The AP standards look like this, with chapters 1-5 in the fall term, 6-10 in the winter, 11 in the spring (with some mechanism for including previous term standards that I haven't devised yet).
I was toying with some more project/portfolio-based assessment for this course, especially after I saw success with limited screencast reassessment at the end of last year).
What I'm going with is a combination of in-class and out-of-class assessment, which I'll put under the umbrella of 'portfolios.' Basically, there are a lot of ways that you can prove to me that you have nailed a standard (and it's your responsibility to make that case to me for each standard):
- Show me how well you did on in-class assessments that covered that standard and/or reassessments (I'm only preparing one or maybe two per unit)
- Show me how you applied this understanding to an in-depth analysis ('capstones')
- Show me a lot of problem-solving from the text (M and I's problems are generally pretty robust and most are not the kind of sterilized problem that you see in Giancoli, Walker, etc.)
- Ideally: all three.
I need a mechanism to make sure that not everybody's just doing problems, with all of the potential issues (ethics and others) that that entails. Maybe I'll make a tally sheet for them, so that they have to color-code the methods that they used, so they (and I) can see at a glance how they met the standard. I'd like to make sure that they do at least three capstones per term, as well.
I'm thinking about a binary scale (Yes, Not Yet) and a 50 + 50*(% of standards met) algorithm.
Thoguht?
I am in a similar situation as you. I am teaching introductory college physics from Matter & Interactions, and this is my first year using Standards Based Grading. What I am going to try is to include a standard for each chapter that says something like, "I can apply Chapter 14 skills to real life scenarios and/or I can use Chapter 14 skills in combination with other skills." This way, the majority of the questions I ask will be straightforward, and higher level questions will be assessed separately.
ReplyDeleteI am also doing in-class and out-of-class assessments. I am hoping that, since I only count the student's most recent grade on a particular standard, the students won't have any reason to cheat on out-of-class assessments (since it is likely they will be re-assessed later on an in-class assessment).
I would be interested to hear more about how your screencast reassessments went.
I'm in a good situation that you don't have the advantage of, unfortunately, in that I had these kids last year, so they know my SBG ropes well, and I don't have to do too much mindset selling in their second year. THe balance for me is to make a system that helps them with the senior overscheduling issues, giving flexibility, but that doesn't enable their senioritis.
DeleteIn my 9th grade class, the kids will be moving from MC/TF to open-ended application to goal-less problems or projects. I'm trying to work on a similar assessment schedule for my AP-C kids, with the recognition that they don't need as much hand-holding and will be working through more ideas in the same time frame. My current outline is a set of AP-style problems in mini-exam format, followed by goal-less problems with a VPython and presentation/screen-cast requirement. As you said, once they have the list of standards and the representational tools to work through it all, it's really up to them to show a widely-applicable understanding.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to introducing less hand-holding, I'll also be introducing them to "we're not going to (or going to be able to) model everything this year - there might even be a bit of lecture." Ah, transitions.... :
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