FIAE+B2+Chapter+9


 * 1) Click on edit this page.
 * 2) Use the down arrow on your keyboard to get the cursor underneath the horizontal bar.
 * 3) Type your name, highlight your name and then select Heading 3 at the top.
 * 4) Copy and paste your reflection underneath your name.
 * 5) Insert a horizontal bar under your reflection.
 * 6) Click save.

toc

Sarah McGinley
Fair Isn’t Always Equal Chapter 9: Ten Approaches to Avoid When Differentiating Assessment and Grading 2/25/10

There are certain things that teachers should avoid when differentiating instruction and assessment. This chapter lists ten practices to avoid and then talks about them in detail. A couple of them really stuck out at me. The second one talked about avoiding penalizing a student for trying to master something through multiple attempts. This is actually something I am going to encourage in my classroom. I would like to know that all of my students understand what I am trying to teach them and therefore letting students have a chance to get it right through multiple attempts is a great way to see that result. This relates to the third one listed about avoiding grading homework or practice. This is one of the reasons why I like the idea of having a point system instead of assigning grades to everything the students do. I would like to be able to give the students a chance on getting the homework right and as long as the student is willing to try multiple times to get the homework right I will give them the points earned. I understand this is a type of grading system for homework but I believe this is better than just giving the student a grade for the assignment and leaving it at that. There may be a reason for not getting the homework done or the student just did not understand what the homework was asking and therefore needs another chance to complete the assignment. I agree with most of the ten practices to avoid when differentiating instruction and assessment.

Diana Quinlan
Chapter nine of //Fair Isn’t Always Equal// deals with what teaches should avoid doing while assigning work or grading assignments. There are ten situations which teachers should avoid and out of the ten two of them which really stuck out to me. The first that jumped out at me was to avoid grading homework. I had math teachers in high school who only assigned homework if they were confident that we understood the concepts and they only graded whether we completed the homework or not. This is how I want to assess homework in my classroom. That way my students have a chance to practice the work, ask questions about it in class, and have a chance to fix mistakes without being penalized. The second situation which stuck out is to avoid withholding assistance. First of all I think withholding assistance is the exact opposite of teaching. I don’t want to do the work for my students but I also want them to succeed and learn. This section also reiterates that what is fair for a student is not always equal to other students.

**Jason Malbon**
The author identifies ten different factors into fair grading and what to avoid. I agree with the first suggestion that you should never factor in nonacademic factors. These include; behavior, effort and attendance. Effort may be one in which I slightly disagree. Although not necessarily appropriate for the final grade, maybe a case can be made for counting effort on individual assignments. Effort counts in the real world. Also if your going to allow work to be redone, than don’t penalize them for it. Avoid averaging a lower grade into the grand total. What does this measure? Your simply alienating a student. Ideas of homework really struck a chord with me. It should never be assigned “just because.” Busy work does not promote learning and a teachers’ credibility can be on the line. Homework should be assigned with the purpose of allowing students to show what they have already learned. They should never struggle to perform with material they haven’t been introduced. Group grading seems an obvious one to avoid. Every class has its passive learners. It is certainly not fair to achieving students to have someone along for the ride to get undue credit. A project contract with clear roles for each team member can be a useful tool in grading individuals within the group. Accountability is the key.

Jared Merrifield
Chapter 9: Ten Approaches to Avoid When Differentiating Assessment and Grading

