So, all assessments are back to the students, tears have been dried and we are now onto our next problem set (what we are calling these assessments).  What we’ve learned is that the rubric allowed us to easily see when a student had good conceptual understanding but perhaps lower skill levels (what we are used to calling “careless mistakes” or worse). We could also quickly see which problems many students had issue with once we compared the rubrics because, for example, problem number 6 was showing up quite often in the 1 row of the conceptual column.  This information was really valuable to us.  However, one thing we didn’t do was take pictures of all of this information to see if we could have a record of the student growth over the whole year. Perhaps an electronic method of grading – a shared google sheet for each student or something to that effect  might be helpful in the future – but not this day (as Aragorn says) – way too much going on right now.

We also changed the rubric a bit for a few reasons.  First, we found that when students completed the problem to our expectations on the initial attempt we felt that they should just receive 3’s for the other two categories automatically.  We considered not scoring them in this category but numerically felt that it was actually putting students who correctly completed a problem at a disadvantage (giving them fewer overall points in the end). Second, we also changed the idea that if you did not write anything on the revisions you earned 0 points for the revisions columns.  Many students told me afterwards that they felt like they just ran out of time on the revisions and actually had read the feedback.  This was unfortunate to me since we had spent so long writing up the feedback in the hope that the learning experience would continue while doing revisions.

Here is the new version of the rubric: Revised Problem Set Grading Rubric new

What we decided to do was to try the revisions this time without the “explanation” part of writing.  I think it will keep the students focused on reading the comments and attempting a new solution.  I was frankly surprised at how many students stuck to the honor pledge and really did not talk to each other (as they still got the problem wrong the second time around – with feedback).  Truly impressive self-control from the students in my classes and how they were sincerely trying to use the experience as a learning opportunity.

I do think the second assessment will go more smoothly as I am better at doing the feedback and the rubric grading.  The students are now familiar with what we are looking for and how we will count the revisions and their work during that time.  Overall, I am excited about the response we’ve received from the kids and hope that this second time is a little less time-consuming.  If not, maybe I’ll just pull my hair out but I’ll probably keep doing this!