Become a more confident language teacher.
As language teachers begin to consider implementing Standards Based Grading, a question quickly arises: what standards should I be grading? Typically, Standards Based Grading in language classes means basing student grades on their interpretive, presentational, and possibly interpersonal performance on summative assessments. Students complete interpretive reading and listening tasks and presentational writing and/or speaking tasks,…
Read More
How do you grade reading comprehension? This has been a hard question for me to respond to for quite a few years now. I have felt somewhat torn about what kind of reading skills I have wanted to assess in order to fit my vision for a proficiency oriented course. Finally, I have a plan,…
Read More
Learning the difference between Formative and Summative Assessment has been an important part in my journey to rethinking how to assess and grade students. What is Formative Assessment? Formative Assessment is assessment that happens during a learning period. Formative assessments are like progress checks, and they are intended for the teacher to gather information about…
Read More
This is my third year using Standards Based Assessment, and I’m hooked. WHY I LOVE STANDARDS BASED ASSESSMENT Reason #1: My students have a clear, measurable goal for my class, instead of a GPA goal. Throughout my entire school career, my goal was to earn a 100. An A. A 4.0. Or higher, if I was…
Read More
I administer four kinds of summative assessments to my students: Reading comprehension assessments Listening comprehension assessments Presentational writing assessments Presentational speaking assessments (Read here about why I don’t administer summative Interpersonal assessments.) Each quarter, I try to get three or four grades in the book for each of the first three assessment categories. I adopted…
Read More
Standards-based assessment means assessing students’ performance in reference to predetermined standards, goals, or outcomes for the course. In language classes, teachers will typically set targets for students to reach in the different communicative skills: interpretive reading, interpretive listening, presentational speaking, presentational writing, and possibly interpersonal speaking. I began using Standards Based Assessment, or at least…
Read More
For my student’s writing assessment today, I allowed them to “choose their target”. I gave them the expectation for what Advanced, Proficient, and Developing skill level would look like and let them choose how to proceed. Proficiency-based Performance Assessment All assessments in my classes are Performance assessments that are proficiency-based. Remember that Proficiency is what…
Read More
How did you decide how to structure your gradebook? Without exception, in every language class that I took from middle school through college, the gradebook looked very similar. Every graded assignment in the course was placed into a category that matched the assignment type: quizzes, tests, homework, classwork, participation, projects, etc. The weight of each category varied–sometimes,…
Read More
Instead of letter grades, my students receive an abbreviation of one of the following terms on their assignments. Some are entered in the gradebook (summative), but others are not (formative). Formative assessments are given during the learning process and are a way for me and my students to see how they are progressing. Summative assessments…
Read More
