Benchmarks: Phase 2

Trying to hone my benchmarks down to something comprehensive that I can use for assessment, here's what I've come up with so far for 5th grade. It would mean changing my thinking from how students do each week to how they do over a 5 month period, and it's certainly more rigid and less applicable to students' creativity, innovation, and effort. It seems to reduce their work to a set of skills--an idea at which I bristle--but it could still be useful, and it's what my administration is asking for.

The 2nd half of the document includes all of the criteria/understandings that go into each column, which would vary by grade, though most of the column headings could be the same for 3-5 and for k-2. 

The other big question is whether it's doable to assess 750 kids for 14 different elements that have so many sub-elements...

How do you assess students? Do you have a set of benchmarks you use?

Tiny boxes in action

Some examples of the current (flawed) assessment sheets in action--complete with embedded flickr notes if you click the images! (Each box represents one class period. Blurred areas are student names.)

Assessment: tiny notes in tiny boxes

Over the course of a school year, I see approximately 700 students in grades k-5 (once a week for either 1 or 2 terms).

My current system for assessment gauges how they do on the work I give them each week. If they do their job, they get a check; If they do it really well and help others, they get a check plus; if they do it beyond my wildest dreams, they get a star; if they sort of do it, but miss some point, they get a check minus; if they totally don't do it, they get an x--so it's sort of an assessment of the whole set of skills they use that day. I also use other codes like ot for off-task, fd for trouble following directions; h if they need extra help; hk for uses home keys, p for printed, a for absent, or b for major behavior problems. (I also keep separate sheets on the 4th grade bloggers, and 5th grade movie-makers, for whom there's a lot more information to track.)

Each mark or code goes in a box a little smaller than my pinkie nail--to accommodate a class of 32 students for 12 weeks on one sheet which also acts as a seating chart. It's hard to fit much information in a box that tiny, and I have more benchmarks than I have boxes (a possible sign that I am teaching too many things in the time I have, but I'm not prepared to cut back). I will sometimes make additional tiny notes that I need to work on a particular skill or concept with a particular kid, but not consistently or comprehensively, so the system has its flaws in terms of assessment driving teaching in a concrete way.

The only alternatives I see would be either:
a) Design a new sheet with fewer, bigger boxes for more notes per kid per week (which would also require that I devote more time to writing those notes each week, and consequently less time to teaching), or
b) Determine 5-10 concrete benchmarks per term for each grade and assess just for that (and effort and behavior) rather than for how they do generally on each particular day's tasks. This is closer to what other specialty teachers in my school do--most assess based on 4-5 benchmarks--but I have been resistant to condensing or reducing my goals that way. Given that my current system isn't giving me all the information I need, it may be time to reconsider and redesign the system.

Action items:
1) See if other techie teachers talk about this online
2) See if I can possibly boil down my goals to 5-10 benchmarks per grade per term
3) Take nap

Standards and Benchmarks

School culture is all about benchmarks and assessment these days, and I'm working on honing my own informal standards and benchmarks (which are really just skills and concepts) for technology use in k-5. (I like the updated NETS07 and profiles, and made my own to complement rather than replace those.)

(The assessment piece is simply that I watch students and talk to them and look at their work with an eye towards these standards, but I have to admit that I can only guess at which of my ~700 students understand the concept of a network or remember, weeks after the lesson, how to create a folder. More on assessment to come.)

They've developed somewhat organically, and will certainly evolve further.
Maybe as a result of your comments!

Testing and Technology, or, Neglect vs Scrutiny

I know many teachers who feel overwhelmed by the pressure they feel from their administrators to do more than they feel capable of doing, and anxious about the amount of scrutiny they are under. I have nearly the opposite situation: I get virtually no outside pressure, evaluation, or feedback. Fortunately, I set my own bar high and reflect on my practice and all that, but I'm sure I could do even more and do it better if I had another pair of eyes on me occasionally, noticing areas for improvement that I don't notice myself. Of course I would take neglect over scrutiny any day, but I'm always in favor of moderation.

Aside from the fact that I have a proven record and am trusted by my administrators, I suppose a major reason for the lack of attention paid to my curriculum and teaching is that my subject is not tested. I have often thought that the day they start standardized-testing my subject is the day I retire, but I don't expect that day to come until after the day that they impose more specific standards and ensure that every school has access to the same level of technology, which is a day I don't expect to come soon.

Even then, I expect the technology would change faster than the testing companies could keep up with it. I can imagine a test asking kids to identify the cpu or a floppy disk, for example. Other potential obstacles include the fact that so much that students do with technology is creative and untestable in any standardized way (or should be, anyway); and the fact that we want the use of technology to be integrated into other subjects--ideally, reading comprehension tests would include an online element, where students must navigate a website, glean information from it, evaluate it for reliability, and post a comment, for example.

Would identifying the usb port be on a separate test? What about changing page layout from portrait to landscape? Or centering a title? Emailing an attachment? Resizing an image? Creating a pdf? Staying safe online? Printing via keyboard shortcut, file menu, or toolbar? Embedding a video on your blog? I got an email this week from Atomic Learning advertising a "Tech Skills Assessment" based on ISTE NETS-S 2007 that can be completed in a single class period. I don't want to use it, but sure would be curious to see it.

What a fortuitous segue this will make to my next post: Benchmarks and Standards!