Pre-Pre-(Pre?)-Planning: Fall 2021 - Standards based grading, flipped classroom, corequisite support, and maybe group work?
After putting together a grant proposal and wanting to do something other than the list of tasks on my plate left over from last term, I thought I'd spend today prepping for my Fall 2021 course; face-to-face business math. I was really inspired by Matthew Lewis & Michal Ramos from Yakima Valley College, and their talk Thinking About Assessment and Grading Differently: Standards‑Based Grading in Precalculus at WAMATYC this year. Students can get so focused on points and grading, that they act as grades aren't related to understanding. In watching their talk I am hopeful that tying a student's grades directly to their understanding of specific learning objectives, they will be more motivated to do things that actually impact their grade.
This chart really hit home how standards based grading could be accomplished, which I have shared in a past blog post.
In reviewing their materials it seems that I have a few choices to make.
- How should I assess the different levels of understanding?
While they focused on online assessments (using WAMAP) being an online course, I'm thinking of moving some of them to face-to-face assessments. Their plan to have students complete the different levels of understanding of an objective sequentially (An Expert assessment doesn't open up until the Proficient assessment is 100%.) is well done in the system, and the questions themselves are great! Of the Expert questions I looked at, they included things like randomly generated values (a standard in WAMAP), analyzing an incorrect answer, and short question path with question parts that opened up based on previous responses. All of these things avoid the 'static' questions I see in so many online systems, and would help prevent sharing of solutions and cheating.
My current thought is to have a similar system in WAMAP where students can complete assignments (homework really) aligned to the Novice and Developing levels of each objective, and students can retake them as much as they want with no penalty. This is also a corequisite support course, so expanding these novice and developing levels to include prerequisite knowledge would seem appropriate. Expert and Proficient levels of objectives would be assessed through face-to-face weekly quizzes, and some other types of assignments, possibly projects, discussion forums, or something else, I'm not sure. I like to limit quizzes to 30 minutes, 5-6 questions, and at the low end this means that I'm limited to something like 25 objectives (5 questions per week * 10 weeks * 1/2 for the number of objectives (Expert and Proficient) I can assess) which seems doable. That leads me to... - What objectives are you going to focus on?
Since assessments are directly related to objectives, I'm constrained by how many objectives to include. These would absolutely need to be student readable, so including vague or abstract objectives that 'cover' a lot of content would not be good. - How to handle retakes?
Students are not going to get things right the first time, and I need to figure out when this is going to happen. Do I plan on some time at the end of class (10 min) where students can complete a question? - What will feedback look like?
In focusing on the specific learning objective, and in creating thoughtful rubrics, I am hoping my feedback will be more targeted about the specific area of confusion. Obviously I'll keep providing process feedback, and discussing ways for students to improve their work. - No due dates?
Really? Am I going to be ok with that? In making the assessments the main way students can reach higher levels of each objective I'm hoping they nudge students into preparing for them. At the same time I need to be deliberate and focus their attention on completing their work on a regular basis.
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