Grading

Hello, Kate Gilman , great question. I'll share what I just posted in another thread about final exams in case that's helpful. For context, I don't do traditional grading or exams; I give the students the course learning objectives at the start and they build a portfolio of learning evidence to share with me at the end of the term.

Forwarded post follows:

The learning objectives will vary depending on where I am (I tend to get antsy and move a lot, so often find myself teaching in new places). Right now I'm prepping for a quarter (not semester) of World History so I only have two objectives: one for historical reasoning skills and one for communicating arguments. The exact text on my syllabus follows:

"Course Learning Objectives:

The following learning objectives are the direct goals of this course; as such, your success in meeting these objectives is what you will be assessed on. After successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Use the following historical thinking skills to understand and evaluate historical narratives: contextualization, claim testing, sourcing, and causation;
2. Communicate historical arguments and conclusions in both written and oral formats."

I will say that I have to translate this into a number and letter to report at the end of the quarter, so I'm still working within a traditional grading school structure. So, for the purposes of what it looks like in the gradebook, there are two categories each weighted at 50% (one for each objective). Within each category will be any relevant divisions. As an example:

Historical Thinking Skills (Weighted 50%)

I'm big on the idea of the "single-point rubric", where each requirement/expectation is either pass/not-pass, which in the gradebook comes out as each being out of one point. So what I'll hand my kids is a short breakdown of each of my objectives, with your classic student-friendly "you will be able to" statements. As I've just started mid-year with the school and don't know the kids well yet, I haven't drafted the student-friendly language.

You can easily adapt this to fit the standards where you are. If students are required to have particular content knowledge, you can easily make categories for that with a minimum cutoff for what constitutes success. My favorite way to assess specific content is with the "identification question" that many of my undergrad professors loved to use. It looks like this:

Identification Questions

Directions: Pick at least three of the people, places, or events below. Describe your choice and explain the historical significance.

Options:

If you want to grade this more traditionally, my old method was out of five points for each. 2 points for describing who or what the selection was, 2 points for explaining the significance, and 1 point for doing it in a complete sentence. It also works with my single-point preference, as well.

Sorry for the wall of text here. If anyone has any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

 Kate Gilman the OER is very versatile allowing teachers to adapt grading practices to their specific school requirements. I like very much what Christopher Barber established as a grading criteria. As a Big History teacher in a private independent school, I align my assessments with my school’s expectations by embedding the objectives and skills Christopher outlines into the following categories: