April is the Cruelest Month April 4, 2008
Posted by Jeff Giddens in : Learning, Reform, Teaching & Learning, Technology , trackbackAlthough it seemed like an April Fools joke, what happened was anything but funny. All of the second semester grades for thousands of students in Evansville’s public schools completely vanished during last week’s spring break after what was described in the Courier Press as rare combination of bad luck and a hardware malfunction. Welcome to the report card wasteland. This kind of situation underscores the need for
- everyone to know the difference between assessment and grading,
- educators to be persistently transparent as to how student work is assessed and how grades are calculated and,
- students to have the means to consistently publish evidence of academic performance in a variety of formats.
Pupils and parents should be just as capable of assessing and grading student work as a teacher would. Everyone involved–community members, parents, pupils, educators, and administrators–needs to be on the same page when it comes to gauging a learner’s performance.
Even though a technology glitch can result in lost grades, other kinds of technology can act as a back-up. For example, if all the teachers in a school were able to make digital publishing tools available to students so that each pupil could maintain a digital portfolio of work in a variety of formats and a variety of locations (i.e., Moodles, blog posts, wikis, websites, podcasts, et cetera), the likelihood of losing everything would be minimized. There would always be artifacts of student learning handy if assessment and grading had to be revisited. In the event of a loss of grades, the availability of well-understood rubrics and examples of student work would mitigate a great deal of anxiety.
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[...] while that was unfortunate, it raised some questions in the mind of Jeff Giddins, author of the Southeast Georgia Tech Integration Blog, on how assessment is documented. Even though a technology glitch can result in lost grades, [...]