FIAE+Chapter+8+Block+2

[|Synthesis FIAE C8 B2]

The chapter opens by saying that teachers can teach and students can learn even grading being in the picture. We are asked to imagine scenes such us a student learning to paint a white line softening the yellow beam of light entering into a window, or a student learning through peer review that a conclusion sentence will help them relate ideas back to their topic. The chapter gives us some examples of how grading is often used and three of them were to motivate, punish, or sort students. We are told that when this happens we destroy the grades accuracy, usefulness, and manipulate the students. We read that receiving a bad grade is not at motivating event, rather for a student seeing that D on their paper distances the student from us as their teacher, and it gives the student doubts of our cause. We see later on that grades should reflect mastery of a topic and that mastery is a demonstration of what children know and how they are able to apply that knowledge, grading should not be based on how the student arrived at this knowledge, therefore participation and effort should not be a part of the grading process. On the other hand we also read that One child may spend multiple hours and great amounts of effort creating the same quality project as a student who slapped it together in twenty minutes on the bus, it is hard to give these students the same grade when we know that one student put more of themselves into it and probably holds much more pride in their final product. On a final know we read that if we are to add feedback about effort, behavior, and participation into a student’s grade, this should be seen in a separate column or done in a way that it does not effect the student’s final grade. This chapter contained a lot of great information about effort, participation, and behavior, and how all of these things can affect a student’s grade. The chapter provided some many good points and contrasting opinions for us educators to see the multiple side of things. Personally I really enjoyed the discussion on how some children can put fourth an immense amount of effort toward a project and only be able to create the same or lower quality work as some child who quickly slapped their project together the night before. I feel that in Elementary and Junior high settings this problem is most dominant, especially for all of those Language Arts lessons that ask you to create a book project to go along with your book report. Being able to draw a picture of a plane crashing into a mountain to prove show you read //Hatchet// does nothing. A student could have looked at the cover of the book and automatically received total points for the project requirements. I also put a lot of faith into the chapter when it stated that behavior, participation, and effort are already affecting their mastery and performance grades, so why thicken the waters by accounting for these factors twice. This is to say a child put forth no effort, therefore their paper was terrible and they got a D on mastery, we then directly assess the fact that they showed no effort and the final score we give that student for the paper is an F. What would we say to this student or their parents, “This is a D paper, it clearly shows no effort and the child was incapable of showing me mastery of the material. Due to this lack of effort your child is going to receive and F.”? I truly feel that students should receive feedback on their effort and participation, but if they are lacking in either of these things their performance and mastery will suffer enough for us to not need to directly attach these attributes to the final grade.
 * **Names** || **Abstract** || **Reflection** ||
 * Barnes Mckell || Chapter 8 in the book Fair Isn’t Always Equal talks once again about grades. This chapter discusses why we grade and what is important to grade and what should not be graded. The book first starts off with six reasons why we grade: to document student and teacher progress, to provide feedback to the student and family, and the teacher, to inform instructional decisions (102). These are the first three reasons why we grade; these are good reasons to grade. The second three reasons consist of: to motivate students, to punish students, to sort students (102). These are all awful reasons to grade. Another aspect to this chapter is about what we grade. This chapter emphasizes grading things you want your students to know. Grading should be based on what we want our students to master. That means participation, behavior and effort should all be less emphasized in grades. || I like how the chapter outlines why we grade and what are good reasons to grade and what are bad reasons to grade. I do, however, disagree with the part about putting less emphasis on participation and effort. I think it is extremely important to participate in class and to put a great deal of effort into the class. I understand as a teacher many of my students are going to forget a lot of what I teach them. But I think it is important to stress effort and participation and I think it should be weighed some in the grades. ||
