Ungrading has long been associated with the idea of purposefully eliminating or minimizing the use of points or letters to assess student work. The focus of ungrading is to provide extensive feedback to students and then jointly (students and instructors) come to a consensus as to what the grade should be. This post addresses what ungrading is and why do it.
As a chemistry teacher considering the switch to standards-based grading, you might be wondering how lab reports work in a system that is not based on points. With lab reports, you just need to decide whether you are grading chemistry content skills, scientific communication skills, or both.
A few months ago I reported that I was involved in a pilot standards based grading (SBG) program. My experiment in SBG started well but required some “tweeks” along the way.
Teacher burnout - it is real. How can teacher's adopt more sustainable grading practices to improve their work-life balance?
Standards based grading (SBG) is a method of assessment that is gaining in popularity. There is ample research to suggest that students who participate in SBG do just as well or even better than those students in traditional classrooms
As teachers, we know how important it is for students to practice what they are learning and we are ever aware of the limited class time we have to provide those opportunities. We also know that our students have a full schedule of classes, are involved in extracurricular activities, work after-school jobs and may not have a strong support system and structure at home. That leaves us with the difficult question of “what do we do about homework?”
Having presented on the topic several times over the summer, I am sharing strategies for helping support diverse learners. As we teachers prepare to go back to school, I have summarized my presentation into a list of ways to help your classroom be inclusive for all learners.
I facilitate a working group of chemistry teachers in the New York area and we recently created our own activity surrounding the topic of oxidation. The goal of the probe was to force students to think about what the meaning of oxidation is, as well as to allow students to engage in the science and engineering practice of argumentation. This was an introductory lesson to my oxidation and reduction unit prior to students learning the terms oxidation and reduction.
At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a bank of released NGSS assessment items that we can draw from to use in our own classes, especially for traditional Chemistry classes. This means, that we as teachers may need to write some of our own assessment prompts to use in our classes.
My district recently provided a professional development session focused on utilizing three dimensional formative assessments in the classroom. The ideas I learned in the session as well an an activity for students to engage in formative assessment are outlined.
