Category: Assessment

I really flipping hope that this works!

11/30/2018

Someone recently posted something on Facebook or Twitter about branching GoogleForms. You can make a form where the user's experience depends on what they select for a multiple-choice item. It's like those Choose Your Own Adventure books that many of us remember from childhood, and I guess the rest of you are millennials who apparently just eat avocado toast and killed the mayonnaise industry.

Anyway, the point is that I got inspired by that post with a mystery author. [EDIT: I have shortened this post a lot from the original draft because you probably don't really care about why I am focusing on discussion skills.]
Today I assigned a different kind of flipped-video lesson. Students will access a GoogleForm, enter their name, and answer this item:

Depending which item they select, one of 6 pages will display. I have an example below:

Students will actually do this twice, because I want them to work on 2 different skills.

I produced six different video lessons (one for each skills), but they are all 4 minutes or less. My wife crashed a couple dishes at the end of one video, but I decided not to re-record it. Four of them were recorded last Sunday evening, and I did the other 2 very early Monday morning (after shaving sooner than usual!) while wearing the same red shirt. My hair looks less-than-impressive, but whatever.

Let's see if this works out as well as I hoped! Comment below if you want more details about how I made the branched GoogleForm, or something else in this blog post.

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A close look at some flipping students' work

9/22/2018

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A commenter asked me to provide anonymous examples of student work from the first "real" flipped video of the year [Tuesday's blog post]. So here you go!
Background: students got a handout & online assignment, both of which had these 3 questions and the chart. The video is about 12 1/2 minutes long.

Below I have scanned two different students' quiz responses.
I considered both of these to be proficient. You will notice less detail by the student on the right, but she has a document disability and an IEP. Therefore I modified expectations so she could get full credit for less written output. Clearly she is on the right track, even though technically she only wrote one difference for #4.

The two quiz sheets below were written by the same boy.
On Tuesday, he was clear about Hobbes and Locke, but not so much about Rousseau. "he thought there should be consequences for people's actions" does not really fit that philosopher's notions of democracy. I checked his notes (which I made them submit with the finished quiz, but they could not see them during the quiz) and saw the same vague reference to consequences. His temporary score was 50%, and I prompted this student to rewatch the Rousseau section (last 4-5 minutes of the video) before the retake.
We had no school on Wednesday because of Yom Kippur, so the 2nd attempt could not happen until Thursday.
Usually I make students retry the entire quiz, but in this case I decided his Hobbes and Locke answers were so strong that I would reward him by only requiring #3 and #5. I think you can see that his Sept. 20 responses are much better! New score = 85%.

Hope this helps!

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My first "real" flipped assignment of the year

9/18/2018

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80% is a good score, right?

Wait, let me try starting this blog post again. Read the questions below. How well could you do with answering them? I know that I would not have known these names when I was in 8th grade ... but most of my students totally rocked today's quiz!!

By the numbers:

79 students took the quiz. 3 were absent today.
They had 3 nights to prepare. I assigned and posted it on Friday.
Only 1 student was completely unprepared. She had totally forgotten the assignment. Everyone else had at least some notes and understanding.
The video is 12 1/2 minutes long, including 1 minute of bloopers/out-takes at the end.
It took about 8-10 minutes for most students to take the quiz, and ~20 minutes for me to score them during a related class activity.
63 of those 79 gave satisfactory answers to all the questions. That's 80%!
The other 16 were missing some key details, but all of them gave at least 1 acceptable answer on the quiz. Their homework is to review the video and their notes again, and retake the same quiz during our next class period.

I have blogged previously about this "Need2Know" mastery assessment method.

I just checked the statistics for my first academic flipped-video lesson quiz last year. That was assigned 1 week later in the school year (Sept 25), and the success rate was lower: 63% on their first attempt. And I thought that topic was easier, too!

So I must be doing some things right this year so far....

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I think I figured out something big....

