Today
I got an assignment back and I was not pleased with my mark. It was a simple
homework assignment that should have been an easy 10/10. When handing the assignments back the prof
prepared the class for the not-so-great marks by saying he expects a lot more
from us, hopefully next time there will be an improvement and these assignments
should be easy marks for us. The issue was that a lot of my classmates,
including myself, did try hard on this assignment. It was on soccer terms so I
did my best to answer with what I learned from lecture and lab that week to fill
in the provided chart. The things I could not answer I referred to the Internet
and a phone call to my boyfriend, who had been playing soccer his whole life. I
feel as though I went above and beyond in providing explanations and examples
of the situations required. After I got my mark back I spoke with other
students who also weren’t happy with their marks. Students who were soccer
players growing up and who fully understood what the terminology meant but they
still barley received a passing grade.
What happened here? Was it possible
that all of us students in the class just did not try hard enough? Or perhaps
the teacher did not provide clear guidelines and express his expectations for
the assignment. I believe I did go above and beyond the expectations. I
followed the guidelines to completing the assignment and somehow I still got an
unsatisfying grade. To make matters
worse, when I did read over the assignment there was not any comments that
could possibly help me in my future to improve my homework assignments in this
class. I think that this was not a valid assessment task because the low marks
should mean that us students did not understand the material being taught. I am
positive all students left with a strong understanding of what was taught
because we all demonstrated a strong understanding of the concepts physically
when we were in the lab.
After
reading chapter three from Interweaving Curriculum and Classroom Assessment: Engaging the 21st century learner by Susan Drake, Joanne Reid and Wendy Kolohon, a couple things stood out to me as things that could have
improved the way the homework assignment was graded. First of all, I believe we
needed to be provided with more specific guidelines or preferably a rubric. A
rubric would have given us students a clear guideline to what was expected in
the assignment, which aspects to focus on or which parts were significant and
most importantly, tell the students how they could be successful in the
assignment. I believe the rubric should have been discussed or created in
cohesion with the students.
Also, John Hattie made a good point, he
said feedback was something teachers claim to give to students all the time but
that teachers simply give the students information on behavioral and social
aspects of their observations. Hattie believes that feedback should be from the
student to the teacher, meaning the teacher has to become aware of where the
student is in the classroom by observing and trying to gauge how the student is
learning. This changes the role to the student showing the teacher where they
are and the teacher taking this information to adjust their classroom to ensure
all students can be on the same page. This relates to my soccer homework assignment
because the teacher assessed his students according to guidelines in his head. This
feedback to the students is sending the message that he was not impressed with
our written work. The teacher should
have taken the poor homework scores and noted that perhaps the students did not
understand the material as he had hoped and that the teacher himself should be
changing his efforts moving forward. The teacher should have observed the great
performance physically in the lab and compared it to the poor assignment scores
and the teacher would have realized that there was a glitch in homework
assessment. Also, the teacher is providing feedback on the students work and
the students are expected to take this feedback and catch up to the
expectation. With the students having no idea what the expectation is, the
students are left frustrated and may not try in the future.
I found an interesting video on YouTube
that discussed how teachers should be teaching. One point from the video that
really stood out to me was the emphasis they put on teachers to make their
students confident. Students should gain confidence in what they have learned
and in their abilities. It makes sense to teach this because if students are
confident in what they learn they will be more willing to use the tools they
learn outside the classroom. Another factor in giving students confidence is
the student must experience success and be taught that they are capable of
achieving success in their work. Going back to my soccer assignment I know many
students are now discouraged from their low grade. We don't know where we can
improve because there wasn't helpful feedback provided. We were not given success
criteria or any guideline that could have shown us what we needed to do to be
successful. At this point us students feel anything but confident because we
are lost in terms of how to be successful.
I think that this prof should rethink
how assessment tasks are done and other methods of assessments could be used.
The prof could assess the class by observations of our performance in lab and
question and answers in the lab. It is clear that the students physically know
what they need to know but on paper the students fell short of the prof's
expectations.