 * Brennick Christopher || Chapter 8 in FIAE is about why we grade and what we should or shouldn’t grade. The fist part of the chapter gores through the reasons we grade students. The book list six reasons for grading; to document student and teacher progress, to provide feedback, to inform instructional decisions, to motivate student, to punish students, to sort students. The book says that the first three reason given are very good reasons for grading and the second three reasons are not very good reasons for grading. The second part of this chapter talks about if we should give grades for participation. The guideline the book sets out for weather or not teachers should grade participation is if participation is the skill you want students to master then yes you should grade it, but if it is not the skill your trying to get students to master then no you should not grade it. The book makes the same case for grading effort and behavior. || I agree with part of this chapter but not all. I feel it is very important to grade for the three reasons listed as the good reason. I think the book is right that the second three are not good reasons to grade and that they are commonly used by bad teachers as an easy way out of teaching. I do not agree with the book about their recommendation of not grading things like effort and attitude. I believe that if we value something we need to grade it and I feel that even more then most content a good attitude and a ton of effort is a valued skills in today’s world. I believe that you can know everything in the world and know how to use that knowledge, but if you don’t have the attitude to take action on it you will still be unable to grow opportunities. ||
 * Columbia Laura || Chapter eight of FIAE discusses why and how we should grade effort, attendance, and behavior. The introduction starts off by saying that students can learn, even without grades and continues to give examples of the little learning moments, such as peer evaluation, in which no grade is giving, yet learning is taking place. Grading participation is discussed next and states that if we want to grade this, we need to set a standard on how a student can reach that standard. Next, grading the effort and behavior was mentioned. It said that in a perfect would, all of these factors could be incorporated into the assessment, yet, it is often difficult for teachers to measure some of these facets. || I feel like it is very important to grade effort because working hard is something that should be encouraged and valued. Yet, when creating my rubrics, I am finding it hard to measure that. For example, if someone where to give an oral presentation, and they get very nervous speaking in front of others, yet they had rehearsed a lot, but they still make mistakes. Yet, if someone was very comfortable speaking in front of others, only rehearsed once and then stood up and gave a near perfect speech, one person's was better, but who put in more work? As teachers, I feel like it is hard for us to judge certain attributes, by just the presentation. This is something I want to learn more about. ||
 * Coombs Kayla || Chapter eight, called “Why Do We Grade, and What About Effort, Attendance, and Behavior?’ introduces teacher responses to why they grade. These include: to document student and teacher progress, to provide feedback to the student and family, and the teacher, to inform instructional decisions, to motivate students, to punish students, and to sort students. The last three, to motivate, punish, and sort, are not considered healthy approaches to grading as they do not help teachers or students achieve goals, and they take away from the usefulness and accuracy of the grades. “A grade represents a clear and accurate indicator of what a student knows and is able to do-mastery. With grades, we document the progress of students and our teaching, we provide feedback to students and their parents, and we make instructional decisions regarding the students” (“Fair Isn’t Always Equal,” 103). The chapter talks about grading participation and recommends that teachers give feedback on participation, but do not include it in the end result grade at the end of the unit, as participation does not show mastery of material. The reading also talks about grading effort and behavior, and how that should not be incorporated into the mastery grade as this type of grade is currently represented, because that would be changing the face of how this grade is defined. Nonacademic factors like the ones discussed should be communicated to the students through feedback, but not necessarily as part of the mastery grade. || I thought this chapter made a lot of good points on grading, and discussed some of the topics I had been pondering. I think that effort and participation are important aspects of the extent to which students are and can learn, but they do not fit in with the other factors that are incorporated into that final grade. ||
 * Cummons Michael || This chapter talks more about grading. This chapter looks at grading as far as feedback for studens and family, motivating kids, diciplining kids. This chapter stresses that grades cannot be a tool for teacher to use for disipline. Grades were designed to assess learning, not to use against kids. Grades that are not specifically related to a students academic success should be well thought out, and should usualy not be used at all. Participation should be not higher then 5% of a students grade. || I really enjoyed this chapter. I think that using grades to punish kids is an awful thing for a teacher to do. Grades are for assessing learning. When a teacher punishes a kids with grades, it puts kids down and doesn't adress the real problem, which is that the kids is not learning very well in the classroom. ||
