Tips & Techniques: Assessment with Stoplight Feedback

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Here’s an idea that a student in a class I taught this summer shared with me. I LOVE it and wanted to share it here.

First, THANKS to Roberta Slobodian for letting me share this.

Here’s her idea:

When you assess something (it could be anything) mark it with a RED, YELLOW, or GREEN dot or star. Each colour means something. I bet you can guess what each one means without even being told:

GREEN: Full steam ahead. It means you’re on the right track, keep it up.

YELLOW: Caution. Needs improvement. There are some issues you need to work on.

RED: STOP. There’s a problem. Come see me.

 

Here’s what Roberta discovered:

The part that I didn’t expect was how they treated it a bit like a game, sharing with their classmates the colour they received, but more importantly, it worked! Students with yellow and red were actually coming to see me for extra help, rather than stuffing it into their binder and ignoring it.

 

SO simple. I think the use of quick, simple feedback is highly under rated. I understand the value of detailed, considered feedback, but when you have more than a dozen or so students to deal with it quickly becomes very onerous.
There’s a real talent to finding fast feedback mechanisms that support people as they more toward their ‘learning goals’ without being trite or too silly. Gamification is a great idea, but not if it is simply superficial. This one is neither.

 

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Using Standards Based Grading to Drive Instruction

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I came across this this morning and it has a lot of good ideas:

Keep It Simple Standards-Based Grading | Action-Reaction.

In particular, I like:

  • Keeping the number of standards per unit small (like 5ish)
  • Grading standards yes/no – though personally, I think I would still have some that are assessed good/fair/poor/NO because it gives more feedback. On the other hand, something like Roberta Slobodian’s stoplight idea is simpler still, and gets the message across very effectively.
  • Once a standard has been achieved, it isn’t undone. This is similar to the idea behind how games assess: points can only go up. Your best score on any level is not replaced by an later attempt – unless of course, you do better.

I disagree with refusing to allow student initiated reassessment. I must always allow for the possibility that I may have missed something.

Also, I would leave all the assessments in electronic form and save the paper.

Now to the reason this post has the heading it does:

So I just put the most missed standards on subsequent quizzes.

A good idea. Even better: take some time in class to “re-teach” those parts where too many students missed things. How many is too many, you ask? Well, that totally depends on what it is. Face it: not all things are of equal importance. Some things are crucial and MUST be understood before going on. In those cases even a small number of students who missed it demands some attention. Other things are less important or ‘smaller’ and could perhaps be addressed by simply telling everyone what they need to know directly.

I wonder how many teachers (HE included) actually take the time to do this? How many actually build space in their schedule for this?

How should we “re-teach” something? There are a myriad of ways, some of which I will talk about in a future post. So stay tuned folks…..

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Where I’ve Been Online (Weekly: Aug. 19-25)

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~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~

22 Aug 12

Finland’s Education System: 10 Surprising Facts That Americans Shouldn’t Ignore

Finland has consistently scored among the highest nations in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that measures student achievement across the globe. Another remarkable fact about Finland’s education system is that students are only required to take one test during their entire time as students.

Finland’s academic success has drawn a great amount of attention, leaving many countries wondering if it’s the Nordic country’s teaching methods or if there’s magic water in their fjord. Here are 10 things that set Finland apart from the rest of the world in education.

20 Aug 12

Programmer Competency Matrix

Tags:programming competency career matrix

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Ten skills every student should learn | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com

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Another article that’s been sitting in my to-blog list for a while, but with school starting (or started) all over the globe, it’s worth noting.

Ten skills every student should learn | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com.

This is a good list:

  1. Read
  2. Type
  3. Write
  4. Communicate effectively, and with respect.
  5. Question
  6. Be resourceful
  7. Be Accountable
  8. Know how to learn
  9. Think Critically
  10. Be Happy

Interestingly, four of them (5,6,8,and 9) require curiosity in order to be of any real value. One of the things I have come across far too many students is a real lack of curiosity. Sure, they ask questions, but if the answer doesn’t fall into their laps, they loose interest. Far too many students are unwilling to do the work needed to find out the answers to their questions. That is the path to ignorance.

