Starting at a new school with a new team, everything is up for grabs—this week, it’s how we assess student learning. I’ve got a lot of questions tonight and decided to write them down. I don't think I have any answers. That seems par for the course lately.
In Unit 1 of Algebra 2, we spent 2 days doing retakes for the unit 1 quiz. After students got the quiz back, we had a “mastery” day where they fixed their mistakes on the quiz and worked on practice problem associated with the learning targets they had trouble on. Then, because so many students had trouble with linear programming, we had a retake day. One the one hand, that's cool that we're giving time for revision and improvement. On the other hand, we reassess every one of those standards again on the test. What if, instead of having a re-quiz, we replaced quiz learning target grades with the test learning target grades? We’re already separating out our learnings targets in the grade book. It would be easy enough to figure out which learning targets we needed to update with a conditional statement on a spreadsheet. We could get at least one of those days back for a rich task or an investigation. Maybe even two.
I'm also rethinking the whole quiz halfway through then test thing we do in math class. After the quiz, students have the opportunity to reassess the learning targets they struggled on. In my department, we don't allow retakes after the unit test. That's a department decision. The number of quizzes we give in a unit is up for grabs though. What if we did two quizzes and a test with no quiz retakes? I like assessing the learning targets twice to show improvement. Since the test already reassess the learning targets from the quiz we could count it as the retake. If a student struggled on learning target #4 on quiz 2 but they rocked out learning target #4 on the test, we could replace the grade entirely. Of course, that begs the question of what happens if they do worse on the question. Maybe we average the two? Obviously, they didn't understand it as well as we had hoped. Every learning target gets assessed twice and we give weight to the later understanding.
One of the difficulties I see with this method is that a student who did poorly on the first quiz need to wait several weeks until the quiz to see his or her grade improve. For students who struggle to make eligibility requirements, that's a really long time to wait. Hmmm, I'll have to keep thinking about this.
If we decided to move forward with a model like this, we would need to restructure our unit timeline. I need time to grade the 2nd half of the unit quizzes, get them back to students, have them make corrections, and give them time to ask me questions. I don't just want to sit around in class and wait though. Maybe we could start new content before the unit test?
I wonder if something like this might work:
Week 1 after finishing Unit 1
-Start Unit 2
-Unit 1 Test
Week 2
-U2 Quiz 1
Week 3
-U2 Quiz 2
Week 4
-Start Unit 3
-Unit 2 Test
What do the rest of you do about re-assessing standards students miss?
In Unit 1 of Algebra 2, we spent 2 days doing retakes for the unit 1 quiz. After students got the quiz back, we had a “mastery” day where they fixed their mistakes on the quiz and worked on practice problem associated with the learning targets they had trouble on. Then, because so many students had trouble with linear programming, we had a retake day. One the one hand, that's cool that we're giving time for revision and improvement. On the other hand, we reassess every one of those standards again on the test. What if, instead of having a re-quiz, we replaced quiz learning target grades with the test learning target grades? We’re already separating out our learnings targets in the grade book. It would be easy enough to figure out which learning targets we needed to update with a conditional statement on a spreadsheet. We could get at least one of those days back for a rich task or an investigation. Maybe even two.
I'm also rethinking the whole quiz halfway through then test thing we do in math class. After the quiz, students have the opportunity to reassess the learning targets they struggled on. In my department, we don't allow retakes after the unit test. That's a department decision. The number of quizzes we give in a unit is up for grabs though. What if we did two quizzes and a test with no quiz retakes? I like assessing the learning targets twice to show improvement. Since the test already reassess the learning targets from the quiz we could count it as the retake. If a student struggled on learning target #4 on quiz 2 but they rocked out learning target #4 on the test, we could replace the grade entirely. Of course, that begs the question of what happens if they do worse on the question. Maybe we average the two? Obviously, they didn't understand it as well as we had hoped. Every learning target gets assessed twice and we give weight to the later understanding.
One of the difficulties I see with this method is that a student who did poorly on the first quiz need to wait several weeks until the quiz to see his or her grade improve. For students who struggle to make eligibility requirements, that's a really long time to wait. Hmmm, I'll have to keep thinking about this.
If we decided to move forward with a model like this, we would need to restructure our unit timeline. I need time to grade the 2nd half of the unit quizzes, get them back to students, have them make corrections, and give them time to ask me questions. I don't just want to sit around in class and wait though. Maybe we could start new content before the unit test?
I wonder if something like this might work:
Week 1 after finishing Unit 1
-Start Unit 2
-Unit 1 Test
Week 2
-U2 Quiz 1
Week 3
-U2 Quiz 2
Week 4
-Start Unit 3
-Unit 2 Test
What do the rest of you do about re-assessing standards students miss?
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