FIAE+Chapter+9+Block+2

Synthesis FIAE C9 B2

Sixth: Don't give out extra credit. Seventh: dont' give group grades. Eighth: don't use a curve when grading. Ninth: Don't record zeros Ten:Don't compare students to one another. This chapter really focuses in on master of material. That is what teachers should be after when assessing students. || This chapter was one of most interesting thus far in this book. These ten "don't do's" are very untraditional. It shoots for a "J" curve in the classroom, as opposed to a "bell curve." I have had teachers who like the bell curve. It seems like the bell curve puts teachers against studetns in the lower standard deviations. I like the part about not recording zeros. It really is true, zeros make final grades look a lot worse than they actually are. || One of the fist things we read in this chapter is that all people develop at different rates, this means that students should have the ability to redo work, or be given extensions in order to help them demonstrate their mastery of a lesson or topic. This is to say that we should not expect that all of the students in our class have fully mastered the test material come the day of the test, but this also does not mean that all of are students do not contain the ability to eventually master the material. The chapter states that it is the teacher’s job to teach the curriculum, not present it and their unit deadlines and then wait to see which students successfully make it through the material. When it comes to making up work the chapter says that in a differentiated classroom, teachers often allow students to redo an assessment type assignment for full credit. We also read that homework should not be graded, homework is practice for mastery and not a demonstration of mastery, and since grades should be saved for demonstrations of mastery, grading does not apply to homework. We see that the most important response to student’s homework is feedback, not a grade. We also read in this chapter that homework that is not done should be given a grade more closely resembling a 60 or the highest level of failure, as apposed to a 0, the lowest level of failure, this insures that the failing grades the student receives for undone homework is much more relative to whatever this student’s grades are for finished homework. Next the chapter dives into extra-credit work and says that if extra credit is to be given it should pertain to the original material as well as not be graded so heavily that it skews the accuracy of the grade relative to student mastery. An extreme example of this would be a child earning a Forty on a history test should not get their grade bumped up to a Ninety for drawing a flower for the teacher to put on the front of their desk. This chapter talked about a lot of really great things and fully changed my view on grading homework. I also felt that homework was a perfectly legitimate thing to grade, but now that I see that if I am to truly run a differentiated classroom I can only grade what is a demonstration of mastery, and homework is simply practice to achieve mastery. I also liked the segment on group grading and agree with the chapter. Group grades are a very dangerous thing, they can be embarrassing for students who are not as far along with understanding in a unit as their peers, and it can cause resent in students who put in a great portion of the effort into a group project while one or two of the other members in the group do very little to contribute. I also found the chapter’s views on extra credit to be very compelling and I hope to implement many of this into my classroom.
 * **Names** || **Abstract** || **Reflection** ||
 * Barnes Mckell || Chapter 9 of Fair Isn’t Always Equal provides ten approaches to avoid when differentiating assessment and grading. 1. Avoid incorporating nonacademic factors, such as behavior, attendance, and effort into the final grade. 2. Avoid penalizing students’ multiple attempts at mastery. 3. Avoid grading practice (homework). 4. Avoid withholding assistance (not scaffolding or differentiating) with the learning with its needed. 5. Avoid assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate their mastery. 6. Avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points. 7. Avoid group grades. 8. Avoid grading on a curve. 9. Avoid recording zeros for work not done and lastly, 10. Avoid using norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-referenced attributes. The chapter outlines all of these ten approaches into more detail. || I am not sure I agree with all of these approaches to grading. In fact, there are a few I absolutely disagree with. Number 7: avoid group grades. I completely disagree with that, I think it is important to grade as a group as well as an individual. And number 6: Avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points. I do not think I agree with that one either. I think allowing extra credit and bonus points can be very beneficial for some students if they take that opportunity. Sometimes life gets in the way of things and I think it is important to allow students to make up some points lost when they didn’t have any control. ||
 * Brennick Christopher || The ninth chapter of FIAE gives ten approaches to avoid when differentiating assessment and grading. The first tip is to avoid non-academic factors like effort. The second is to avoid punishing students for taking multiple attempts at work. The third tip is to not grade the practice work given to students. The book also says under this tip to not give homework until students have gained understanding. Not withholding assistance to support learning is the fourth tip. The fifth tip is to not assess students in ways that do no indicate true learning. An example is giving a math word problem to an ELL student. The student may understand math but they are not able to understand English so it is hard to read the problem and they do not do well. The book cites not giving extra credit or bonus points as the sixth useful tip. The seventh tip the book gives teachers is to avoid grading students as a group. Avoid grading on a curve is the eight tip given to teacher. The ninth tip for grading is to not give zeros for work not done. The final tip is to avoid using norm references in grading. || I really enjoyed the tips in the chapter because they are problems I have often seen in my own educational career and I think that we all go back to the way we learn and think well we made it into college so we must have done all right. The most important thing that I picked out was not giving practice work until students have gained understanding. This just causes frustration because students don’t have the tools to answer yet and they will just get frustrated and not like the topic. ||
 * Columbia Laura || Chapter nine of FIAE, gives ten approaches to avoid when grading and assessing. The first one is avoid incorporating non academic factors into the final grade. This is important because the final grade should show mastery of the subject, not how well they behaved. Others include avoiding penalizing students for multiple attempts, as well as avoiding grading homework. Another approach was to not withhold assistance with the learning when the student needs it. As well as not assessing students in ways that do not really show what they have learned, as well as avoiding extra credit. It is important to avoid group grades, as well as grading on a curve, and giving zeros for work not done. Lastly, it is important to not use norm-referenced terms in the criteria, such as comparing students based on what other students have done. || I felt this chapter was extremely helpful on giving me a perspective on some issues I had been wondering about. I had been thinking about extra credit and how that would align with my lesson plans. I know understand that it is more important for students to redo their work, and try to improve their products, than it is to make up a new assignment for them to work on. It makes so much more sense now, why a lot of teachers do not do extra credit in their classrooms. ||
 * Coombs Kayla || Chapter nine outlines ten approaches that teachers should avoid when differentiating assessment and grading. These are as follows: avoid incorporating nonacademic factors, such as behavior, attendance, and effort, into the final grade; avoid penalizing students’ multiple attempts at mastery; avoid grading practice (like homework assignments); avoid withholding assistance (not scaffolding or differentiating) with the learning when it’s needed; avoid assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate their mastery; avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points; avoid group grades; avoid grading on a curve; avoid recording zeros for work not done; avoid using norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-referenced attributes. || I was surprised and affirmed by the approaches that were outlined in this section as ones to avoid. I was surprised to realize that I should avoid allowing students to do extra credit and offering bonus points because this was one thing that I respected my teachers in the past for doing. If I did not understand the material the first time I was assessed on it, I was always grateful of the opportunity to do another assignment or something to make up for my poor grade that I previously acquired. I always like getting bonus points or doing extra activities to additionally boost the grades on my assignments and tests. I was not surprised that we should not use group grades, because I have been in so many groups where the work is not shared, and some students are benefiting from the efforts of their team members. I liked this reading because I was introduced to many new ideas on grading and assessment techniques to avoid. ||
 * Cummons Michael || Chapter 9 of FIAE is about the 10 approaches that a teacher should avoid when using DI in their assessments. First: don't put non-academic things into the final grade of a class. Second: students must have time to master a subject. Do not punish a student who takes a while. Three: Don't grade what is only practice to mastering a subject. Fourth: Don't withhold assistance. Fifth: Don't assess students in a way that doesn't show mastery.
 * Damboise Kelley || In chapter nine author Rick Wormeli describes the ten grading techniques teachers should avoid when using differentiated instruction and assessments. First, do not include behavior, attendance, and effort into a student’s final grade. Second, allow students to have multiple attempts at achieving mastery level by letting students redo their work for a better grade. Some students take a longer time to reach mastery, and it takes them learning from their mistakes to understand the content. Third, students should only receive homework on the content area once they have learned and are being to comprehend the general understandings. Forth, do not withhold giving assistance to students because not all the student receives the same equal assistance. This goes back to providing students with differentiated instruction and how some see it as unequal when all the teacher really is doing is teaching to their learning style instead of other students learning style. Fifth, stop assessing students in ways that do not best represent their mastery of the content. Sixth, don’t allow students to do bonus or extra credit work to raise their grade, it would be more beneficial to the learning process if a teacher allowed the student to raise their grade if they had to redo the assignment. Seventh, do not participate in group grading; all teachers know that there is always that one student that does ten times more work than the others, but they all still get the same grade. Not a good idea. Eighth, avoid grading based upon a bell curve; a good grading curve will look something like a “J” curve. Ninth, do not use a zero because it brings the students grade down drastically and doesn’t provide an adequate representation of the student’s grade. Tenth, do not use norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-referenced attributes. || I have always been a strong believe in giving extra credit and bonus points to students who want to raise their grade because they are not satisfied with where they are at, but it wasn’t until I read this chapter that I realized that there is an even better way of helping students raise their grade, and its more beneficial to the students learning process. If students are required to redo an assignment that means that they have to dig deeper into information that they might not have truly understood. This gives them another attempt at mastering the content, but also at the same time allows the student to raise their grade. I also like the idea of allowing students the ability to have multiple attempts at achieving mastery levels because not all students learn at the same rate. Some students take longer to understand the material, but when they finally do get it, they have a deeper understanding of the content area. Allowing students to take a stab at an assignment that wasn’t that great provides the perfect opportunity for a deeper understanding. ||
 * Kelley Kathleen || Chapter nine is Fair Isn’t Always Equal discussed the ten different grading approaches that should be avoided when you are differentiating assessments. The first approach that should be avoided is incorporating factors such as behavior, effort and participation. The second approach is to avoid not giving students the ability to redo in order to reach mastery. Not permitting students to redo tasks reverts back to the terrible system of regular grading. The third states that the teacher should avoid grading practice work. Doing so would only frustrate the learner, and after all, it is only practice. The fourth condition is that teacher should avoid not providing the student with assistance through differentiated instruction or scaffolding. Doing so can create a situation where students become frustrated and assessments become less accurate in terms of determining proficiency. The fifth condition is that teachers should avoid providing assessments that don’t give an accurate representation of the level of the students mastery. We need to teach our students the skills required to show competency in the subject area. The sixth states that we as teachers should avoid giving the student extra credit and bonus points because if the point levels are high enough, it can distort the grade enough which could give a false sense of mastery. The seventh condition states that we should avoid giving one grade to the entire group. This method doesn’t allow you to see individual growth and can’t be used to determine progress. It can also cause there to be tension within the group for people to perform at the optimum level. Condition eight states that we should avoid grading on a curve because they do not give an appropriate representation of the students level of mastery. Condition number nine says that giving zeros for missing or incomplete work should be avoided because accuracy and usefulness of the grades are distorted. The final condition is that teachers should avoid using standards to describe criteria. || Chapter nine is Fair Isn’t Always Equal was a great chapter to read because it gave more examples of things that we shouldn’t do as teachers, but I do feel like many of the conditions in the list were all concepts and ideas that we have read about before in the past few classes. One concept in here that always strikes me as interesting is the idea that we should avoid giving the class extra credit work. Until now no teacher was ever really able to give me a reasonable answer as to why, and this book helped me clarify that. Even though the book may think this is a bad idea, I may just include two bonus questions at the end of each exam that will challenge the student. The amount of points per question won’t be a significant amount so it won’t have to large of an impact. ||
 * Knowles Christina || Chapter nine talks about what we should avoid when we are grading our students. Number one is that we should not grade on things that are not academic like effort. We should also not take away points if a student needs to try multiple times to master a task. This sends the wrong message to students when it comes to mastering work. We should also not grade homework because students are still learning while they are doing homework. Homework should be viewed as students practicing their work. The fourth thing we should not do is not giving students help when they need or ask for it. We should be constantly giving students help, especially when they are asking for it. The point of helping a student is so they can master the work. We should also make sure that when we grade our students we are grading them on the task at hand and not things that are off topic. We should also not give bonus points because it will most likely not have them master the task they were originally asked to do. Number seven says that we should not give group grades because there are times when one student will do more work than the rest of the members. If we give a group grade we would be rewarding students for doing little work. We should try giving individual grades whenever possible. We should also not grade on a curve. Grading on a curve makes it look like the grades are well distributed but we also need to consider th at maybe all of our students mastered the task. The ninth thing we should not do is not to record a zero for work that is not done. This is because it will skew the rest of the grades. The last thing we should not do when grading is not compare a students grades to another’s because it does not make any sense. || I liked that this chapter talked about what not to do when we are grading. It gave me a lot of good tips. However, I do not think a student should get any grade when they did not do assignments. This could possible mean that a student could pass a class when they did very little work. I also o not think it is fair to students who did the work and got grades. There is no reason in my eyes to give a student a 60 or any points when they did not disserve it. ||
 * Mourkas Margaret || Chapter Nine was titled Ten Approaches to Avoid When Differentiating Assessment and Grading. As stated in the title this chapter talks about ten different things teachers should avoid when teaching their students. The first approach is Avoid incorporating nonacademic factors, such as behavior, attendance, and effort, in the final grade. This was discussed in depth in the previous chapter. The second approach was Avoid penalizing student’ multiple attempts at mastery. Some students might need a couple tries at a subject to fully master it. The third approach was Avoid grading practice (homework). Homework is typically given to help students learn new material. This poses a problem because some students might only have partial knowledge of the subject when the homework is assigned. The fourth approach was Avoid withholding assistance with the learning when it’s needed. The fifth is Avoid assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate their mastery. Adjusting your assessments for students who don’t “speak the language” of the assessment is not considered a bad thing. The sixth approach was avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points. The seventh approach was avoid group grades. This does not mean avoid group work, but if an assignment comes out of the group work, give everyone in the group earns their own grade. The eighth approach was Avoid grading on a curve. The ninth was Avoid recording zeros for work not done. Lastly, approach number ten was Avoid using norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-referenced attributes. || This chapter was really interesting. It gave us some rich information about the little things about teaching that some people take for granted. Everything that is mentioned is mentioned to make students want to learn in the classroom. I definitely plan on giving bonus points and extra credit but I will be doing it just like the chapter explains; going above and beyond the expectations and continuing the explanation of mastery. I also believe that some homework shouldn’t be graded if it is practice work. The only way I would consider grading it is if was an effort grade. As long as the student came in with an honest attempt at the homework then they would receive a complete grade for it. This would work really well in science and math classes. ||
 * O'Neil Christopher || Chapter nine discusses ten different approaches that teachers should avoid when differentiating assessment and grading. Each of the ten approaches are explained in depth and have examples that go along with each of them. The ten approaches discussed are: avoid incorporating nonacademic factors, avoid penalizing students’ multiple attempts at mastery, avoid grading practice (homework), avoid withholding assistance with the learning when its needed, avoid assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate their mastery, avoid allowing extra credit and bonus points, avoid group grades, avoid grading on a curve, avoid recording zeros for work not done, and avoid using norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-referenced attributes. Some of these approaches had more in depth descriptions than others. However, all of them are explained well enough so that readers can get the best understanding about them. || I liked this chapter because of the examples it gave about each one of the approaches. Each of these approaches I agreed with except for the avoid recording zeros for work not done. I must admit that it does a better job arguing the case than the UbD/DI book did, but I still strongly disagree. However, I do agree with giving the students a sixty or a fifty instead of the zero. If I was ever forced to not give out zeros, I would definitely give the student a fifty for the assignment. ||
 * Richardson Cassandra || Chapter nine outlines the approaches teachers should most avoid when assessing for grades. First and foremost, effort, participation, and attendance should not be a factor in the final grade. Second, allowing students extra credit when it would be more beneficial to redo the assignment. This way, they learn from their mistakes and re-evaluate information they didn’t quite understand. Third, avoid grading what is clearly practice work. That way, if a student hasn’t quite gotten something and has practiced, they won’t be penalized. Fourth, do not avoid providing assistance to your students. Fifth, avoid giving assignments that don’t befit the mastery of the content. Sixth, avoid extra credit because of the balloon effect; a score can grow, but the understanding associated with the grade will not grow as well. Seventh, group grading is ineffective. It rewards students for the few who go above and beyond on their own, and contribute this to their group. Eighth, avoid grading curves. A ‘J’ curve, if a curve is necessary, is more realistic. Ninth, zeroes should be avoided altogether, because they can deflate a grade without providing the proper usefulness. Finally, the tenth is to avoid using standards to define specific criteria. || I enjoyed this chapter a lot, because these are all things that I have seen firsthand in my educational career as a student. I was glad that certain things were included on this ‘to avoid’ list, including group grades, something I always hated because I tended to be the overachiever in the group to make up for others’ lack of initiative, and also participation, effort, and attendance grades. Participation grades especially always frustrated me, because I tend to listen to what other people say rather than talk myself, and this was never reflected in a participation grade. One thing that surprised me was number six, avoid extra credit. Yes, I was fully aware of the balloon effect, but I hadn’t quite caught on to the real reason it was ineffective. ||
 * Trundy Monique ||  ||   ||
 * Webb Christopher || This chapter is all about the ten commonly accepted but inappropriate grading practices. The first one is the ones dicussed in the previous chapter, incorporating behavior, participation, and effort into the grade. The second is penalizing students multiple attempts at mastery. This goes back to the idea that it doesn't matter when students master the material but allowing for differnent levels of progression. The third practice is to avoid grading homework. The most effective thing we can do to students homework is provide feedback to them about it. The fourth practice involves withholding assisstance with the learner when it's needed. If a struggling student needs a graphic organizer we shouldn't deny them it if it enhances their learning. Number five is to avoid assessing students in ways that do not accurately indicate mastery. Teachers need to differentiate assessment for students who learn differently. The sixth practice is avoiding bonus points and extra credit. It's a delicate balance, you can't grade the extra credit when they haven't done the regular work. The seventh practice is to avoid group grades. These might create unhealthy peer pressure among classmates. Next it recommends avoiding grading on a curve. The ninth practice is avoiding giving zeros for work not done. By doing so we are showing students we want them to demonstrate they know the material and it doesn't matter when they master it. The last practice is using norm-referenced terms to describe cirterion-referenced attributes. || This chapter went into a lot of detail on most of these practices. I liked it because most of the other books told us what we should be doing. It was nice to reading something which highlighted soe of the things we should avoid doing. It provided a lot of good examples of how to counteract doing these negative practices and made it easy to see how to avoid doing them in the classroom. ||
 * West Simon ||  ||