Now that we have a general idea of what we should do as teachers in terms of grading and assessment, it’s time to focus our attention on what //not// to do! The first practice is avoiding nonacademic practices as described in Chapter 8, and I would have to agree with that. The second is to not penalize student’s failed attempts. This is a recurring idea in this class, in that the student’s progress should not be assessed poorly if the final product demonstrates adequate mastery. I have had a (very) few teachers who went against this unspoken rule, but several of my high school teachers did the exact opposite by omitting the lowest quiz grade we received throughout the semester from our final grade. This second practice makes sense to me, because I know that several of my students will struggle to understand the material, and taking points off of their future attempts is not proper motivation. The third is to not grade homework, and I agree completely. Very few of my teachers in high school graded homework very heavily, but most of them simply checked it and provided feedback based on how well we grasped the material. Plus, this would not make the final grade accurate, for it is monitoring the students’ progress rather than their degree of mastery once the class is complete. The fourth practice is pretty straightforward: avoid //not// differentiating. I think that concept is nailed into our heads by now! The fifth practice actually ties into the previous one in most cases, and it really incorporates the multiple intelligences in that not everyone has mastered every intelligence, but we all possess them. Artistic skill is a big one, and I can relate to that myself, being a self-proclaimed incompetent artist who can draw but not draw well. However, if the assessment is more focused around interpretation through artwork rather than the quality of the artwork itself, I am less pressured and usually receive a good grade. The sixth practice was nothing new; in fact, I don’t think I ever heard the term “extra credit” throughout all four years of high school. I did, however, hear the phrases “redo” and “second draft” almost every week. I have always thought that extra credit gives students an unfair advantage over each other, whereas simply redoing the assignments gives students an equal opportunity to do better, since they are working according to the same resources. I also look down on group grades, and this is because of my seventh-grade science project in which I did all the work while my partners slacked off and we //all// received excellent marks (not to brag). Also, we all know now not to grade on a curve. It makes sense not to give out a zero grade, for it distorts the final grade. Still, what would be an appropriate substitute if the assignment is never handed in? The final practice is to never intermingle norms with requirements, an agreeable set of standards elaborated in one of the previous chapters.

Sarah Robinson
In this chapter it is learned that problems do arise in the classroom when it comes to grading students, and this chapter discuss ten problems and how to fix them. I found many of these very beneficial for my future classroom. The one that I found very important would be not to penalize students for multiple attempts at mastering a subject. This means that when students hand in homework or such, it is unfair to grade students on such a things because students are only tiring to do their best. It would be fair to provide feedback for those students that need more practice and it would be fair to give variation of homework assignments depending on the outcome of the students work. I also agree that teachers should never grade on a curve because that gives students a chance to slack off, and not do their best because they are relying on each other to do equally as bad. I want to grade my students not on each other, but as unique individuals that they are. One of the last suggestions that this book made that will impact my future classroom is not assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate their mastery. This means not giving students practice and homework assignments that are related to the subject direction or giving the students something complete new to work on their own. This can cause students to get discouraged.

Eric Cole
This chapter is all about ten items that teachers should avoid when they grade their students. While many of these items were good pieces of advice, there were a couple that really spoke out to me. The first was item number three: avoid grading homework. I have to say that I hate the idea of homework to begin with. I know that it is supposed to help students understand a concept, and to help them down the road to mastery, but the truth is most students don’t use it for that purpose. Most students honestly see homework as being a pain in the %^&, and just rush through it so that they can be done with it, and move on to more important things in their lives. This is especially true if the homework is for a subject that the student has no interest in whatsoever. Now I am not saying that homework should be eliminated because it does have it purpose, but there just has to be a better way to reach that purpose. If you have to use homework though then I agree that it should not be graded. Homework is simply practice for a student, that is it. If you start grading the practice stuff, and the student doesn’t do well then they might just shut down, and give up altogether, which is not helpful for the student at all. The other item I agreed with was to avoid group grades. I happen to think that groups don’t work all that well. It is a rare case where someone is put into a group where everyone actually participates in it. That is why all groups should fill out an evaluation, and turn it into the teacher that way if someone did slack off from the group, and not do as much work, they can be sniffed out, and be given the individual grade they rightfully deserve.

Alicia Kenison
Wormeli emphasizes that there are some things that we must take to heart in grading; we don’t have to include everything. I really like number 3 that referred to grading homework because it used to frustrate me when teachers would grade all the worksheets that we still did not really know what we were doing. Homework is meant to be practice. In doing homework the brain is trying to make connections that have not yet been mastered. I agree that we should give quizzes after homework, but allow time to answer questions. These ten things are all aspects that I will keep in mind while grading my students work because what is the sense of grading something that has nothing to do with the assignment.