4/6/2018

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This revelation deserves a longer blog post, but I just need to gush a little bit and get this into verbal form. It's Friday night and I should probably be doing something (anything) else, but well here I am in the blog-o-verse.
I've gone back and forth for years about how students should show their understanding, and especially when: in the classroom or on their own time? Flipped philosophy is all about what is the best use of precious class time? and sometimes I think it's assessment, but sometimes I don't. Now that it's April and we have just a few weeks left together, I have been swinging toward the "I don't" side of the debate. QUIZZES ARE THE MOST BORING THING that we do in my classroom. Right now I do not feel like philosophizing about that issue. Here's what I am doing instead:

Instead of using Edpuzzle or a similar app (which could go defunct or hide behind a paywall at anytime), I am just using good ol' GoogleForms to collect answers from students about the video lesson. This works sooooo much better for me because I can easily navigate the spreadsheet of responses to check their work.
38 of 84 students attempted the optional "A" item; 26 did a proficient job the first time with the two main questions, and another 19 needed to revise their responses because of inaccurate/incomplete attempts the first time. ONLY TWO students underperformed and chose not to revise their first effort. (That's what senioritis looks like in eighth grade.)
I was quite pleased with their demonstration of learning, not least of all because it didn't require a 15-minute quiz!

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If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

1/19/2018

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Recently I realized that I'm probably the only teacher who does flipping quizzes like I do. Many colleagues use EdPuzzle or some similar online application to check students' understanding of the video lessons. I will address my feelings on that in a later blog post.
My current system has evolved over 5 years, but its DNA traces back to Bergmann & Sams' first book's chapter on accountability. You need to know what students know before they get to the high-order stuff. In a chemistry class, that means they need proficiency on lab safety before they can appropriately perform a science lab experiment; in a history class, they need proficient knowledge before they have the historical context/skill to successfully research, engage in simulation activities, read primary sources, etc.
Anyway, here is what I do:

First, I assign the video lesson

It's due 2 or 3 school days from now.
Students get a handout [below] that is basically identical to what I post in our LMS (Schoology) where the video link can be found. All the learning objectives are listed there along with note-taking advice, because that is our year-long academic skill.
They are called "Need2Know" tasks because these are the essential bits of historical information I want students to retain for future objectives, activities, and learning.
I expect them to take notes before the quiz, but I will not formally grade the notes because those could just be copied from a friend....

In the days before the quiz, I field students' questions by email, during study hall, before school, etc. At some point I also print copies of the quiz and place them inside each students' tabbed manila folder. If students need a modified version, then that's what I insert instead.... They will never see each other's quiz sheets, so my students don't even know their assessment was different!]

2-3 days later: They take the quiz

If students brought notes (95% of them do!), they immediately put them inside their desk and clear off the desktop.
When everyone has arrived, I let them retrieve the notes and 'get in the zone' for 30-45 seconds. Yes they are kind of cramming, but this rewards everybody for producing and bringing notes. (If I had let them do this immediately after arriving, then students would get a different amount of time with their notes, and I don't think that is fair.) Meanwhile, I insert the quiz folders into each student's desk -- they are always turned around 'backwards' so the desk opening faces the front of the classroom. :)
Within less than a minute, everybody has swapped their notes into the desk, removed the quiz sheet from the folder, and stood the folder upright as a Fortress of Solitude to hide their work from their neighbors. They are filling the boxes as well as they are able with 1 or 2-sentence responses. I believe the process of writing this information helps to cement the facts into their memory for future retrieval and understanding.
They already know the quiz questions because I listed them next to the video link and on the printed assignment sheet. The quiz sheet might be formatted with boxes and lines to organize their output, but there are no tricks & no mysteries in Mr. Swan's class.
I guess-timate the amount of time needed, and peek over the shoulders of the last 3 or 4 kids. You can tell who legitimately needs a bit more time to finish writing, and who just plain forgot. Within about 15 minutes we are done.

Same day: I check everybody's quiz while the students....