 * Damboise Kelley || Chapter eight goes into a deeper explanation as to why we grade, and how exactly does effort, attendance, and behavior factor into the grading process. The number one reason as to why most teacher’s grade assignments and assessments is because they say that it is required of them to provide evidence of learning, and this may be the only way to achieve that task. There are six other reasons as to why teachers do end up grading students they include: being able to document students and teachers progress; being able to provide feedback to the student, family, and the teacher; to inform instructional decisions, to motivate; to punish; or to sort students. Grading should not be used to motivate, punish, or categories students; this is probably where grading gets a bad rep from. Another area that probably shouldn’t be grade has to deal with participation. When student are asked to participate in order to arrive at the final product then it should not be graded, however, if participating in an activity is the way to show mastery then it should be graded. When it comes to grading to show mastery of a certain subject area then effort, attendance, and behavior should be left out. || A huge red flag should come to mind when talking about using grades to motivate, punish, or categorize students. Before I enter the high school I remember hearing horror stories about this one teacher who would grade his students extremely hard. The teacher was under the assumption that the harder I grade my student the more motivate they will become to learn the material. However, as a student if I were to receive bad grade after bad grade I would probably give up on the content because I obviously don’t understand what is being taught, and I probably never will because look what my grades have reflected so far. As for categorizing a student based upon the kinds of grades they receive means that the teacher doesn’t understand that the student probably is not receiving instructions that tailor to his or her learning style. ||
 * Kelley Kathleen || Chapter eight of Fair Isn’t Always Equal discusses the reasons as to why we use grading to assess our students, and how we take effort, attendance, behavior, and participation into account. The first question that began this chapter asked : why do we grade students? Many teachers feel like grading is more of a burden, than a helpful means of assessing where a student stands in the material. Rather than grading as a way to sort students, motivate, and punish, we should be using alternative ways. Teachers need to be able to give feed back and guide their students to success. If a student receives low grades, they are deterred from learning, and if a student always earns high grades, they may not have the motivation achieve more. Also discussed in this chapter was whether or not include participation, effort and behavior in the student grade. The general response to this question was no. There may be some circumstances, such as the one presented in the book, that require the teacher to come up with an alternative way to assess whether or not the student has achieved mastery, but this cannot happen on a day to day basis. The author states that participation should be worth no more than 10% of the entire grade because you will have those students that are not ready to speak during class because they have not yet mastered the material. As far as effort and behavior is concerned, that is one thing that it hard to grade because there are no guidelines for it, and if they are graded for it, students may think that they can produce a terrible product and pass just because they worked hard. || Chapter eight of Fair Isn’t Always Equal was generally review from the last few readings that we have done for class. There was one quote in the reading that I really liked and it said: “One of life’s tough lessons is trying hard and failing. It does no kids anywhere any good to give grades based on trying hard or behaving nicely because sooner or later they hit the wall of not having the knowledge the grade implied” (page 109). I just thought that this quote was great because it reminded me of something that my English Composition teacher would say. All in all, I would have to say that I agree with the idea that it is near impossible to grade effort. Even if effort could be graded, I am not sure that I would want to include it in the over all grade. Participation on the other hand is something that I will incorporate in my grades. It will only be a small percentage, but I want the students to know that they are going to be actively participating in class. If they aren’t comfortable with the area of study, then they don’t need to contribute in the discussions, but I do expect them to contribute where they can. ||
 * Knowles Christina || Chapter eight discusses the importance of grading and why we grade. It also talks about the different types of grades we can give our students. The chapter gave the top six reasons why teachers feel they should grade their students. Three of the reasons are useful because grades can give feedback to students, teachers and parents. Grades can also show the progress students have made in the course. The way grades can be used in a negative way is to motivate students, punish students, and to categorize them. Using grading this way can be very harmful to students mentally. The chapter also talks about grading participation and grading effort put into the class and how we can use them in our grading systems. || I am a big believer in giving effort grades because a student can be putting a lot of effort into class work, but may not be understanding to subject and may do poorly on assignments. I think that effort grades can also give teachers insights on what works for their students and what des not. Effort grades can show a teacher if a student gets the content in the course or if the student is slacking in the class. This way the teacher will be able to help her students better. ||
