Week 4

Vignette 8: Decisions Decisions

What a coincidence! I'm a little late getting this particular blog in, but thank goodness, because yesterday at teacher's convention I took in a session where the presenter spoke on this exact topic. He talked about using a lot of project based learning and authentic assessment in his math classroom; aside from the midterm and final he does not use tests in his class. This led to questions and conversation about how students are much more engaged and clearly have a more fulfilling and authentic learning experience, but things can be much more difficult for the teacher when it comes time to assign a grade. This in turn led to the hypothetical question of what the difference is between 90% and 95%. Or 80% and 83%. Aside from the literal difference in the numeric value of each, the idea here is that this is an immeasurable difference (for our purposes).
The presenter (David Martin was his name-o) talked about how feedback is very meaningless if there is a grade attached to it - it was encouraging to hear someone else say this as I've been suspecting this is the case since my IPT.

To answer the question, Mr. Brit seems like he has been using a number of different assessments throughout the year. Hopefully a lot of these have been incorporated into his overall marking scheme. It sounds like he is left with the task of assigning an 'achievement' mark which sounds to me like it will be mired in subjectivity. If this is so then he needs to have some sort of a rubric in place; I don't think that he should attach a number to a student's performance if he cannot justify it. Having said that, I hope we are moving in a direction where he won't have to justify it. He should be able to give the student and his/her guardians a detailed description of the learning and improvement that the student has achieved throughout the year, and the number attached to it should be trivial at most.