Self-Assessment and Science Skill Tracking

written by Quinn Loch

A few days ago, Kim Miklusak provoked some great conversations in the Collab Lab about how we have students self-assess and how we can get students to better understand their current skill set. You can read her previous blog post about cognitive bias and how people can incorrectly evaluate themselves when it comes to knowledge or skills.

Mark Heintz recently shared his approach with self-assessment and skills tracking using Schoology's many features. The goal is to have students assess themselves and allow them to compare their assessment to the teacher's assessment. This can help close the cognitive bias gap that students often have and it can give students a better understanding of what skills they might need more attention on, even if they didn't realize it.

I have this same goal when it comes to self-assessment of science skills, however I plan to implement this strategy on paper throughout the year. In biology, we typically have a lab for each unit that gives a chance to provide formative feedback, and we have lab practicals that act as a more formal summative assessment of lab skills that we have been developing. To help track progress, I drafted a skills tracker that I will have my students will use.

Students will assess themselves only on the skills that we have been developing with a rubric that helps guide them. This rubric will be attached to the lab that they turn in.

After a student submits their lab, I will use the same rubric with a different color pen so students can see their assessment next to mine along with any comments I may have left. This information will then be logged in their tracker. By the time a lab practical comes around, students will have feedback from previous labs and can help focus their energy and attention on certain skills that they maybe didn't realize they struggled with.

I'm hoping that these tools will guide students into a better understanding of their own learning and progress. Along with getting a better sense of where they stand, it should also help students target the specific skills that they need to continue to develop.

Sharing Rubric Design

Written by Kim Miklusak and Quinn Loch

Sometimes in the CollabLab we hang unit plans, lesson plans, or assignments up on the dry erase wall to request interdisciplinary feedback from our peers.  It's a great opportunity to provide a consistent message to our students and reflect on our own instruction.

We did this for our writing rubric in regular & honors biology and AP English.  At first glance, you might not think there’s a large overlap between the subjects; however, we realized quickly that the writing skills in one class can inform those in the other.

In English, I have recently moved to a 3-degree rubric: mastery, proficiency, and “not yet.”  The way I think about it, a 4-degree rubric still accepts borderline unsatisfactory work.  Instead, proficient shows that the student technically understands the skill and has demonstrated it in their work.  Mastery, however, moves to a more successful, argumentative, or stylistic demonstration of the skills.  I’ve also taken up the language I’ve seen online; instead of having a “revision” or “unsatisfactory” category, I’ve labeled it “Not Yet,” indicating that students can progress to the next level.  Yet I wasn’t sure of a straight 3-degree rubric because even AP considers “rising” and “falling” scores,” so I added two categories in each area, which also satisfies a points-driven report card.  Ideally those point values would go away and students would be able to focus on honing skills-driven writing.  

The feedback from the team involved wording and whether students were familiar with the language on the rubric and how well this aligned to the College Board's actual holistic scoring guide. 

In Biology, skills related to experimental design, execution, analysis, and reflection are a continued focus for the freshman biology team. Last summer the team designed a rubric to help provide feedback on lab assessments. Here is our original rubric. The goals of our rubric included the following...

1. Allow for focused student revision
2. Make grading easier, less subjective, and more consistent
3. Clearly communicate expectations to the student

Based on discussion and feedback with colleagues, I made some changes to condense the original rubric with aim to make it clearer. This involved having fewer descriptors and including "rising" and "falling" scores to provide some wiggle room when grading, making the score translate better into the grade book. Here is the second revision.

In biology, next steps within the process of skills assessment will be to gather student samples that can be used as models in the development of skills. These models can be used as guides or as a way to train students to further understand the expectations within the rubric.

More on common rubrics soon! Big conversations are happening!

SBG Skill Rubrics

Written by Quinn Loch

A couple of years ago, the science department decided on a list of  “ins-and-outs”, or skills that we wanted each student to develop before they left a specific year in school. A significant amount of these ins-and-outs related to the scientific method and experimental design – crucial skills that students needed to development in lab based classes.