 * Mourkas Margaret || Chapter 8 dives into the issues of grading aspects of education that do not really have anything to do with mastery, directly. The chapter starts out by pointing out some extreme cases of grading effort, attendance, and behavior. The chapter then discusses reasons that teachers grade their students. It gives six different examples, three good: to document stuent and teacher progress, to provide feedback to the student and family and the teacher, and to inform instructional decisions. . . and three bad: to motivate students, to punish students, and to sort students. “It may be advisable to give feedback on participation but not to include it in the formal, end-of –the-year grading-period” page 105. The chapter discusses also that each student is different, once child may be loud and always has something to say, but another might be quiet and shy. || This chapter I thought was interesting because it discussed the aspects of education that we want all our students to do well on but we might not know how to work it into our grading system. I have always had participation as apart of my final grade and it always frustrated me because I would participate but not as much as some but more than others. I never thought it was fair to judge every student’s participation on the same scale. I think that grading on someone’s effort in projects though I think is fair. I think if a student puts a lot of effort into a project and does everything correctly they should get a good grade. However, if a student does all the required information but puts in little to know effort then that student should get a lower grade. ||
 * O'Neil Christopher || Chapter eight discussed why teachers grade and if they should grade effort, attendance, and behavior. Grading attendance, effort and behavior makes the accuracy of the grades become skewed. Teachers should not be grading based on a student’s behavior in the classroom. What does their behavior have to do with their mastery of the information? Teachers should also be very careful when including effort into a grade. A lot of times, the teacher will not be able to accurately know if a student put a lot of effort into an assignment. What is really good for one student may be considered thrown together the night before for another student. Attendance definitely should not be included in grades. A lot of high schools have a policy where if a student misses a certain number of classes, then that student will fail for that semester or even for the year. This may seem like a good idea in theory, but when actually put in place it may back fire. Students will still miss class for that number of days and then fail out of school. || I liked this chapter because it gave a good idea of why teachers should grade based on the student’s mastery of the information. A lot of teachers like to grade based on the student’s effort, attendance, and behavior. In my opinion it is a complete waste of time to grade those three things. Just because a student behaves poorly in class does not mean he is not a master of the information. I had a lot of friends who got in trouble a lot and were some of the best students academically. As for the attendance idea, I think it is a good and bad idea. It is a good idea because most students will try their best not to skip out on classes in fear of failing. It is a bad idea because some students will miss that one day because they were unable to obtained a written excuse (doctor’s note or any other reason) and fail out of school. ||
 * Richardson Cassandra || Chapter eight gets into the nitty-gritty of grading in that it discusses why teachers grade, and what kind of toll specifics like attendance, participation, and effort can take on a student’s grade. The chapter supplies six umbrella reasons on why to grade, three positive, and three negative. The three positive are: to provide evidence of progress (both teacher and student), to be able to provide feedback for the student, teacher, and parent, and to inform instructional decisions. The three negative are: To punish students, to motivate them, or to sort them. Grading this way impacts students negatively, and in some cases, doesn’t allow them to recover from the blow and think of schooling as a positive. || As far as grading is concerned, I don’t really agree with giving participation, effort, and attendance grades. Yes, each of those aspects is important in their own right, but for an incredibly shy student, participation grades can really bring what could be an excellent grade down. On this note, effort grades, when used correctly, can be effective if used in the right manner. It can help assess understanding among students; what students are willing to work on diligently and make real strives to reach the given goal, most likely was a successful assignment. Others, where one-sentence answers are given, is not the best assignment to give effort points to. ||
 * Trundy Monique ||  ||   ||
 * Webb Christopher || Chapter 8 of FIAE discusses why we as teachers grade. They provide three good reasons why we do as well as three bad reasons. The first three reasons are to document student and teacher progress, to provide feedback to the student and his/her family as well as the teacher, and to inform instructional decisions. Three bad reasons we grade are to motivate, punish, and sort students. The chapter also discusses whether or not to incorporate attendance and behavior into the students grade. It gave the example of the school system in Fairfax County Virginia where is a student has three unexcused absences they receive an automatic F. Grading participation is tricky as well. If participation is the mastery we are seeking then it should be graded. however; if it through participation we achieve mastery then it should not be graded. Sometimes it is appropriate to modify the curriculum for certain students who have extenuating circumstances. Next it talks about possibly grading effort and behavior. These should be graded separately as well, not part of the academic grade because it distorts it, it does not reflect mastery. || This chapter was extremely helpful because it talked about things I had not even considered yet. I realized that some of my teachers in high school and even most of my college professors took effort, participation, and behavior into account but I never fully realized how to factor it into my grading system until now. This chapter gave a lot of good reasons about why they should and should not be influenced in a students grade. I liked how they used quotes and gave the opinions of educators in this matter because their insights are the ones that matter and will help us the most. ||
 * West Simon ||  ||