I’ve posted a lot about my trials and errors with SBG but for the most part what I do is what I was doing in 2017. I’ve written about this scheme here. I’ve given different thoughts to how (or if I should) incorporate performance tasks, tests or other summative assessments but mostly I just use SBG for all my grading. In 2017 I said that the final mark creation involved some voodoo. I think at the time I was also using a 4pt scale, and I still use a 4pt scale. The names of the levels has changed to match what we do across the Vancouver School District. My scale is Beginning, Developing, Applyi ..read more

A couple of weeks ago I was reading through some of my edu feed and I came across a post about assessing curricular competencies in the new BC science curriculum. The post discussed feedback cycles on the competencies. After reading the post I felt kind of anxious, which isn’t that uncommon for me when I read something that I know I can improve on, or should be doing better with. Later in the day I was still feeling bothered and then it finally dawned to me that when I read about assessing curricular competencies, I end up feeling crappy. Crappy about my teaching and crappy about not helping o ..read more

Over time I’ve been playing with the format of my SBG tracking sheets. The biggest change for me is the addition of tracking curricular competencies. Tracking curricular competencies is pretty tricky in my opinion. While I fully and enthusiastically agree in practicing and recognizing curricular competencies, I’m much less interested in grading them. Why? Because many competencies cannot be taught. For example, I can teach a student to factor a polynomial, but I cannot teach a student “to use logic.” I can teach a student to use multiple representations when modeling motion, but I cannot teach ..read more

One thing that I’ve always struggled with is adding challenging questions to my assessments within a SBG scheme. Like a lot of people using SBG, I use a 4 point scale. The upper limit on this scale is similar to an A, and for the sake of the post I’ll refer to the top proficiency as “mastery”. If a student were to get an A in a course I teach, roughly speaking they would have to be at the mastery level in at least half of the learning objectives, and then only if they don’t have any level 2 grades. The problem with asking a good and interesting challenge question is that only one or two studen ..read more

I’ve written about my usual SBG scheme here. It works fine and many students take advantage of learning at a slightly different pace but still getting credit for what they know, once they know it. However, I’m interested in keeping small quizzes primarily in the formative domain, yet using an assessment tool that is based on clear learning objectives, re-testable and flexible. This post talks about a possible transition from using a few dozen learning objectives in quizzes to a new, larger goal assessment tool. Where I’m at This year was the first year that I had to put some restrictions on th ..read more

The Task I recently sent out a survey to Twitter where 50 respondents were presented with series of scores for students. The scores were for individual learning objectives and all the scores are based on a 3 point or 4 point proficiency scale. Each score was indicated by one of four different colours. Users were asked to come up with an overall letter grade and percent for each student based on these learning objective scores. Some guidance was given to the user to ensure that everyone would have a common understanding on what each colour meant. Below is an example of scores for a student. Th ..read more

Last night I was at a district meeting on Communicating Student Learning. There are a few different CSL projects going on in our school district and these meetings are good places to share our individual school experiences and collaborate on new ideas. At one point in the meeting, two concerns about proficiency based assessment/reporting came up. I wanted to write about them because these are two issues that I see raised with regards to assessment and Standards Based Grading (SBG) quite often and they are great questions. The first concern was asking how teachers can decide whether a student i ..read more

Today in physics 11 I tried a new lab using our motion and force sensors, carts and tracks. The lab idea is from New Visions and I believe that the script that I was working from was written by Kelly O’Shea and Mark Schober. I was pretty excited to give it a try because I’ve always just told my students that the area under a force-distance graph is work. With this lab, students develop the idea from direct evidence. Students set up a tilted ramp such that they pull a cart up a delta h of 20 cm. The angle of incline can be anything, and this will play into the discussion after data is collected ..read more

Research has long shown that fraction arithmetic is difficult for students.  We also now know that success when working with fractions is one of the best predictors for success in post-secondary education. With this in mind, one of my prime focuses in math 8 is to do the very best I can with teaching fractions to my students. The research on fraction arithmetic tells us that by grade 8, students have a success rate of around 50% when adding fractions.  For some people in BC, this issue with fractional arithmetic is compounded by what they see as a weakness in the new BC Curriculum. I ..read more

Following up from my previous post, here is another brief set of notes on the action and dialogue in my grade 8 math class.  We start the day out with some voting questions where we use Plickers and Peer Instruction.  My general instructions for all classes when doing voting questions are as follows: No talking allowed while voting.  No sharing of answers or ideas. I want to see what your thinking and if you take your idea from someone else, I won’t know if you get it or not. After you vote, we’ll see if there is an overwhelming consensus. If there is a mix of answers, I will g ..read more