Heard the story of the teacher who said as the student waited for her test results: "You're a 70 percent so it doesn't matter what you got on this test"? How many of our students know they're labeled, stuck based on their average marks? A few are resilient, with enough home support emotionally and sense of self to be able to keep trying without being crippled by poor grades. Many consistently feel they are "stupid" and allow that thought to condition their self-perception.
Because quantifying student performance is here to stay, what can be done to dull the pain and minimize the negative impact of the almighty mark? Here are some methods and I am interested in your thoughts as well:
1. mastery learning, where the task isn't complete until it is the very best the student can do
2. formative assessment overrides summative evaluations: our marks recording should have a few results for each category and a lot of practice tasks that lead up to those few results.
3. stating the big idea for each cycle in terms that the learning goal has relevance to the students' experience. The big idea should answer the question "why should this be important to me?"
4. selecting content that has intrinsic beauty, appeal. For example, spend the time finding a text to read that illustrates the content of the language we have to teach as well as style, images, topics, point of view that is just fun to read!
5. designing tasks tare geared to the student's personal interests as well as displaying competency of the required skills
6. using rubrics that describe the criteria in language the students understands so that they have a clue as to how to improve without our "professional" interpretation
7. taking the time to write anecdotal, personalized comments on the report card
8. offering alternative testing procedures besides pen and paper, such as oral questions, multiple intelligence tasks, one on one student presentations instead of in front of the whole class, extra time, etc.
9. never using the fall back phrase "you have to know this for test". Instead, use phrases like "this is something you can use when....."
10. only testing what you have worked on AND PRACTICED with the students. Resist pulling an old test from the drawer for expediency, regardless of its current validity.
