Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Grading questions - away from philosophy and down to business..
I've had the opportunity to grade a lot of kids work this week. They were maps. It required placing 58 items drawing in lakes and coloring so it made sense. There were other factors as well. I realized that grading is right up there with classroom management in terms of challenge. I want to spend substantial time on each one to be fair and consistent but when does that interfere with efficiency which I believe is crucial in every job. Would the student even look at it and take my thoughts into consideration or would the map end up at the back of the section in their binder never to be looked at again? Where and how should my time be spent? These are my questions. I want to do a thorough job that benefits the student yet, that would take days the way I would go about it. Also, to be completely fair you need to check against every other assignment graded to ensure consistency. This is difficult when many variables are being considered. I have more questions than thoughts or answers with this blog. Practice definitely will solve some concerns. I guess my question is, is whether there is a perfect and fair way to grade an assignment with several subjective variables? When one has 100 plus complex assignments to grade, how do you make sure that one 23/25 is equivalent to another 23/25 or to ensure that a 24/25 is really better than that 23/25? What do these numbers really mean and how do we become masters of fairness and efficiency which should not be mutually exclusive?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank You Katherine for your thoughts on this most diffidult of subjects. Over the course of this quarter, I have come to add assessment to my list of things that need ongoing reflection and direction. (For me, it joined classroom culture development, and differentiated instruction.) The daily assessments are what I want to find a way to manage, but I too am overwhelmed by those big ones. What is really tough for me is when clearly someone put much effort into a mediocre result, while someone else used much less effort for a beautiful result. How do we account for effort? Things are definitely percolating for me here too. At the moment, I find specific rubrics to be very helpful. The students can then use them as a checklist of sorts and work to improve their assignments on their own. By the time they turn it in, they have a pretty good idea about how they did, and our work becomes coaching on their weaker areas.
ReplyDeleteI watched some teachers co-teach 8th/9th grade English last week. They had very specific rubrics for 9 kinds of writing which they had numbered in order of difficulty. Students start at the first one and do not move on until they have fairly well mastered it. They get weekly opportunities to better their skills and receive feedback. Loads of work, but the students check off items on the rubric as they write. What I deduced is that having a well-defined rubric, written in language that the students understand, can work as a checklist that betters their work and eases assessment. That's the idea anyway. One can always hope . . I'll be interested to read the answers that come to you over time. Keep up the good work!