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Worksheet Upgrade
Worksheet Upgrade
March 2021
March 2021
Having to create assignments for students who were online this year gave me a lot of opportunities to challenge myself in the areas of formative assessment. It challenged my thinking on the issue of grading everything. It made me focus more on ways to get students the immediate feedback I knew they would need in order to keep them going. I didn't want them to get stuck at home and use the excuse that they "didn't know how to do it", or that "they didn't have any support". I didn't want them to be nervous to ask for support if they just don't get how to do an assignment.
By using the data validation and conditional formatting features in Google Sheets, I was able to ask students questions to check their understanding of a concept and instead of having to wait until I had time to grade their papers, they would immediately know that they were doing the skill correctly. If the cell turned red, they knew they needed to reread and revise their answer. If the cell turned green, they knew that they were understanding the concept correctly.
This format allowed me to walk around the room (or view their sheets from my screen if they were online) and see students screens turning green or red. It allowed students who got a red answer right away to go back and re-read the question and think through what their answer might be. They knew if they didn't understand immediately and could ask for support while I was available. I was less concerned that the online students weren't getting the support they needed.
The assignment that I was using in the past was technically a formative assessment, but two things about it were opposing its effectiveness. The first issue was that I was grading it as if it were summative assessment. The second issue was that I wasn't harnessing formative assessment's greatest "power", immediate feedback. Providing immediate feedback this way made the assignment actually feel like formative assessment and its format gave me the confidence to not grade it.
You can see the incorrect answers turning red and the correct answers turning green.
Using this format gave me the peace of mind I needed to let go of grading every assignment. Viewing their screens as they worked made it easy for me to quietly check in with those that were stuck. A quick scan of their digital papers allowed me to see who was getting the concept and who wasn't.
Part of me was worried that students would just keep guessing until they got the right answer, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that student's intentions to learn the concepts are 95% positive. They could be trusted with their own learning. They weren't just guessing they were trying. Even those whose cells turned red didn't give up. They immediately went back to check their work knowing that learning the concepts now would allow them to do better on their assessments at the end of the unit.
There are some worksheets that teachers have or develop that really do help them determine whether students are understanding important concepts or not. If yours falls into this category, adding these two upgrades just might be the change your looking for.
In this Punnett Square assignment, you can see the incorrect answers turning red and the correct answers turning green. Notice that the the genotype letters control the color of the cell and show the phenotype.
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