September 25th 2014: Why Did I Fail My Assignment?

         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.