I can’t completely explain it – either it was channeled procrastination, or my top-down brain demanding more structure. Either way, I found I couldn’t get this first unit test written until I committed myself to a standards-based assessment strategy and wrote up a full rubric for that unit’s learning standards.

I’m glad I went through with it. I was kind of wussing out and just going to put together “the usual” – write tests, add up scores, call that a grade. Now I feel much more in control of how this is going to come together. I’m still unsure of whether I want to expose the system to the students; we’ll see. But at least when students come to me after bombing a test, I’ll have a framework for getting them to demonstrate future mastery of those skills. Even better, it means I can split apart the re-demonstrations into subparts, rather than having them rewrite an entire test at once (which, being a night school course, we don’t really have time for).

What was interesting about the write-up experience is that our provincial standards are *so close* to being directly usable for a solid standards-based (concept-based? whatever) system. They’re already written up in nice bite-sized chunks of understanding. The problem is, they’re totally imbalanced. One unit that takes about 1/7th of your class time over the year contains 1/4 of the total number of standards. Worse, in other grades there are individual “standards” that have subpoints that encompass an entire unit on their own.

Now that I type this up, I suppose arguably I’m making the same classic mistake – assuming that an accurate summative grade should come from simply adding up all of the individual standard marks. But with a nice manageable number of concepts listed, keeping them weighted equally makes the entire system more accessible for students as well as for yourself. Students can glance at their scorecard and know immediately how they’re doing and what to focus on mastering. (In theory.)

After the break I’ll c&p the provincial standards, and my own reworking I came up with including marking rubrics. I’d love to hear critique in the comments! (I pulled a sneaky trick with my third ‘concept’; I can’t decide yet if that was evil or not.)
Continue reading →