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.

The Evolution of the Bio Curriculum

Written by Quinn Loch

The bio team, like most teams at EG, has been reworking its curriculum since I joined it three years ago. The largest changes have been with our learning targets and our grading practices. We are always trying to figure out both what we want students to master and what that mastery looks like.

We recently worked together during a pull-out day and examined our curriculum on a more global scale. Our collaboration led to great questions and conversations. For example, why do we have a "scientific method" unit? Doesn't this unit include the skills that should be developed throughout the year and not just in small doses? Isn't our course supposed to be a year long investigation into the process of science that is just driven by principles in biology? How often should we be assessing skills related to experimental design and analysis? What are these skills? How often do we have labs where we practice these skills and how are we providing feedback on them? Should large themes like change over time (evolution) be taught independently or weaved throughout the year as an important overarching reality of the world around us?

It was great to have this open dialogue and it really helps reset our priorities in a science classroom. We spent the beginning of the day agreeing to eliminate our independently taught scientific method unit. Instead, we would use our standards based rubric that we developed as a way to constantly assess on science skills throughout the year.

By using this rubric, students can track their progress throughout the year on important lab skills like procedure writing, graph making, and conclusion writing. This rubric format was modeled off of what Kim Miklusak and the English team use for writing.

On top of re-evaluating skills in the classroom, we re-worked our content for the year as well. This included re-writing learning targets so that they are more student friendly and re-structuring so that large themes like evolution, energy/matter flow, and interdependence are interwoven throughout the year.

What part of our brainstorm looked like in the Collab Lab.

The biggest challenge still, in my opinion, is how to connect progress and student mastery in the grade book. This is what I consider to be one of the biggest "growing pains" of our transition to standards based grading in biology. As a team, we are on the same page as to our targets and what mastery should look like, but are our students? How are we weighting formative and summative assessments in the grade book? How can we make a student's progress throughout the year clear and understandable? What's the best way to communicate this?

Finding solutions to these challenges is the next step and will help make reassessment more efficient and hopefully increase student ownership.