This week’s articles were good for me to read. I know I focus too much on the failing grades in my classes and telling my kids their grades are not acceptable doesn’t encourage them to do well, it just makes them sit there and feel worthless. It has been a good lesson in learning that students hear those comments as you’re a loser and won’t amount to anything more than I need to get myself in gear and get my assignments done.
Tomlinson states, “Grades should derive from summative, not formative, assessments” (pg. 130). I don’t know if I necessarily agree with this in any way. If we are only grading their summative assessments, what happens if they just had a bad day and didn’t do well on the test, is that the end of it, there’s no coming back from a bad grade on a summative test. The formative should be there to balance out a little bit of that in my mind. I mean I think tests should be worth more than daily assignments, but I think there needs to be a little weight to the daily assignments. Maybe that’s just me though, I don’t know. I just know that I wouldn’t want to have a grade based solely on my tests because what if the teacher doesn’t give tests that I do well on. For example, I’m horrible at multiple choice tests, so if the teacher only gave multiple choice tests, I would bomb them, but if there was an essay portion, I could balance the two and probably pull off a C, so I do think it is important to have a variety of questions on the tests so students are not doing a whole test in a format that they don’t do well with.
I created this infographic because I was trying to distract myself from all the other stuff in life I have to do before tomorrow night. It basically just shows how I feel about assessments, whether formative or summative, that if you encourage kids all the way through, I think their intrinsic motivation is going to increase.
Tomlinson states, “Grades should derive from summative, not formative, assessments” (pg. 130). I don’t know if I necessarily agree with this in any way. If we are only grading their summative assessments, what happens if they just had a bad day and didn’t do well on the test, is that the end of it, there’s no coming back from a bad grade on a summative test. The formative should be there to balance out a little bit of that in my mind. I mean I think tests should be worth more than daily assignments, but I think there needs to be a little weight to the daily assignments. Maybe that’s just me though, I don’t know. I just know that I wouldn’t want to have a grade based solely on my tests because what if the teacher doesn’t give tests that I do well on. For example, I’m horrible at multiple choice tests, so if the teacher only gave multiple choice tests, I would bomb them, but if there was an essay portion, I could balance the two and probably pull off a C, so I do think it is important to have a variety of questions on the tests so students are not doing a whole test in a format that they don’t do well with.
I created this infographic because I was trying to distract myself from all the other stuff in life I have to do before tomorrow night. It basically just shows how I feel about assessments, whether formative or summative, that if you encourage kids all the way through, I think their intrinsic motivation is going to increase.