Assessments Posted on:

Assess Your Assessments

Assess Your Assessments matrix by Grant Wiggins Questions about the matrix does ‘support your answer’ always fall into ‘far transfer’? what does near and far transfer mean? what mode of assessment works best for middle school students? can a selected response go beyond recall and inference? what do you fill into the empty boxes? just a check mark or a score? how does a teacher include a variety of each format? throughout the year? i wonder if gold standard pbl checks all of the boxes. i wonder what an ill-structured problem looks like. can assessments overlap in categories? Ideas mini […]

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Digital Citizenship / eportfolio / Formative Assessment / Innovation / Learning Measures / Progress Monitoring / Reflective Practice / Space Configurations / Technology / Visible Thinking Routines Posted on:

10 Ways e-Portfolios Increase Learning

10 Ways e-Portfolios Increase Learning In schools, the use of e-portfolios is increasing as a way to enable learning, as well as a means to measure it. See Admissions Revolution (80 colleges and universities move towards use of online portfolios). There are a variety of types and purposes of e-portfolios including workspace, showcase, academic, employment, etc. This post focuses primarily on the blog as student workspace – designed as a tool to accelerate learning at any age, as well as to build capacity for being globally competitive beyond schooling. How might e-portfolios increase learning? 1) Writing – Does the importance of […]

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Entry / eportfolio / Faculty Meetings / Formative Assessment / Learning Measures / Learning Outcomes / Professional Learning Communities / Teamwork / Vertical Teams / Video Posted on:

Building Our Learning Measures

Building Our Learning Measures This morning, our monthly vertical team meeting focused on building our capacity with two of our ‘expanded learning measures’ – formative assessment and e-portfolios. Here is the agenda with some data added… Essential Questions What are the limitations of numerical grades as a single measure of learning? How will we develop our understanding of e-portfolios as an effective measure ‘for’ and ‘of’ learning? Desired Outcomes Vertical Teams collaborate to implement formative assessment and e-portfolios. Learning Opportunities In advance, read Edutopia article: 11 Essentials for Excellent Eportfolios Entry Ticket: Upon arrival, write on 3 separate post-it notes… […]

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Assessments / Badging / Entry / eportfolio / Exit Tickets / Faculty Meetings / Formative Assessment / Learning Measures / Progress Monitoring / student led conferences / Transfer Posted on:

Formative Assessment Tickets

Formative Assessment via Entry, Transfer, and Exit Tickets Formative Assessment = a range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment. This morning’s faculty meeting was a lesson in formative assessment. We started the meeting with an entry ticket – a Poll Everywhere survey (thank you Alex Bragg!) about our team’s wildly important goal of ‘expanding the learning measures.’ The original agenda for the meeting was sent to faculty in advance indicating the bulk of the time would be spent on teachers earning badges. After assessing […]

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Traditional Grades Posted on:

9 Tips for Grading

The discussion and debate between numerical grades and standards based grading has been on the minds of our team a lot recently. As we look for new ways to expand the learning measures beyond the single gauge of traditional grades, we aren’t throwing traditional grades out. So, it follows that we should examine some tips, issues, and best practices related to traditional grades, as long as they are still in use… Here are 9 TIPS FOR GRADING we explore in a pre-planning session today…

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Assessments / Badging / eportfolio / Progress Monitoring / student led conferences Posted on:

Expanding the Learning Measures

How might we expand the ways we monitor student progress and the measures of learning beyond quantitative, numerical systems that are not always reliable? Since May, eight dedicated educators have engaged in four summer grant opportunities to accelerate the work of our entire team, all with the purpose of expanding our ability to measure and monitor student progress and learning. While our Middle School continues to use a quantitative, numerical grading scale (0-100), we have been working to add additional, qualitative gauges to our dashboard, with the purposes of greater student engagement and ownership, and making learning visible. The (XLR8) summer grants include: Assessment […]

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Assessments / Leadership / Progress Monitoring Posted on:

How Do You Measure Learning?

Attempting to accurately measure one’s learning seems simple enough, but can actually be a rather elusive pursuit. How often do we challenge assumptions about our own experience and mental model of progress monitoring and report cards? Spend a few minutes challenging some of your basic assumptions about how we measure learning with these 6 familiar questions. They reveal some limitations to our current approaches and help to widen our options for innovation. Why do we measure learning? A Brief History of the Report Card

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