A New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at the College Level →

Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

But there are obvious downsides. Click through to read more. 

Warning: This is a New York Times link. I normally have a policy against posting any content from the NYT because of their poorly implemented, broken paywall and overly restrictive copyright policies on people who share their work online. 

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15 Ideas That Really, Really Screwed Public Education Up

Wow. This was a challenging and controversial read. Here are the first three from the list: 

1. Focusing On Curriculum And Assessment Rather Than Learning Models And Support

This is likely the worst idea public schooling has taken on. The idea here is that by using a standards-based, outcomes-driven, direct instruction model, that real-life content can be parsed without neutering it, understanding be anticipated, and that data can be gleaned and resources shared to improve learning for all. But this only served to homogenize learning in a way that made the world of school entirely different than the world they live and use information in every day.

2. Scripted Curriculum

This is perhaps the most symbolic adoption by public schools struggling to keep teachers and students “on the same page.” For now, let’s skip the desire to have all teachers and students “on the same page,” and focus instead on the idea of a set of learning experience planned in another state by a corporation with zero knowledge of the lives and cognitive identities of students. This falls closely behind #1.

3. Growth

Growing from one-room schoolhouses to sprawling campuses with as many as 5,000 students seems like a natural “development,” but was a recipe for disaster. Size obscures nuance, numbers challenge personalization, and transfer is difficult to coach.

How A Teacher Turned To Technology To Solve A Thorny Problem And Raised $100K

The clincher, the thing that made Quick Key go viral, was a poorly-lit video of an excitable guy holding his iPhone up to a Scantron page, one of those test pages you used to fill out in school. He thumbs through page after page, making comments on students’ performance as the app scans the page and instantly reports a grade. The video was amazingly compelling. The creator, Walter O. Duncan IV, can barely contain his excitement. His app looked great, it worked seamlessly, and the video struck a nerve with students and teachers, pocketing 260,000 views on YouTube and popping up on the front page of Reddit.

12 Alternatives To Letter Grades In Education →

Here are 4:

1. Gamification

A comprehensive systems of badges, trophies, points, XP, achievements. This uncovers nuance and is capable of far more resolution and precision than a letter.

2. Live Feedback

Here, students are given verbal and written feedback immediately–as work is being completed. Live scoring without the scoring and iteration. No letters or numbers, just feedback.

3. Grade–>Iterate–>Replace

In this process, work is graded as it traditionally has been, then, through revision and iteration, is gradually improved and curated. Eventually “lesser” performance (as determined by students, peers, families, and teachers) is replaced by better work, but without the grades. Grades jump-start the revision process, and that’s it.

4. Always-on Proving Grounds (Continuous Climate of Assessment)

In this model, assessment never stops–the result of one assessment is another. Not tests, but demonstrations. It doesn’t stop, so rather than halting the process to assign a letter, the process continues on.

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The letter grade fails because its job–to communicate learning results to learners and families—cannot possibly be performed by a single symbol.

Further, the letter grade “pauses” learning–basically says that at this point, if I had to average all of your understanding, progress, success, and performance into a single alphanumeric character, it’d be this, but really this is over-simplifying things because learning is messy and understanding is highly dynamic.

But parents don’t want to hear about understanding because it’s grey area that doesn’t make sense. It sounds like spin. It’s subjective. Complex. They want it to be distilled for them–and rightfully so, but that reduction dissolves the honesty of the learning process. Conversations with parents turn most frequently on missing work, learner temperament and/or attendance, and the letter grade, but rarely on knowledge, curiosity, or the ability to evaluate information.

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12 Alternatives To Letter Grades In Education

Ninja Update (11/30/2012): I made some slight corrections to the author’s grammar.

Feedback, feed-forward, peer-assessment and project-based learning →

This is by far one of my favorite posts of the year, and the best I’ve seen on feedback in a long time. It’s worth the time it takes to read and re-read (and you should re-read it).

I stole my scaffold for peer and self-assessment from Geoff Petty. I think he’s great because he shares so many wonderful resources for free online. Petty argues that too much of the feedback we give students is BACKWARD looking and often this feedback is quantitative (numerical e.g. 7/10; 70%), but even qualitative feedback (words e.g. ‘You didn’t begin your sentences with a capital letter.’) more often than not looks backwards at what WAS done or, typically, WASN’T done. Petty advocates for a method of feedback that is both backwards and forwards looking, and to do that he uses the ‘goals, medals, missions‘ protocol. It’s really neat because the language is accessible to all age groups and is non-threatening. Essentially the ‘goals’ are the criteria for the product (be it a short film, an essay or a presentation) and the ‘medals’ are what has been achieved (this is the backward looking stuff) and always takes the form of positive statements, e.g. ‘Your introduction is strong.’ The ‘missions’ are the important part of the protocol – this is ‘feed-forward’ as it is looking at what the student needs to work on to improve the product.