This is a new development in the 2017-18 school year. I used to be proud of myself for taking the quizzes home, scoring them, and returning those grades the next day. That's still too late!! Immediate feedback has huge benefits. If any students need to review & retake, they need to know before leaving my classroom today.
I do not pass back the quiz response sheets, for several reasons. 1) I don't feel the need to write comments on each student's quiz, so I can read through them more quickly! 2) It's one less sheet of paper to get lost, improperly filed, etc. [I keep them for my own records until the end of the grading term.] 3) Students might notice the multiple versions, which can lead to uncomfortable & unfair conversations / disclosures. 4) On a similar theme, I can differentiate for the length/depth of responses, without students seeing two different sheets and asking "Why didn't I get credit for the same answer this kid wrote?" The fact is that his 3-sentence answer might be the best he ever wrote, but for her it would be an underachievement. I teach a wide range of students, so the bar for proficiency must be adjusted sometimes. This assessment system lets me do so!
So, I'm at my desk for about 20 minutes*, skimming through all the quiz sheets and occasionally calling up a student to decipher their own handwriting....
MEANWHILE, students spend class time to engage in the new material in some independent way: make a short comic strip to summarize a sub-topic, or produce a propaganda poster that might have appeared at the time, etc. These are low-stakes assignments that will not grade. If there were 1 or 2 students who weren't ready for today's quiz, then instead they will work on the video lesson during class time -- in the library, with one of the two wifi-enabled tablets in my room, or perhaps on their own cell phone.

* If you feel that this makes me evil, disengaged, lazy, or whatever, then I am sorry but we can still be friends, right?.

How I handle retakes:

They only need to re-try the objective(s) they missed on the first attempt.
On this example quiz, let's say that a student wrote only two items for question #1, wrote rock-solid answers about Bunker Hill and the Olive Branch Petition, but had an unclear response about Common Sense: "It was published by Thomas Paine in 1776" is accurate but does not show the understanding I'm looking for....
After I read his quiz sheet, I turned to his assignment sheet and notes (which he'd placed into the folder after the quiz) and I circled those learning objectives: #1 and #5.
He leaves my classroom with a clear assignment: review the video and/or your notes about Loyalists and Common Sense.
At the next possible opportunity (a student-centered activity tomorrow, a study hall period, a few minutes before homeroom....), he will retry those answers without access to notes. Usually I give a new copy of the quiz sheet, for him to write in a corner of the room; sometimes for convenience I will quiz the student orally.
RARELY, a student is still unprepared with incomplete or inaccurate responses. Now it's time for a one-to-one conversation about study skills and/or the academic topic.
USUALLY the retake ends with a successful result, and verbal encouragement from me.

How does the grading work for these assessments?

You can see the headlines below. I am not playing a numbers game. This is a mastery assessment so I expect 100% proficiency. I'm not going to count some questions more than others, or calculate partial credit for getting 1 out of 2 results of Bunker Hill.
Also, I need a super-quick scoring system to return everyone's quiz within 20 minutes!
These Need2Know quizzes are the smallest element of the term grade: 3% or 4% per quiz (a total of ~25-30%).
A few students complain about the 50% score for just 1 question wrong .... I respond "Yes, you only have 1 item to fix and then it's a B grade"
Any student who bombed the quiz at first can also get an 85%, but he must work a lot harder to get there than the child with only 1 misunderstanding. That seems fair to me.
On the "Rising Tensions Part 4" quiz example I used earlier:

65 students aced it on quiz day [100%]
14 students had to fix at least 1 question [85%]
3 students needed a second retake attempt [85%]
2 (out of 84) never did that retake, so their 50% score was stuck in the gradebook.

I don't feel good about those 50% scores, but since that quiz (November 6th) I have worked more closely with both students and they are significantly improving.

Sooooooo whaddya think? You made it this far in the blog post, so you must still be interested. Like I said at the start, this system has evolved over time and probably will again... maybe with your input!

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I really flipping hope that this works!

A close look at some flipping students' work

My first "real" flipped assignment of the year

I think I figured out something big....

If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

Who is this flipping guy?!

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