Based on the common skills (hypothesis writing, identifying variables, data organization, procedure and conclusion writing) we came up with the lab matrix.

A snippet of the lab matrix.

This matrix provides a nice framework for students to organize their experiments coherently. It also provides an opportunity to drive instruction towards a specific skill development. For example, the focus for our freshman is hypothesis writing, graph construction, and identifying variables. When designing our labs, as a team we can decide how much scaffolding to provide based on the skills we want to focus on.

This Summer, myself and the biology team designed a rubric to help assess a students progress on specific parts of the experimental design.

Part of the experimental design SBG rubric. 

Instead of grading an entire lab with arbitrary amounts of points throughout, I can provide specific and targeted feedback on skills within experimental design. For example, on the pH lab that my freshman are working on, I will be providing feedback only on their variables, graph, and analysis

This rubric can also be used to help peer-assess as students become more familiar with it throughout the course of the year. The goal is to, by the end of the year, have student progress on all of these skills so they enter sophomore year with a solid foundation that they can build on.

Schoology Checklists as Formative Assessment

By Kim Miklusak

Schoology checklists are not new on this blog: you can read more on how different subjects have used them here!  This year, Matt Snow & I are using them to differentiate instruction and provide immediate feedback for students at the AP level.

The sequence goes like this: Students take a pre-reading quiz on vocabulary from the text, using context clues and roots to determine the meaning of 5 words.  They have 3 opportunities to take the quiz in order to get 100.  This will then unlock the text, which students will annotate and submit, receiving quick feedback on a 4-point scale.  They then take a 10-question comprehension quiz, participate in a discussion in which they write a sample thesis (again using a 4-point scale).  Finally they are able to unlock the AP writing/analysis assignment, which targets individual writing skills.  None of these steps is graded!  They are the foundational skills required to reach higher level understanding, so students receive self-, peer-, and teacher-provided formative feedback before moving on. 

This example is not set up as a checklist because we are modelling it for students first.
The next assignment will be a linear checklist feature.

We have multiple goals for this set-up: 1) we hope to catch each student where s/he needs the most support, 2) we hope to provide immediate feedback on targeted skills, and 3) we hope to allow students who do not need as much support the opportunity to push themselves farther than they may have been able to in a traditional classroom set-up.

In pre-1:1 years, I had students fill out an excel print out, noting what score they received on the 4-point scale for each writing skill [more information on that can be found here].  But now with Schoology, if I can mark assignments as "graded" even if they are formative, I am able to see a running tally of how each student scored on each individual writing skill.  Now not only do students get quicker, targeted feedback on individual skills, but they can see their own development over time, thus making revisions and conferencing more effective and efficient.

This screen shot is set to display our "writing" rubrics/skills.
I can also change the view to "reading" or grammar rubrics/skills

You'll see in the sample above that there are some things I need to work out: for example, how to label each assignment.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to work with these features for this upcoming year!

Using Mini-Rubrics to Provide Feedback in Schoology

By Kim Miklusak

I'm excited to use rubrics in Schoology this year.  As I mentioned on my other blog [shameless plug], I'm looking forward to working with mini-lessons on skill-specific assignments that target what each student needs to be successful in larger reading and writing assignments.

The tricky thing on Schoology is where and how to set up the rubrics.  There are many websites and videos for setting up and using them.  If you're looking to start small, I recommend setting up a few generic ones.  For example, I have one set up for "journals."  I'm not grading all of my discussions in our actual gradebook, but I do want to provide students with targeted feedback on the depth of their responses to encourage them to give enough detail to explain their point of view.

Discussion topic & rubric

Grading view of a discussion on web browser

Grading view of a discussion on Schoology app

There are pluses and minuses to grading on the app vs. website.  The website allows you to clearly see which students' submissions have been graded, but it takes 4 clicks to finally submit the rubric.  The app is much quicker, a really nice interface, but it's hard to see which submissions have been graded--not a problem if you just move down the list and check every student, though.

Grading assignments with the Schoology rubric is so smooth on both the app and website.  This will be so helpful in giving immediate and detailed feedback to students on specific skills.