Assignments Students Own →

With three suggested principles on how to make that happen. Here’s the second:

2. Students must have a say in what the assignment will include and how they will complete it.

Although teachers traditionally take charge of creating and implementing classwork, young people benefit by contributing to the development of goals, expectations, and rubrics for assignments. Students who understand an assignment’s worth will want to invest in its development. The creative process can be as important as the final product; involving students in making process-oriented decisions can foster increased responsibility and passion for learning.

Students must be granted some autonomy in their own work; they should make substantive choices regarding such matters as what format their final products will take, what content they will address, and how they will complete assignments. When tasks are too perfectly prepackaged, learners are less likely to grapple with ideas in meaningful ways.

Rigorous assignments balance adequate guidance with enough freedom for kids to be creative, ask their own questions, and take risks.

Standardized Testing the Video Game →

Some fascinating testing possibilities with Common Core. Definitely worth a look.

I ended a previous SmartBlog post  with this caution: “Remember that the day of any test, students work alone. Without us. They employ not what we have ‘taught’ but what they have ‘learned.’” In regards to computer-based testing, this is even more true.

Consider one fourth-grade example found in that SMARTER Balanced Zip file. In it a student is asked to read a bit of a story that contains only descriptions with no dialogue. The prompt states: “This is the beginning of a story written by a student who wants to add dialogue. Decide where the three pieces of dialogue should be placed. Click on them and move them into the correct order.” Then, the child must do just that. Instead of simply selecting from four multiple choices, a fourth-grader interacting with that prompt, drags several sentences containing dialogue around and around until they believe they are in the correct order. In another example, listed as eighth grade, a student is presented with a passage, then this prompt: “‘Joy Hakim, the author of this passage, admires Sojourner Truth. How can you tell that the above statement is true? Click on a sentence in the passage that could be used as evidence to support this statement.’”  Then, again, instead of selecting one of four choices, a student could click on any sentence in the entire passage to back up that claim.

Google-Proofing Assignments

holtthink:

In a recent article “Are we Outsourcing our Memories?”  Rabbi Aaron Ross, Ed.D. writing in Free Technology for Teachers began his blog post by quoting from a slide that hangs in his office: ““If your students can Google the answer, then you are asking the wrong question.” At almost exactly the same time, and without knowledge of his quote, I posted this on Tumblr: 

“Teachers often complain that students can simply look up answers to their questions on the Internet. To that I push back: Then why don’t you make questions that require more skill to answer then simply finding the answer on the Internet?”

Both have similar ideas: If the answer is easily findable on Google, then perhaps the question needs to be reworked for more depth and complexity. After I posted my quote on Plurk, some of the responses looked like this: 

So, that got me to thinking about how questions are asked, what makes good questions, the nature of assignments, and a whole lot of other things. I decided to come up with some ways to make your assignments essentially “google proof,” in other words, the answers cannot simply be looked up online and regurgitated back in seconds.  Yes, students can probably find some examples of the following online, but by making the content they create individualized, they would spend more time trying to find something original than actually creating it. 

Here are just a few ways of Google-proofing assignments:

1. Assignments that require students to create original content 1: Comics  For instance, when learning about the periodic table of elements, instead of giving an assignment where students have to merely define an element and tell you all about it, have them design a comic book character that takes on the super powers of the element they have chosen. Then, create a comic using programs like Comic Life:” The Adventures of Hydrogen Man” for example. Why not a graphic novel where each student takes on an element?   Use comics as narrative devices. The information in the comic may be easily found, but  the comic itself cannot. Having students create truly original work is one of the best ways to google proof assignments.  

2. Assignments that require students to create original content 2: Film  A self-produced short film is also a great way of having students show great depth of understanding, while at the same time limiting the ability to copy. Many of the skills needed to produce a short film are exactly the skills we want students to have: collaborative learning, story boarding, writing, editing… 

3. Mindmaps  While mind mapping products like Inspiration have been around for a while, they are not as widely used as you might think. It is difficult to, oh say, find a mind map of specific things online. (And even when you can find them, the image os sometimes fuzzy.) For instance, it is pretty easy to find an outline or a discussion of the causes of the civil war, it is more difficult to find a mindmap of it. Get a bit more in-depth and the chances of finding a mind map that fits the bill become slim. Refining the assignment even further (for instance the role of Virginia in the Civil War) and the chances of finding a corresponding mind map become slim.

