Plus One Grade 7 Revision Books Pdf Download

It is an understatement to say these units have been piloted many times. The teaching in these books has been planned, taught, revised, and retaught, through a cycle of improvement involving literally thousands of classrooms in schools dotting the globe.

Two and a half years ago, I decided that the traditional system of grading student work --- based on assigning point values to that work and then determining course grades based on the point values --- was working against my goals as a teacher, and I decided to replace it with specifications grading. I had just learned about specs grading through Linda Nilson's book on the subject. This happened right at the end of Fall semester 2014, and I spent the entire Christmas break doing a crash-course redesign of my Winter 2015 classes to install specs grading in them.

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But it was only this last semester, the one that just concluded this week, where I felt that at every point during the semester --- from day 1 all the way through turning in course grades yesterday --- the specs grading system I had in place was working the way I wanted. It's still not 100% there, of course, but I think I have a blueprint of how to use specs grading moving forward[1] and of course, I want to share it with everyone.

In specifications grading, instead of using points to assess student work, the work is graded on a two-level rubric --- that is, some variation on Pass/Fail or Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory. Instructors craft a set of specifications or "specs" for assignments that define what Satisfactory work looks like. When the work is handed in, the instructor simply categorizes it as Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory depending on whether it meets the specs or doesn't. There are no points, so there is no partial credit. Instead, instructors give detailed feedback on student work, and specs grading includes giving students the opportunity to revise their work based on the feedback, and submit a revision as an attempt to meet specs.

Specs grading still uses an A/B/C/D/F course grade reporting approach, but the letter grades are earned differently. Rather than calculating complex weighted averages of points --- which you can't do because there are no points --- letter grades are earned by completing "bundles" of work which increase in size and scope as the letter grade being targeted goes higher. The idea is that students who want a "C" in the course have to do a certain amount of work that meets the specs; those wanting a "B" have to do everything the "C" people do, but more of it and of higher quality and/or difficulty level. Similarly the "A" students do everything the "B" students do plus even greater quantity and quality.

Done right, specs grading allows students choice and agency in how and when they are assessed; students are graded on what they can eventually show that they know, and they get to learn from mistakes and build upon failures; their grades are based on actual concrete evidence of learning; and the grades themselves convey actual meaning because they can be traced back to concrete evidence tied to detailed specifications of quality. The instructor often saves time too, because instead of determining how to allocate points (which takes more time than you think), she just determines whether the work is good enough or not, and gives feedback instead.

Some people may debate whether or not "engagement" ought to be part of the grade. Personal experience with this course tells me that it should, in this case. What I mean here is not just attendance in class, but also preparation for class, active participation during class, and enagagement in the course outside of the class. I want students to treat the course as a high priority and engage with it as such.

Learning Target assessments were graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory according to specifications that I determined, and those specs are at the bottom of each Learning Target assessment so it's very transparent for everyone. If student work was Satisfactory, I just circled the "S" at the top of the page, and circled "U" otherwise.

Challenge Problems were not graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory but rather using the EMRN rubric, which is a modification of the EMRF rubric I wrote about here.[2] "Pure" specs grading would say that I should not make things so complicated, and just use Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory with a high bar set for Satisfactory. But I've found that in math classes, written work is hard to get right and students get easily discouraged, so I felt there should be some detail added to the 2-level rubric to distinguish between Satisfactory work that is excellent versus merely "good enough", and Unsatisfactory work that is "getting there" versus that which has major shortcomings. Students would submit their Challenge Problems as PDFs or Jupyter notebooks on Blackboard; I'd grade it there and leave feedback, then students could revise (see below).

Importantly, there were no recurring deadlines on Challenge Problems. Instead, students were allowed up to two Challenge Problem submissions per week (Monday--Sunday) which could be two new submissions, a new submission and a revision, or two revisions. The only fixed deadline for Challenge Problems was 11:59pm on the last day of classes, after which no submissions of any kind were accepted. This helps keep students from procrastinating until the end of the semester and dumping a ton of Challenge Problems into the system all at once. (Although there were issues with this; keep reading.)

I broke again from the specs grading mold and graded the final using points, grading each recycled Learning Target with either 0, 4, 8, or 12 points. A 12-point score was given if the work would have earned Satisfactory marks according to the original specs, 8 if it was "almost Satisfactory", and so on. The feedback questions were given 4 points, bringing the total to an even 100 points.

Learning Target assessments could be "revised" by retaking them, either at a subsequent Learning Target assessment session on Friday, or by scheduling a 15-minute appointment in the office to do it orally. There was no limit on the number of times students could retake Learning Target assessments, but there was a limit on office hours appointments: no more than twice a week, for 15 minutes each, and no more than two Learning Targets attempted per 15-minute session, and appointments had to be scheduled 24 hours in advance. Also, students had to try the Learning Target on paper first before doing it in the office. This was a policy purely to keep the number of office hours visits for Learning Target revisions down to a reasonable level.

For Challenge Problems, students could revise any Challenge Problem that received an "R" or "N" grade just by submitting a new version on Blackboard that addressed the feedback I gave. There were no limitations on the number of times students could revise Challenge Problems other than the two-submissions-per-week rule, and the fact that any Challenge Problem work that earned "N" required students to spend a token to revise.

What's a "token"? A token in specs grading is a sort of "get out of jail free" card that a student can spend to bend the rules of the course a little. Every student in my course started with five tokens. By spending a token, a student could purchase a third submission of a Challenge Problem in a given week (but these couldn't be "stacked", for example to get four submissions in a week for two tokens), to purchase a third 15-minute oral revision session in a week, or to purchase five engagement credits.

The "specs" part of this system so far has come from the Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory rubric and EMRN rubric used for grading Learning Target assessments and Challenge Problems. Most of the engagement credit-earning items were also graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory. Specs grading also has to do with the assigning of course grades, and here is how it worked in my course.

First of all, let's distinguish between the base grade for the course and the modified grade. The base grade is just the A B, C, D, or F that a student earns. The modified grade is the base grade modified up or down by a plus or minus. Course grades were determined by a simple two-step process.

So the base grade in the course is entirely determined by three points of information: (1) how many Learning Targets you pass, (2) how many Challenge Problems you pass, and (3) how many Challenge Problems show excellent work. (An "F" grade is awarded if a student doesn't complete the requirements for a "D".)

The grade of "C" is considered "baseline competency", and to earn that grade you have to complete the "C bundle", which is passing 75% of the Learning Targets and completing five Challenge Problems, with no requirement of excellent/exemplary work required. The "B bundle" is everything in the "C bundle" with more Learning Targets passed and more Challenge Problems completed plus some evidence of excellent/exemplary work. The "A bundle" is likewise everything in the "B bundle" with even more Learning Targets and Challenge Problems completed plus even more extensive evidence of excellent/exemplary work. Notice, students get to choose which Challenge Problems they attempt -- we had 17 Challenge Problems in all and students just picked the ones they liked[3].

Additionally, students targeting an A or B grade in the course had to complete at least one "theory" oriented Challenge Problems with an E or M grade (i.e. successfully write a proof for a mathematical conjecture) or else the final grade was lowered by one-half letter.

If the only grade we awarded were these five letters, this would be extraordinarily simple. But we also award plus/minus grades, and so I had to add rules into the system for how this works. I chose to approach this by awarding plus/minus modifications on the basis of the final exam and on engagement. The base grade was raised by a plus, lowered by a minus, or lowered by an entire letter as follows: ff782bc1db