Grading view of an assignment on Schoology app

Please share ways you have used skill-specific rubrics in the comments below.  And please stop down to the CollabLab if you are interested in setting these up or would like to discuss more ways to use them in class!

What does a letter grade mean?

By: Rachel Barry

Why do we give students grades?  What makes a "B" different from a "C"?  Who decided our grading scale and why?  Why do we have a deadline of a semester -- are students supposed to stop learning or not go back to learn the material prior to semester grades?  I love having discussions regarding these and so many more questions related to grading and assessment.  Sometimes I feel like a kid again always asking "Why?", and I embrace the idea of challenging the system to determine if our motives are for the correct reasons for our current population and demography as education evolves.

Data can be a great resource to drive instruction, if provided and used correctly.  As a math teacher interested in analyzing data, I do this daily, and some of the ways can be seen in this prior blog post.  Another great resource not mentioned in that post is looking at a student's prior grades in math courses.  The key to making this data component useful is to ensure the letter grade reflects student mastery of skills learned in the courses.  This means that behavior and participation cannot be included in the letter grade.  A student receiving an A or a B should tell me that they have demonstrated mastery of most or all standards covered in the curricula.  When participation or behavior is factored into the grade, this skews my understanding of what the students know or don't know.  When grades reflect knowledge of skills, communication of student learning is streamlined to the students, teachers, parents, and counselors.

Our curricula in the Math Department at EGHS is aligned to the ACT College Readiness Standards and split into four levels, based on Marzano's research.  Our district letter grades are awarded as such:

Because we are required to report grades in this way, we have created a grading rubric that aligns our leveled curricula to our districts' letter grades.

Because of these structures, we teachers can use letter grades to accurately determine our students' level of understanding of course standards.

Tech Tuesday: Updates to Schoology

Busy day down here in the Collab Lab!  We had a representative from Schoology come to observe teachers and discuss our uses of Schoology here at EG.  Thank you to Carmen Ruiz, Kristen Guth, Sandra Lee, and Steve Lesniak for hosting our guest! 

Here are some new features that will be coming with Schoology:

1. Course Section Management: This will be launched in one month or less Common preps can be merged so that updates/assignments/calendar can be pushed out to multiple sections.  All materials will be in one section and pushed out from there.

2. Portfolios: Students will have a "location" on Schoology to house multiple portfolios of work (essays, career information, etc.) Teachers/Counselors can also assign portfolios to students.

3. Shared Rubrics: As of Friday, teachers are now able to share rubrics within the grading feature.

4. Broadcasting (Big Blue Button): Host a live video seminar! This is currently only for the browser version.

5. Embed Resources Apps (YouTube, Khan Academy, GoogleDrive): In Assignments, you are now able to add direct resources from external apps. This would help alleviate students seeing inappropriate videos on the way to the designated YouTube video, for example, or direct students to a Khan Academy quiz, etc.


Here are some responses to some questions staff posed to the representative:

1.  Can you delete a submission if a student submits to the incorrect assignment? Currently there is not a way to do this.  The teacher will have to reference the student's most current revision.

2.  Students cannot view colored folders on the app.  Is this going to be an option?  The representative is bringing this back to Schoology.

3.  The speaking feature, rich-text, and inserting images do not work on the mobile version.  Is there a way to change this?  It appears that this is a mobile development issue and Chris is going to share this feedback with Schoology.  A work around is to use the browser version of Schoology on the iPad or on a desktop computer. This should be coming by the end of March. Stop in to the CollabLab if you'd like more information.

4. Can we archive updates for us to reference next year? Currently there is not a way to push updates to resources sections, but you can return to the archived version of the course. Another workaround is to create an update as attachment that could be saved as a resource.

5. It would be great to be able to comment on posts in a Media Album. Is this an option? This functionality is available on the browser version but not currently on the mobile app. They are bringing this feedback back as well.

Schoology is so responsive to teacher feedback--especially those using it "on the front line." Please contact the CollabLab if you have any questions, have examples to share, or would like to know more!