Grades should provide feedback to students, parents, and teachers as to the progress students are making toward learning targets. Meaningful grades require good assessment practices. Erica Posthuma presented a ChemEd X Talk on May 11th, 2021, providing an overview of effective assessment design. She discussed writing and communicating learning goals, developing targeted questions and prompts, and scoring using a standards-based approach. You can watch the edited recording of Erica's Talk below.
ChemEd X Talk Recording: Edited video of Erica Posthuma's ChemEd X Talk - ChemEd X Vimeo channel (5/16/2021)
Resources
See the Supporting Information below to find items Erica discussed in her presentation. Erica also suggests reading her 2019 ChemEd X blog post, Advanced Chemical Lab Design. In that post she outlined the advanced chemistry (post-AP Chem) course she designed including the objectives and rubrics she uses. You can download them from the Supporting Information of that linked blog post when you are logged into your ChemEd X account.
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To find the schedule of future ChemEd X Talks as well as more recordings of previous Talks, see the ChemEd X Talks schedule.
Erica began her teaching career in 2000. Her work in Modeling Chemistry pedagogy has been published in the Journal of Chemical Education and she has led numerous national talks and workshops. Along with several colleagues, Erica has provided professional development on the topic of grading and assessment. She has spoken on effective grading practices at Indiana University, the American Modeling Teachers Association (AMTA), ISACS, and the Indiana Non-Public Education Conference. Erica has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society. She is highly involved in the AMTA and currently serves as their Director of Communications. We are very fortunate to have her as an associate editor for ChemEd X. Follow Erica on Twitter @eposthuma.
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Comments 1
Grading
Thanks for sharing this talk, Erica. I agree that the purpose of grading is to COMMUNICATE student achievement. You are probably already familiar with Ken O'Connor's work. I've enjoyed reading Ken's book about fixes for grading.
https://www.oconnorgrading.com/publications
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIISIJ68TlmrxT4JV_ApE8cqgYgMyZFfv