4. Three Photo Essays using Original Photos  A lot of us have taught our students how to find creative commons images on the net to use in assignments. Fewer teachers have taught students how to use thier own images to create a narrative. There is a really interesting iPad app called Visual Poet which allows students to create a three panel poem or story. Ideas like this force students to think succinctly, as well as allow them to use their own creativity. 

Here is an example:

               

5. Change your questions from year to year. If you think kids don’t know how to copy and paste your worksheets online for the next generation of students coming up then you are kidding yourself. Change your questions. Don’t get caught in the rut of “WOUF:” Write Once, Use Forever. Dig deeper. Challenge the students. It is easy to find trivia answers on Google like “When was the war of 1812 fought?” It is harder to find answers that dig deeper: “What do you think would have happened if the War of 1812 was never fought?” Then next year, change that question to “You are president James Madison’s speech write and you must write a speech that convinces the citizens we should go to war. What are the major points you are going to write about in your speech?  

6. Getting Granular. The more granular you get on a topic, the less likely the student will be able to find something online. The more personal you get the less likely there is an google answer. For instance, if you ask students to write about Jay Gatsby, the likelihood of them finding information is pretty good. If you ask them to compare Jay Gatsby to say, a living person like Mitt Romney, the less likely you will find information on it.  Compare Jay Gatsby to someone in their community…The more specific you get, the more personal you get,  the less likely there is a “google-able” answer. 

One of my PLN members on Plurk, Laura Sheehy also pointed me towards an old Intel document on questioning skills that fits nicely with this topic. Anyone who has gone through the Intel Teach program knows the idea of the Essential Questions and Curriculum-framing questions.

Some of the questions to ask about your questions could be: 

• Does the question require students to answer how and why? 
• Does the question help to uncover the subject’s controversies? 
• Does the question in some way connect to students’ lives?  
• Does the question require students to dissect their thinking?

Those are great starting points for any question you pose to your students, AND they have the added benefit of delving deeper into the topic. 

What would you do, or what are you doing to make your assignments “Google Proof?”

Let’s make a list below!

I loved this post! And if you aren’t already following holtthink, what are you doing with your life?

"I feel we need to do more Assessment FOR Learning because students are so afraid of making mistakes. They can’t understand that it is by making mistakes that we learn. They are so afraid to make a mistake or try something new or radical that they just want some directions to follow so that they can get full marks."

— Assessment FOR Learning

Tame the Beast: Tips for Designing and Using Rubrics →

Six pieces of advice here, but here’s my favorite (and in my mind, the most commonly overlooked):

3) Use the Rubric with Your Students… Please!!!

You have to use the rubric with the students. It means nothing to them if you don’t. We’ve all had that time when we gave students the rubric and they threw it away, or the papers lay across the room like snow at the end of class. In order for students to keep a rubric, and more importantly to find it useful in terms of their learning, they must see a reason for using it. Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them reflect, self-assess, unpack, critique and more. Use it as a conversation piece during student-led conferences and parent-teacher conferences. If students and stakeholders use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevancy to learning.

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Alternatives to Traditional Homework

(via So Much Homework | Connected Principals)

gjmueller:

No, Facebook Is Not Ruining Your Grades

The study, published last week in Computers in Human Behavior, analyzes 1,839 college students’ survey data about Facebook use and actual grades (as opposed to self-reported grades). It also takes into account students’ high-school GPAs.

On average, students say they spend 106 minutes on Facebook per day. Each increase of 93 minutes beyond 106 minutes correlates with a GPA decrease of .12 grade points — statistically significant, but not dramatic when applied to a real-world situation.

photo via flickr:CC|English106

Wait til my hundreds of Facebook “friends” hear about this in my next status update…

Would you describe zucchini brownies as mellifluous or paly? Or possibly the source of a protuberant midriff?

If you’re lost for the answer, you may need the help of 14-year-old Charis Freiman-Mendel. She’s been cooking up an innovative way to help students learn their SAT vocabulary with a new book, Cook Your Way Through the S.A.T.

Charis got the idea to create her own cookbook by combining her love of cooking with the need to fulfill a homeschool art requirement and study for the SSAT – the Secondary School Admission Test , which resembles the SAT and helps determine placement into independent junior high and high schools .

via The Chronicle

Carrot Cake Demo (by SATgourmet)

Socrative: A Student Response System for Everyone →

Whatever you have, the free, multi-platform student response system, Socrative.com will use any of these. Did you spend $3000 on Activotes or other student “clicker” systems? Well, you could have simply used those laptop carts, those iPads, a desktop computer, or asked your students to bring their own device and fired up Socrative.

This seems pretty compelling. Right now it’s invite-only, but I signed up. If I get through, I’ll take a look and report back. Click through for a preview in the meantime.