Amanda Fitzpatrick
For the most part, this chapter was basically a review on items that either the author already covered in the text, or that I had already known or had already planned to do. However, one item that struck me was that of trying to avoid to give group grades. I know that in my lessons there are many instances in which students work in pairs or in teams. For the most part, it is difficult to distinguish completely what student did which in groups and even if the project was done mostly by one person it is difficult to really tell with accuracy how much effort, time and knowledge was put into the project. Although one can never tell the accuracy of student responses, I think that this is the best way to attempt to uncover who did what work in the project and whether the grade that each student gets is a grade that they deserve. I definitely plan on using a student response with each project that I do as not only will it allow for more accurate grading it will tell which parts of the project were effective and which should be altered.

Scott A. Bowden
This chapter brought in a lot of useful information. I will talk about the pieces that struck me either on a good wavelength or a bad wavelength. I was surprised by talk about avoiding bonus points. All my academic career, teachers have been offering bonus points in classes and some of those were good and useful and others not so much. One teacher in middle school would give extra credit for doing nothing related to what we were doing in class, and even at times, that aspect would be ambiguous. I personally feel that bonus points are a helpful and useful thing when used appropriately and not allowed to completely overrun a student's grade or be off on some wild outside tangent. The piece that I really agreed with was not grading on a curve. I like the mastery approach where the grade is what it is. I've had teachers who have made their grades almost impossible to guess at first glance because they didn't decide what an A, B, C, etc was until they graded all the pieces. In one of those classes, it was hard to get an A because I had to compete with much more skilled students to show that my mastery was as solid as theirs and that isn't right. The only time I could ever see myself grading on a curve would be if I were discussing normal curves in statistics and gave a grade on a quiz or project about the normal curve a curve-based grade. I can justify it for that, but nowhere else. Curve grading is stupid, end of story. This chapter had a lot more to glean from it, but if I expressed it all here, this entry would be much longer than it should. These were the points that struck the biggest chord with me.

Jared Boghosian
I love how first approach is flat out DO NOT grade based on effort, attendance, and behavior, enough said. Avoid grading homework, at first I thought this was a funny concept but since we have been talking in class about formative and summative assessments it is seeming more and more viable to me. Here is where I stand on offering bonus points and extra credit, I do not mind offering a couple chances in the grading period to earn a couple extra points (no more than 3) on a paper here, or a project there. As for for a whole extra credit assignment, I say neigh because as the book says, a different assignment will not show mastery of the content they should have learned. I myself would think twice about recording a zero in the grade book, because I have seen how it can dramatically skew the final grade. However, I'm sure they might be situations and circumstances that might warrant such a severe grade, I'll have to think on it more.

Mike Lawson
Chapter nine was all about what to avoid when grading or assigning work to students. There are ten different things a teacher should avoid when doing this. The one that I really like the idea of is not grading home work. I think that good teachers realize that by not grading homework they give students a choice…do they want to learn or not. It is a little rough because a student could simply choose to not learn. Yes a teacher will check the homework no matter what. However, there is no penalty for putting down the wrong answer. Feedback is the grade given in this situation. Good feedback is priceless and will allow students to rethink, refine, and revise homework and concepts. Another point Wormeli made is withholding assistance. I think that by withholding assistance you legally aren’t teaching. This is something that I will almost never do. The only time I can see myself not assisting a student is on a test. Even then though, there are situations where I would help students out. Like the book states Fair isn’t always equal so some students may need a little more help and that is something that goes along with knowing your students.

Susanna Cooper
I loved the point that was made in chapter 9 about all students being expected to know the same material at the same time of their lives. Besides school work, what other events in life are we expected to do everything at the same time? We can get our driving license when we are ready, we marry when we feel ready, and so on. Now I am not saying that school should be there for when kids are ready, I can definitely see why it is a good Idea to let students who are struggling have affair chance to keep trying hard and retaking tests. This is showing determination and responsibility and should be encouraged, not graded with a low grade. I also like how this chapter said not to grade homework. I think homework should just get a check, it shows that students finished the work and the teacher can see if they understand what was assigned.