Many courses are designed with a one-way flow. Assignments are turned in, graded, and given back without a chance to change and improve before the class moves on. Students, as they get used to this, stop reading teacher comments on their work and become numb to feedback. In order to fight this tendency, I want to allow students many opportunities to show growth throughout the unit and course. However, there are also practical constraints of teacher grading time, class time for new topics, and the possibility that students will not try hard the first time if they know they can simply revise it later that must be balanced against infinite revision.
I experimented most with student-revision in my Statistics course. In order to make sure that students learned all material on quizzes, I rewarded students with half of their lost points back if they correctly revised all problems that had errors. To prevent infinite revision, I only awarded the points back on the first try making revisions (students had access to me, peers, and assignments while making corrections). If there were still errors after making corrections, I talked to the student individually to make sure they knew the correct way to do the problem. This ensured that students never slipped completely through the cracks -- in the end, everyone had to answer each question correctly, even if it required help.
On projects, I like to use collaborative tools such as Google Docs that allow me to access student works-in-progress. Instead of allowing students to hide their work from me until the due date, I made it a habit to give students feedback every night or two by leaving comments throughout their papers or spreadsheets. Not only did this help me by giving me extra time outside of class to see what each team was up to, but it made class time incredibly productive because students actively wanted to fix their errors as soon as possible and have me check over their work. Daily revision led to a level of engagement I have never seen before. Go here to see samples of student work on the Minute to Win It papers (each revision with my comments added in).
I have also started grading project reflections twice. On the first pass, I give students comments and push them to reflect on their own work. On the second pass, I hand them a final grade. The interim grading forces time for improvement and motivates students to read my comments, think about what they did, and improve their work. By only allowing two stages on the reflections, I encourage students to think hard on the first try so they have a safety net of one attempt to respond to my feedback and earn back lost points.
Multi-Stage Assessment: Teacher-Directed Revision
I believe that designing a course with clear objectives and many levels of aligned assessment is an effective strategy to teach students a new concept. At first, this sounds like "drill and kill" or an obsession with testing. However, the alternative is to forgo giving students feedback and allowing them to go on making mistakes until it is too late and the class is moving on. By assessing students early when the stakes are low, they have time to learn from their mistakes and demonstrate growth throughout the unit.
Starting the course with clear ELOs (essential learner outcomes) gives me strong direction to focus my teaching. The homework must prepare students for the concepts they will be assessed on. I believe that solutions should be posted for all homework so that students can learn from their practice as they go and check their own work. In many cases, by simply providing good resources, many students can teach themselves much of the material, freeing teacher time to go into greater depth when students do need help. The first level of assessment should happen daily. I use SMART responders to give instant quizzes to my students to assess their early understanding in a given lesson. This gives students an idea of how they are progressing and lets me know which types of questions students need more help with immediately. Next, students need to be assessed in a test-like manner on a few topics at a time. For this, I give traditional quizzes on paper once every 2-4 lessons. The entire math department makes it a priority to grade all quizzes in time for class the next day so that students get feedback on how they did and what they need to work on as soon as possible. Students make corrections on these quizzes and hand them back in to be checked. In this way, I can make sure that students learn how to solve every problem they were given, even if it required help. Finally, students are assessed on their overall understanding of each unit. The unit test is worth a significant portion of the grade in each class. By doing this, the earlier assessments and homework can be made worth very little, taking off the pressure associated with these assessments and allowing students to focus on the growth and learning.
In order for this sequence of assessments to work, all of the content needs to be aligned. The homework prepares students for the daily quiz and section quiz. The quizzes prepare students for the test. If these parts do not line up, students will be left guessing what they need to learn and quickly become demotivated. In class, my expectations are clear and students are rarely surprised by the content of an assessment. When students believe that most things they encounter on assignments and quizzes will reappear on the test in some form, they are more likely to engage with that material and push through difficulties in learning.