#teaching theory

In case you want to read real people talking about Standards-Based Grading instead of just my amateur summary.

Explanations from Teachers

http://mrsbmg.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-can-improve-my-grade-by-retaking-part.html

http://larkolicio.us/blog/?p=3

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=346

http://www.mrmeyer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/howmathmustassess.pdf

http://concurrencies.blogspot.com/2010/01/formative-assessing-to-extreme.html

http://www.asd4.org/schools/indiantrail/documents/SLP/2012-13/seven_reasons.pdf

http://assessmentforinstruction.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-are-we-grading-hopeful.html

From Educational Resources

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/oct08/vol66/num02/Seven_Reasons_for_Standards-Based_Grading.aspx

http://hepg.org/hel/article/545

http://academia.edu/1157096/Being_Fair_Teachers_Interpretations_of_Principles_for_Standards-Based_Grading

Papers

http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/fie/2012/1353/00/06462211-abs.html

I'm in the middle of reading everything I can get my hands on about standards-based grading. It seems really fantastic. The basic idea is: grades should mean something. They should reflect an understanding of the material. So instead of having a Chapter 2 test, all the material for the year is broken into learning objectives, and a quiz has one or two questions on each objective, and the quiz has no overall grade, but rather a score for each objective based on how well it has been learned. When it has been learned perfectly, no need to have it tested anymore on that student. When not, the student knows *exactly* what they need to work on, and can take another assessment testing that objective and have a higher score replace a lower score.

Teaching can be the same as always, except often SBG teachers don't grade homework so much as correct and give lots of feedback. Lots of feedback is crucial, so that there is much more formative assessment (assessment that helps kids understand where they are, where they should be and how to get from one to the other) than summative assessment (one-directional information from student to teacher about how much the student knows). 

It refocuses grades, makes assessment less stressful and more accurate, gives kids a much better sense of exactly what they have to learn and how they can do it and doesn't punish slow learners. 

Sounds amazing, right? The only drawbacks I see other than implementation difficulties are that it's hard to see how to bring other graded assignments into it, like projects, inquiry-based learning, and having test questions that ask them to explain and describe to me what's going on, all things I'm interested in trying

From the Blog Entry:

What should educators know about technology?

Let’s resist the answer “Nothing!” (and the answer “OMG, iPads!”) and the argument that ed-tech procurement decisions are made elsewhere. Indeed for decades now, that’s been the case. Education technology — both hardware and software — has been something appearing in schools without much input from teachers or students. But with the rise of consumer Web technologies and the ubiquity of personal computing devices (particularly mobile devices), that’s changing.

"I seek the building blocks of the intelligences used by... sailors and surgeons and sorcerers."