A school with which I am familiar is making a huge effort to change its focus from evaluation to learning (think NCLB in reverse). One of their strategies has been to move to outcomes and thus skills (or competencies) instead of simple recall and "stuff". Another has been to using performance statements (rubrics) rather than grades. The is to describe what a student has done so that s/he can see what can be done in addition to show improvement. Guess what happened.
They divided any activity into, eg, four categories such as throwing accuracy in PE or spelling accuracy in English or Answering the question in History. They next devised five levels for each category (think Likaert) with a simple statement for each level and the middle statement indicating "satisfactory" or "on target" or "meets expectations" etc.
The idea is that the language of each statement clearly indicates to students what is required to move to another performance level. Think "often does" and "generally does" and "consistently does".
Wonderful! But ... students immediately turned the middle statement into a "3" thus producing a 1 - 5 scale, with a four-category activity now graded from 1 to 20. Then they began comparing these grades with each other, and then they began using exactly the concepts and language the new approach was supposed to have erased.
I hope the school continues with this approach and I do think that over time, changes will occur. At the same time, I do rue the day grades replaced learning as the motivation for student performance. I don't know when it was exactly, but I think you know what I blame.
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