If I combine the common elements, I could probably shorten this list to just 5:

  1. Be curious.
  2. Communicate well.
  3. Think Critically.
  4. Take responsibility.
  5. Be happy.

Not bad.

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Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Cleaning out some of my backlog of drafts….
This is an older article that’s been sitting in my to do list. The comments are still relevant. If anything, the situation has grown worse in the mean time. This article is about US schools, but the situation is little better in Canada.

Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants,” Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. “We ask, ‘How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?’ With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, ‘Is it safe to eat here?'”

Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.

Living off their reputation:

“We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are,” the recent federal report “A Test of Leadership” observed. “Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.”

The changing economic and global context facing contemporary college graduates convinces us that the limited learning that exists on U.S. campuses—even if it has been a part of the higher-education landscape since the system’s inception—qualifies today as a significant social problem and should be the subject of concern of policy makers, practitioners, parents, and citizens alike.

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Adjuncts’ Working Conditions Affect Student Learning, Report Says – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Adjuncts’ Working Conditions Affect Student Learning, Report Says – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Well what a surprise.

Contingent faculty members who are hired just before the start of an academic term can opt to prep their classes while they’re not on the payroll or resign themselves to teach courses for which they’re not adequately prepared, the report says.

I do a LOT of prep for which I am not paid. Universities COUNT on this.

  • The ‘just-in-time’ staffing model is unjust for faculty and for students and clearly compromises education quality
  • Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions

The question that keeps coming back to me again and again, is “How does this approach makes things better?” and the fact is it doesn’t. Which brings us to the next question: What are universities for? They no longer seem to be for teaching the next generation of scholars, and given the kind of control universities and granting agencies exert on faculty, they aren’t about advancing knowledge either (unless it’s profitable).

So, what ARE they about?

 

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What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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What a Tech Start-Up’s Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Interesting. This confirms some of my own feelings and experiences.

Suggestions:

  1. Do not specify a required number of posts. If you are going to grade, then grade for the quality of the discussion, not the quantity.
  2. Allow anonymous posting.
  3. Have students introduce themselves at the start of the class.

“yet another place for students to grind for grades”:

Professors may want to think carefully before giving formal grades for participation in online discussions, the data suggest. When professors required a set number of discussion posts, the number of submissions was higher than in courses where professors left participation up to students. But instructors reported the highest gains in student understanding when discussion was less strictly marked.

…

One of the clearest trends was that students at highly selective universities are far more likely to ask questions anonymously than are students at other institutions.

…

In another finding, the practice of asking students to post a comment to introduce themselves correlated with more-robust discussions.

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Problems with Academia, #347: Grades are prized over learning.

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An Academic Ghostwriter Comes Clean – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Emphasis on grades and competition always increase the pressure on students to “win the prize” rather than learn. When most of the rest of the world rewards appearances over substance, people will cave.

As he wrote papers for students across a range of institutions, Mr. Tomar said in the interview, he saw vastly different levels of expectations. The lowest, he said, was at for-profit colleges, where he often saw the same assignment recycled. Sometimes he was hired to complete writing assignments for online discussions at for-profits, where the grades are based on whether the work is completed, not on its quality. Such work received little of his attention, he said, “because it was clear to me that nobody, nobody, nobody cares.”

The rating of schools based on profit, graduate employment, and student satisfaction can be misleading. Is an undergraduate education from an big-name university really better than one from a small school where the teachers know you?

He also aims his ire at more-traditional institutions, and none more so than Rutgers, which he decries as a “money farm” that sold him on an idealized version of Walden Pond but gave him Wal-Mart instead.

There’s an old joke that goes:

What do you call the person who graduated 499th out of 500 from medical school?

Dr.

What assurances do we have that this person actually knows anything? What assurances do we have that the person who graduated 3rd knows more?

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