Even though I recommend Mark Barnes’ SE2R feedback model, and have written about that, here, there’s a bit more to his “Assessment 3.0” book than just the model. It warrants further reading…
Continue readingse2r
CI Assessments
I was recently asked a very good question about how to change one’s assessments to align more with CI. By that, we’re talking about comprehension-based language teaching (CLT) that prioritizes comprehensible input (CI) in the Latin classroom. First, it helps to think in terms of what standards were being assessed beforehand, even if they weren’t explicitly called “standards.” These old standards were mostly discrete skills you’d expect to find in tests accompanying popular textbooks, like vocabulary recall, derivative knowledge, grammar identification, and cultural trivia. New standards based on CI—whatever they are—will have meaning at the core. My suggestion is to focus on assessing comprehension of Latin, because that’s more than enough to ask for. One benefit of this standard is that is that it has those old discrete skills embedded within something larger and more meaningful that you can assess (i.e., comprehension). Let’s look at how each one of the old standards is contained within assessing comprehension…
Continue readingCurrent Reading: Formative Assessment
I’m going to start sharing some findings in a series called “Current Reading” as part of a lit review I’m doing on assessment and grading; nothing too fancy or cerebral, but definitely more than blog post ideas.
Why the announcement?!
On the one hand, this is not new. I’ve shared plenty of direct quotes and sources in my blog posts in the past. Also, consider this a symptom of being steeped in academia once again. I’m reading hundreds of pages of research a week, and it’s important to digest and keep track of studies that support my own research. This includes knowing who wrote about what, and when. On the other hand, a second language acquisition (SLA) researcher Bill VanPatten mentioned something online recently when I shared a 2020 post with a summary of CI non-examples. His comment was how ideas in that post were oddly familiar ones throughout the field. That’s completely true; I never claimed they were *my* original thoughts. Like many of my posts written to pass along information, that 2020 summary doesn’t include citations to any particular study. It’s a collection of ideas that have consensus in the SLA community, and that lack of citations was intentional, not an oversight.
Why intentional? For nearly all of my blog’s 12 year history, I never wrote for the academic community that would be interested in that kind of stuff. I was writing for other teachers. I sometimes added just a shorthand author and year (e.g., Feldman, 2018) to some statements that would give most people what they needed to track down the original—if they really wanted to read that original! In my experience, though, most teachers don’t read research, so I haven’t bothered much with bibliographies. Since I’m no longer teaching, and I’m now using bibliographies a lot more these days, I do want to make a clear distinction between posts of the past and posts moving forward. Granted, my posts are still actually written for teachers, make no mistake! My degree program is Teacher Education and School Improvement (TESI), and I’m still sharing ideas for practical implementation. The one difference is that they’ll now include more breadcrumbs for everyone to follow—myself included. After all, there has been no better way for me, personally, to consolidate thoughts and work through concepts than by writing these blog posts. You might also benefit as well. Now, for the good stuff…
Continue readingStudent-Led Assessment (Published!)
This is my first contribution to a major publication for all teachers—not just those teaching Latin—since I officially began researching grading practices at UMass. I’ll get to what you’ll find from me in Starr’s book later, but I just received my copy and wanted to share some top reasons why you probably want this book…
Continue readingA Year Of Grading Research: 30 Articles, 8 Books, 1 Pilot Study
You’re looking at my school desk. There’s some wormwood lotion for our desert-like winter classroom conditions here in New England, some peacock feathers (why not?), one of the deck prisms my great grandfather made in his line of work, the growing collection of my ancient wisdom series obsession, and what remains of this year’s unread novella order. What’s not there is the stack of articles and research reports that had been piling up since last spring. I’ve finally read them all during my planning periods. Of course, each report itself produced at least another to read, and often two or three more, making the review process more like attacking a hydra, but those are now tucked away in a “To Read/Review” folder in Drive. My desk is clear, and that’s enough of an accomplishment for me while teaching full-time. Aside from the reports, I’ve read 8 books, too:
- Hacking Assessment 1.0 & 2.0 (Sackstein, 2015 & 2022)
- Ungrading (Blum, 2020)
- Point-less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More Meaningful Grading (Zerwin, 2020)
- Proficiency-Based Instruction: Rethinking Lesson Design and Delivery (Twadell, et al. 2019)
- Embedded Formative Assessment (Wiliam, 2018)
- Assessment 3.0 (Barnes, 2015)
- Grading and Reporting Student Progress in an Age of Standards (Trumbull & Farr, 2000)
- Punished By Rewards (Kohn, 1993)
In case you’re wondering and were to ask for my current top five, which includes Grading for Equity (Feldman, 2018) that I read a couple years ago, it’d have to be Ungrading, Pointless, Punished by Rewards, and Hacking Assessment. Beyond the books, this year I also completed a small-scale pilot study, which I’ll be presenting at the CANE Annual Meeting. While not specific to Latin teaching, a case could easily be made that *any* grading research can apply to *every* content area. In fact, it’s somewhat remarkable what researchers have found, yet the profession just doesn’t seem to know. And there’s consensus. I’m not prepared to make sweeping claims and cite anything specific, but my impression of the consensus so far is:
- Grading does more harm than most people think. It’s one of the few relics of antiquated education still practiced today en masse, in pretty much the same way, too. Considering everything that’s changed for educators in the past two, five, 10, 20, and 50 years even, now realize that the current dominant grading paradigm predates all of that. The fact that most grading systems are still based on the 0-100 scale with a “hodgepodge” of assessment products that are averaged together to arrive at a course grade is nothing short of astonishing.
- Schools with a more contemporary (i.e., 30-year old) approach that claim to have standards-based learning (SBL) and grading (SBG) systems are actually still in their infancy, with some not really implementing the systems with much fidelity at all, thus, giving a lot of SBG-derived or SBG-adjacent practices a bad name. It’s mostly teacher/school misinterpretation and poor rollouts of these practices that render the efforts ineffective, not the practices themselves.
- Gradelessly ungrading is probably the only sure bet for fixing the mess that grades have gotten us into. If you’re putting all your time and effort into SBG, I recommend that the second you understand the basics, see if you can skip right on over to a) using portfolios, b) getting rid of all those points, and c) having students self-assess & self-grade just once at the end of the term. You’re gonna need to provide a bit of feedback with this kind of system, too, so maybe try Barnes’ SE2R model.
Magister P. 