Inquiry II Seminar

Hey Sophie!

Although I’ve never heard of ELOs, I’m really interested in how to get students more involved in assessment. One of my School Advisers taught Montessori for a decade so I’ve been learning a lot about student self-assessment and other forms of alternative assessment from her. When I do my literature circles unit, I’m planning on having students perform self-assessment after each literature circle meeting to help them gain a better understanding of the skills that they’re using when they discuss in groups.

I’m especially interested by your mention of student-created rubrics (that’s a new concept to me) and the fact that students are made aware of the skills they’re being graded on rather than just their percentage. I look forward to hearing more about this later in the term!

– Allison

Sophie, I think using criterion-referenced assessment for high school students is extremely important because students will be able to improve their skills based on these criterions rather than receiving an almost meaningless grade. I wish my school could start using these assessments as it is more of a traditional school and one of my SA is definitely grade oriented.

If it’s possible, I hope you could explore on some of the issues of how to implement criterion-referenced assessment in a traditional, more grade oriented school. Look forward to hear your presentation!

Sophie,

This is a rich and worthwhile topic that will be of great interest to your peers and also useful for you in your practicum. It may be useful to allude to the BC Performance Standards, which are prepared with a view to criterion-referenced assessment:

“The standards focus exclusively on performance assessment. In performance assessment students are asked to apply the skills and concepts they have learned to complete complex, realistic tasks. This type of assessment supports a criterion-referenced approach to evaluation and enables teachers, students, and parents to compare student performance to provincial standards” (BC Performance Standards).

As well, because you mention student self assessment and student-created rubrics, it would be useful to include articles on these topics in your reading list, as well as an article or two examining the affect of such approaches on student learning, motivation, etc.

I look forward to speaking more about your work in our meeting tomorrow.

Best,

Teresa

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References

BC Performance Standards. Available: http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/perf_stands/

Hi Sophie,

I said I’d forward a reference in relation to the practice of grading:

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In point of fact, the first instance of grading students’ papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. No one knows much about William Farish; not more than a handful have ever heard of him. And yet his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself. When Galileo said that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he did not mean to include human feeling or accomplishment or insight. But most of us are now inclined to make these inclusions. Our psychologists, sociologists, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge.

I shall not argue here that this is a stupid or dangerous idea, only that it is peculiar. What is even more peculiar is that so many of us do not find the idea peculiar. To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman, 1982, p. 13)

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Reference

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage.