Research and Assessment

Research and Assessment

The bulk of work from this performance indicator was not on the same technological path as some of the other artifacts, but it represented a lot of vested time in my educational travels. CI 515 provided lifelong research skills for me as an educator and proved to be influential in assessing and improving my classroom practice. By following the true cyclic process of action research, I continued to reflect on my own teaching and developed my personal theories on grading in the classroom long after the conclusion of the ISU class.

Coming from a rural school district, I teach a wide range of ages and abilities requiring a grading philosophy that supports the needs of each student. For my action research project, I explored “Failure is Not an Option,” a philosophy that I thought was based on grading, but turned out to be based in learning (Blankstein 2004). The study examined the use of this policy, sometimes called ABCI, in order to determine the effectiveness it had on completion of graded assessments and ultimately overall course grades. Some of the potential areas of study relating to this topic included student assessment, student motivation, time management, project-based learning, grade ownership, role of the teacher, initial completion of homework, number of times things need to be redone to achieve success, comparison of course grades in classes where the policy is used/not used, etc.

It was evident from my initial research that U.S. leaders felt the need for some type of meaningful change in the way public education prepares students for life outside the classroom. A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983), No Child Left Behind (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education 2001), and Race To the Top (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education 2009) are all sweeping, educational-reform movements, but, “assessment should be a significant part of the learning process, not an event to be feared” (Rieg 2007), and each of these movements focused on high-stakes tests for proof of educational improvement. “Grades must do more than just rank and sort students relative to each other if they are to serve the higher purpose of raising student expectations and, eventually, future student performance” (Carifio, 2009).

During my initial research, I stumbled upon the concept of Professional Learning Communities, something that my school district had begun to implement during the second-year of the M.Ed. program. These PLCs allowed me to share and explore best practices with fellow teachers so we could create an environment where every student could be successful regardless of their current achievement level. It was from those conversations that alternative forms of assessment and the concept of student input on assessment became a renewed focus of the research. I took the information from my initial findings and applied it to a 21^st century classroom in order to separate the learning of a subject and the skills of learning.

This was not an easy boulevard to traverse. If I truly expected our students to become lifelong learners, I needed to provide for them guidelines as to what skills make up an exemplar lifelong-learner and help them learn to gauge their own learning skills. This required not only a student-centered environment, but also a differentiation between having success with content and having success with learning skills. As the implementation of Iowa Core continued and standards for content areas including 21^st century skills became better defined, the need for effective learning environments became imperative to student-centered learning. Tomlinson (2006) would argue that classroom management techniques would help to provide that environment, and to eliminate the buffers outlined by Schmoker (2006), students needed continuous feedback about their performance in that environment.

A separation of content from learning skills was needed, but “many grading policies allow for the subtraction of points due to student’s not being prepared for class, missing deadlines for assignments” (Carifio, 2009). Many times the curriculum in my class was being learned, but the attitudes and work habits of my students caused their content grades to go down, which was not a true indicator of how much content they had actually learned. Encouraging 21^st century skills from the Iowa Core, I had the students assess themselves on these skills, resulting in them making the necessary connections between their learning “problems” and the outcomes that they received from a particular class. Currently there is one class where learning skills is a separate portion of their final grade and another that is doing the self-assessment, but it is not part of their final grade. I wish I could give you some concrete evidence that this was successful, but I am still gathering data from my first semester of using this separation of learning skills. One outcome that emerged as I traveled this thoroughfare was the positive conversations that I have had at parent-teacher conferences regarding students’ strengths/weaknesses in math and strengths/weaknesses as learners.

Blankstein, A. M. (2004). Failure is NOT an Option ™: Six principles that guide student achievement in high-performing schools. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Corwin Press.

Carifio, J. (2009). A Critical Examination of Current Minimum Grading Policy Recommendations. High School Journal. 93 (1), 23-37.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A Nation at Risk. [http://ww2.ed.gov]. U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.

Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. (2001). Elementary and Secondary Education Act. [http://ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml] U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.

Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. (2009). Race to the Top Fund. [http://ww2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html]. U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.

Rieg, S. (2007). Classroom assessment strategies: What do students at-risk and teachers perceive as effective and useful?. Journal of Instructional Psychology. 34 (4), 214-225.

Schmoker, M. (2006). Results Now. Alexandria, VA. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Tomlinson C.A. & McTighe, J. (2006). Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.