Assessment: Theory into Practice

I need to start this off with a big thank you to my badass wife Rani for her help making the badass posters you'll see below. She's a badass 5th grade teacher.

My last two posts have been about my journey towards understanding SBA and some new understandings about assessment I gained this summer. I’m about to start my third week of school, and I think I have something ready to present to students (and also parents; back to school night is this Tuesday). I’ve broken it up into three sections.

What I Assess
Based on the four claims, here’s what I’ve put together in an attempt to make this clear to a population who has had no experience with standards thus far. I debated what exactly to present here, and decided just to keep it simple: these are the four things that matter - really matter - in understanding mathematics. I chose to leave out the Practice Standards and just include some of their wording in the descriptions. I might make a different decision if these students had any experience with standards, but I think this sums things up without overloading.

​How I Assess
​I have some experience with a 1-4 scale, so I’m sticking with that. I think I can explain it clearly and assess fairly using this model. The big idea is that I am assessing your level of understanding, not your ability to do a certain percentage of math problems correctly. I hope I can make this clear.

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How this all translates to grades
I have to give a percentage grade, there’s no way around it at my school. This is sort of the hardest part for me. My last school was an IB school, so I used historical data from IB exams to set up my system there. It’s a much more forgiving system, in terms of percentages, than the classic American system where 60% is the minimum passing grade. I’ve done a lot of blog reading about this, and I think I’ve got something I can work with:

Grading Scale (what I put in the grading system)
0=0%
1=50%
2=70%
3=85%
4=100%

Weighting
10%: Practice work (includes homework, classwork, etc, and is pretty exclusively completion grades)
65%: Summative assessments
20%: Cumulative exams
5%: Awesomeness
Awesomeness, you ask? Yeah, this is something I threw in to try to keep kids on their toes.

• It’s not extra credit - I expect all of my students to show some evidence of awesomeness.
• It’s intentionally vague - I don’t know how they’re going to be awesome, so they will have to come up with what this looks like, and convince me, on their own.
• It’s probably different for everyone - Are you a great artist? Love writing poetry? Like tinkering or building? Spend all of your free time on the computer? OK, do something awesome for math class with that.

This might be a complete failure, but I’m curious to see how it comes out, and I think keeping it at 5% keeps the stakes low.
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So, by the time parents come in for back to school night on Tuesday and hear about this, I’ll have presented it to all of my students as well. I expect some pushback, but I’ve thought about this for a long time now, and I’m feeling confident and ready to support my position clearly. Wish me luck! And, as always, let me know what you think.