October 10 - Entrance Slip

 The article "Refocusing out efforts: A shift from grading to an emphasis on learning" by John Sarte and Sherri Hughes uses a lot of previously conducted research as well as their own study to argue that "if teachers avoid using grades as an extrinsic motivator and focus on engaging the students in learning, they will promote intrinsic motivation in students to improve their feelings of success in the course". I agree with this because not only is it a compelling argument backed up by a lot of research, I have also seen the results of this first hand. My students in the past have performed significantly better when they were told to just explore and have fun with a certain topic and that they were not going to be graded. What I found surprising at the time, though, was that they still wanted to know how they were performing. Having done the B.Ed. program for a little over a month, I can now connect this to the student's desire for formative feedback and intrinsic motivation to learn. 

In our EDCP 441B class, we have been talking about various effective ways we can do this, and create authentic assessments for our students that truly reflect their learning. A big part of this is engineering and reverse engineering the learning map - the criteria that goes on the proficiency scale. The proficiency scale is a really big and revolutionary thing to happen in recent years. We can now move away from assigning percent grades (or letter grades) to students, which will motivate students to learn and still provide transparent and honest feedback. However, I have also been hearing about cases where some teachers that have been in this profession for a while are not so far along the unlearning process as they should be. This is, at best, having no affect on students' motivation and at worst, confusing and frustrating for students because they are not getting clear feedback from their teachers. This is something that I found myself constantly thinking of when reading this article - How effectively are the new systems being implemented? How are teachers going to be held accountable for doing it right rather than treating the new scale as another A-B-C-D scale?