My experiment with learning goal grading continues, and I’m having fun with it. My students seem to like it, though some of them are a little confused on the process of it all – how do we retry? What things are graded? How do we… when do we… etc. To be fair, a lot of that confusion is because I’m still stabbing about with a stick to figure out the best way to implement this system.
While grading my third assessment in the system – and my third assessment that tested only one standard – I realized that I needed to separate out algebra and arithmetic errors from the content itself. The standard was “Can move back and forth among area, perimeter, radius, and diameter of a circle.” And on the assessment, almost every student did that perfectly; equations were perfectly set up, understanding of the basic concecpts was clearly there. A few girls missed things under this standard – confused diameters and radii or circumferences with areas – but most of the mistakes on their papers were procedural not conceptual. Algebra, arithmetic, units, or simply following directions. So I added two learning goals to my list called “Units, directions, rounding, completeness” and “Algebra and arithmetic”. I gave each student a perfect score of 100 on those topics, and they can only lose points. 1 point here, 2 points there, 3 or 4 points for egregious issues. So instead of giving a student who left units off of everything a 90 on the Circle Area and Circumference standard, I can give them a 100 on it but take 4 points off of this rolling standard that is constantly important.
At the end of the unit, I will give a mastery badge to anybody who has a 90 or above in those areas, since they will have shown consistency in these areas.