Some Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

I  have been thinking about assessment lately, especially student feedback. I am interested in finding ways for students to use feedback on tests and quizzes to improve (I’m actually doing my action research on this). Well, I had a conversation on Friday with some of my peers, and professors, which provided a few ideas on how to do this. There were a few that I particularly liked, and I’m writing them down now, so that hopefully I’ll remember them and try them. 1. Getting students to give their own feedback on quizzes. Give the answers on the blackboard, and get students to pair up and explain the answers to one another. 2. Letting students re-write unit tests. The tests would obviously not be identical, and would give students a chance to show what they’ve learned. I’m not sure what the weighting would be on the second test. Maybe it would be beneficial to figure this out with the class. Also, an idea that was mentioned was to make it so that the students would have to get a 75 ...

I was just looking through the Growing Success document for an assignment in one of my classes, and it struck me just how arbitrary our grading system is. I don't really understand why we convert from "acheivement levels" to percentages (why not just one or the other), and why these acheivement levels aren't evenly distributed. There was a grid in the book which showed all of the conversions using a 1-, 1, 1+, -2, 2, 2+ etc. system converted to a percentage system. But the system is skewed such that for instance, a level 4- spans from an 80-86... 7 percentage points, but a level 3+ spans from 77-79... only 3 percentage points. I remember this difference in my school experience... it didn't make sense to me that an "A" spanned from 80-100%, but a "B" was only from 70-79%. It's like the people setting up the system decided that every ten percent from 50 percent onwards would be a different letter grade. And then when they got to 80 percent...