
Baird, L. L. (1985). Do grades and tests predict adult accomplishment?. Research in Higher Education, 23(1), 3-85.
Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf