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It's a website that is asking students to create their own questions because it has a powerful impact on learning and there are given 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions.

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Asking students to create their own questions has a powerful impact on learning. Plus, 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions.

You've seen a penny hundreds, if not thousands, of times. But can you draw one from memory?

In a famous decades-old study, adults were asked to draw a U.S. penny without any aids. Although they were confident that they knew what a penny looked like, their performance on the test was "remarkably poor." And when shown pennies with slightly different characteristics, such as misplaced text or with Lincoln's portrait facing the wrong direction, few were able to identify the inaccuracies.

It's a maddening quirk of human memory: We're often convinced that we know something, but upon closer examination, it's just an illusion. And this, of course, is no surprise to teachers, who often encounter students who overestimate how well they know a topic.

Understanding how people learn and reliably commit things to memory is what prompted psychology professor Mirjam Ebersbach and her colleagues at the University of Kassel to study how students prepare for an exam, and what strategies yielded the optimal improvements in student learning.

In a recent study, Ebersbach and her research team randomly assigned 82 university students to one of three groups. In the restudy group, students simply revisited and restudied the material from a lesson in their psychology course. In the testing group, students studied the material and then took a short 10-question quiz. In the last group, students studied the same material and then created their own probing questions.

One week later, all of the students took a test on the material. Students in the restudy group scored an average of 42 percent on the test, while students in the testing and generating questions groups both scored 56 percent-an improvement of 14 percentage points, or the equivalent of a full letter grade.

"Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content," Ebersbach told Edutopia. "One has to reflect what one has learned and how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge."

Stronger Memory Traces

Why is generating questions so effective? Past studies reveal that learning strategies that require additional cognitive effort- retrieval practice, elaboration, concept mapping, or drawing, for example-encourage students to process the material more deeply and consider it in new contexts, generating additional memory traces that aid retention.

Yet the most commonly used strategies are also the least effective. In the study, students filled out a survey identifying the learning strategies they typically used when studying for exams. By far, they said that taking notes and restudying were their go-to strategies-a surprisingly common finding that's been regularly reported in the research. Less than half as many mentioned practice tests, and only one student among 82 mentioned generating questions.

Passive strategies such as rereading or highlighting passages are "superficial" and may even impair long‐term retention, Ebersbach explained. "This superficial learning is promoted by the illusion of knowledge, which means that learners often have the impression after the reading of a text, for instance, that they got the messages. However, if they are asked questions related to the text (or are asked to generate questions relating to the text), they fail because they lack a deeper understanding," she told Edutopia.

That lasting "impression" of success makes it hard to convince people that rereading and underlining are, in fact, suboptimal approaches. They register the minor benefits as major improvements and hold fast to the strategies, even when the research reveals that we're wrong.

Getting Students to Generate Productive Questions in Class

While generating questions is an effective study strategy, it also can be adapted into a classroom activity, whether online or in person.

Here are five ideas to incorporate student-generated questions into your classroom.

Teach students how to ask good questions: At first, it can be difficult for students to generate their own questions, and many will start with simple yes/no or factual prompts. To encourage better questions, ask students to think about and focus on some of the tougher or more important concepts they encountered in the lesson, and then have them propose questions that start with "explain" or that use "how" and "why" framing. Direct your students to road-test their questions by answering them themselves: Do the questions lead to longer, more substantive answers, or can they be answered with a simple "yes" or "no"?

A bonus: Students who propose questions and then answer them to test their soundness are also relearning the materials more deeply themselves. Very sneaky.

Play Jeopardy!: Research shows that active learning strategies, such as using the format of the popular game show Jeopardy! to review concepts, not only boosts student engagement but also increases academic performance. You can involve students by asking them to write the questions themselves.

To create the game, specialized software isn't even necessary: The researchers in the study used the wiki feature in the class's learning management system to create a 6x5 table with each cell containing a question. Similarly, you can use PowerPoint or Google Slides to create the Jeopardy! game grid. Here's a handy template.

Have students create their own test and quiz questions: Is it cheating if students write the questions to the exam? In a 2014 study, researchers evaluated a strategy whereby students not only developed the learning materials for the class but also wrote a significant part of the exams. The result? A 10 percentage point increase in the final grade, attributed largely to an increase in student engagement and motivation. Popular tools like Kahoot and Quizlet are fun and convenient ways to create quizzes, no matter if your classroom is in person, hybrid, or virtual.

Improve class-wide discussions: In a 2018 study, students were asked to write questions based on Bloom's taxonomy; questions ranged from lower-order true/false and multiple-choice questions to challenging questions that required analysis and synthesis. The students not only enjoyed the exercise-many called it a "rewarding experience"-but also scored 7 percentage points higher on the final exam, compared with their peers in other classes.

Use some class time to identify the characteristics of higher-order questions; then collect student questions and discuss some of the more challenging ones as a group.

Get at 'driving questions': For Andrew Miller, a former high school teacher and current administrator at an international pre-K-12 school, taking a page out of project-based learning and asking students to create driving questions -such as "Why do leaves have different shapes?"-not only enhances their understanding of the topic but also "creates interest and a feeling of challenge" that can draw in even the most reluctant students.

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Using Student-Generated Questions to Promote Deeper Thinking

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Asking students to create their own questions has a powerful impact on learning. Plus, 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions.

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Using Student-Generated Questions to Promote Deeper Thinking

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Using Student-Generated Questions to Promote Deeper Thinking

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Generating questions helps students to understand the learning material better, because they need to think deeper.
"We’re often convinced that we know something, but upon closer examination, it’s just an illusion."
-> use it in a classroom activity
-> use "explain, why, how" for the questions
https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-student-generated-questions-promote-deeper-thinking

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I felt very called out while reading this article, as I am a huge procrastinator myself but never really thought about the reasons behind it. For me it is actually a combination of all the reasons but I still feel that there is a fair share of lazyness involved as well, at least for me. Also I feel like it is a very strong habit that I've formed over a long time which maybe could've been prevented if I learned about it in school - which then applies to how this article could be useful in Swiss Schools.

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Fast and Efficient Ways to Provide Feedback

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Fast and Efficient Ways to Provide Feedback

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This article focuses on a very fast way of giving productive feedback. This so-called "flash-feedback" helps the teacher to not get buried by the amount of giving constructive individual feedback.
This particular goal can be reached by giving only 2-3 small feedback chunks per student.

The article mentions further 2 key-points:

> Targeted response
If a student has big problems with commas, instead of mark all hundreds of commas in an essay. The teacher should give the student a new exercise which targets the correct use of commas.
> Micro-conferences
Make small 1-2 minute conferences with each child to talk about their progress instead of making longer conferences.

These two points can easily be applied to Swiss primary teachers.

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Three simple strategies to provide feedback that save time and improve student performance.

Johnson, author of the book Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster-Without Burning Out, teaches writing to more than 150 students, so he calculates that "responding to one essay or project or test in ten minutes-a blisteringly fast speed based on the teachers I've talked to-will take over 25 hours." As a new teacher, he found he was spending all his free time grading, so he began to research and develop ways to offer quick but meaningful feedback.

In a method he calls flash feedback, only a few clear learning objectives are addressed at one time-any more than that, he argues, is not only time-consuming for the teacher but also overwhelming for the student. Identify specific, actionable goals for individual lessons, he insists, and couple the work with similarly tailored feedback.

Johnson also says that if grading is to be sustainable and constructive, students should shoulder more of the burden, evaluating their own work products before teachers do and reflecting on their own efforts more frequently. When students are asked to persist to find answers and new strategies to solve difficult problems, comprehension and retention are improved.

Finally, flash feedback should include a system for efficiency and a back-up plan for the times when individual feedback takes longer than expected-an approach he calls a "spillover plan."

There are three strategies that Johnson returns to "again and again":

1. Targeted response: Johnson advises that educators tailor an assignment and its assessment to a single learning objective. For example, Johnson's students struggled with commas. He abandoned the practice of circling every erroneous comma in their papers and instead devised an assignment focused solely on the issue. Students write a "comma paper" on any topic they choose. The only requirement is that they include four examples of the correct comma usage taught in class. He uses the electronic "find" function to locate their commas and uses pre-populated template responses to offer feedback-one that congratulates them if they correctly placed the commas and one that tells them the paper has errors and to receive credit for the assignment, they need to go back and fix them. This condensed assignment yields big results, Johnson says: "The best part is that the deep focus on commas leads to more student growth in one short paper than a year of circling and correcting commas ever did!"

2. Micro-conferences: While one-on-one meetings are "one of the most celebrated pedagogical tools," they can take a large portion of classroom time when a teacher has many students. Johnson advocates the use of a micro-conference: a 1-2 minute session focused on a specific learning goal. Students assess their own work first. After giving themselves a score and writing several sentences about their work, students speak with the teacher about their assessment. "My role in this is mainly that of the gadfly-asking questions and helping the student to orient in the right direction," Johnson says. These quick check-ins provide a way to offer feedback without consuming large chunks of instructional time.

3. Wise Interventions: In a process developed by psychologists at Stanford University and the University of Virginia, rapid positive change occurs when teachers intervene at "the exact moments that fuel and perpetuate negative student beliefs/mindsets/behaviors." By framing feedback with encouragement and reiterating the teacher's confidence in the student's abilities, one famous study found, that negative narrative is disrupted and students are far more motivated to revise their work. Similarly, research out of Harvard concluded that little gestures that create a sense of relationship with students can boost confidence. Participants in that study were 422 percent more likely to loan someone their phone if the person prefaced the request with the simple, conversational sentence, "I'm so sorry about the rain." In the same way, Johnson says, sharing a short personalized statement on a student's paper can make her more receptive to the feedback and more willing to make adjustments to her work.

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Fast and Efficient Ways to Provide Feedback

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Three simple strategies to provide feedback that save time and improve student performance.

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I chose this article because I can really relate to it. It addresses the most common reasons for procrastination, which are: fear of failure and criticism, confusion and unclarity, prevention and need for pleasurable experiences. As I read the article, I asked myself why some tasks are easy and why others are very hard for me to complete. And yes, if I feel overwhelmed or like I won’t be able to do the task I usually have a harder time to even get started. Although I have made the experience that the most difficult part is usually to get started in the first place. When your are on it, it get’s easier step by step.I think this is important to consider with students as well. Procrastination itself is not the problem, but we need to figure out where the actual problem and blockage lies. And then as teachers it is our job to help the students to overcome these obstacles.

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I chose this article because I can really relate to it. It addresses the most common reasons for procrastination, which are: fear of failure and criticism, confusion and unclarity, prevention and need for pleasurable experiences. As I read the article, I asked myself why some tasks are easy and why others are very hard for me to complete. And yes, if I feel overwhelmed or like I won’t be able to do the task I usually have a harder time to even get started. Although I have made the experience that the most difficult part is usually to get started in the first place. When your are on it, it get’s easier step by step.I think this is important to consider with students as well. Procrastination itself is not the problem, but we need to figure out where the actual problem and blockage lies. And then as teachers it is our job to help the students to overcome these obstacles.

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Psychologists have uncovered reasons why students put off important work. But there are a few simple things teachers can do to keep students on track.

Michael Morgenstern / theiSpot

Leonardo da Vinci spent nearly 16 years painting the Mona Lisa-and never completed it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." And Frank Lloyd Wright spent a mere two hours designing Fallingwater -after delaying for nine months.

"Procrastination is extremely prevalent," Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, noted in a 2007 study. "Estimates indicate that 80 to 95 percent of college students engage in procrastination, approximately 75 percent consider themselves procrastinators, and almost 50 percent procrastinate consistently and problematically."

If you're a middle or high school teacher, it's likely that you have procrastinators in your class-students who consistently wait until the last minute to turn in their assignments, or put off studying until the night before a test. This delaying has a cost: A 2015 study found that the longer business school students waited to turn in an assignment, the worse their grades were, with last-minute hand-ins costing them five percentage points on average, or half a grade. And a 2015 meta-analysis confirmed this result, finding that procrastination was associated with lower grades across 33 studies that included over 38,000 students (most of whom were in college). Even worse, medical research has linked procrastination to higher levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and fatigue.

It's a common perception that students who procrastinate do so because they don't care about the assignment-and that's usually wrong, argued Devon Price, a social psychology professor at Loyola University, in 2018. More often than not, the underlying reasons for procrastination fall under two categories: fear of failure or confusion about the first steps of an assignment.

"Procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well," Price explained. Procrastinators can stare at a screen or book for hours, paralyzed by fear. At that point, the best solution is to take a short break and engage in a relaxing activity.

Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University and leading expert on procrastination, has performed several studies on why students put off important work. In a groundbreaking 1989 study, Ferrari found that college students often procrastinated because of indecision: They spent too much time worrying about whether they were doing an assignment correctly, prolonging the time they spent on even simple tasks. For these students, procrastination was a coping mechanism to avoid stressful experiences.

"It is very helpful and useful to gather information to make an informed decision, but when one simply continues to gather beyond the point of adequate resources, then they are being indecisive and the waiting is counterproductive," Ferrari told an interviewer in 2010.

In a follow-up study, Ferrari found another reason why some students procrastinate: fear of criticism. He discovered that many college students engaged in self-sabotage because they could then blame low grades on the deadlines rather than their own abilities. These students preferred to "choose situations in which their public image would not be damaged by poor performance." Once again, procrastination was a coping mechanism-in this case, to protect the students' self-esteem and perceptions of their identity.

Ferrari discovered yet another, very different, motive for procrastination in a 1992 study. Some college students delayed starting on an assignment because they enjoyed the perceived thrill of working against a deadline. Putting assignments off until the last minute was a way of "adding drama to life," giving these students a rush of adrenaline.

Indecisiveness, avoidance, and thrill-seeking are thus more likely explanations for procrastination than laziness or lack of motivation. So what can teachers do? Here are some suggestions.

5 Ways to Encourage Students Not to Procrastinate

1. Spread deadlines out. Researchers have investigated the impact of three types of deadlines for a series of tasks: evenly spaced, self-imposed, or a single, final deadline. In the first experiment, students were assigned three papers and were asked to either turn one in at the end of each month, choose their own deadlines, or submit all three papers by the end of the course. In the second experiment, students were given a task-to proofread three passages-and submitted their assignments weekly, at their own self-chosen pace, or all at once. In both experiments, evenly spaced deadlines not only yielded better student work but also decreased the chances that students would miss their deadlines.

The takeaway for teachers? Instead of giving students a big project with a single deadline, break it into smaller tasks with evenly spaced out deadlines. Ask for multiple drafts of a paper, for example. In a project-based learning unit, have students present their progress at specified checkpoints. This can be especially helpful for students who are paralyzed by large projects-by making each part more manageable, you can reduce the anxiety associated with intimidating deadlines.

2. Provide supportive feedback. Students with low self-esteem may be reluctant to put forth their best work if they're worried about criticism or afraid of failing. Avoid giving highly critical or negative feedback, which may have the unintended consequence of making students feel nervous or self-conscious. Students may also respond poorly to feedback that feels controlling, so avoid being too explicit about what needs to be corrected. Finally, be cautious about giving feedback to students in front of their peers-they may feel uncomfortable and become disengaged.

3. Teach time management and study skills. A 2017 study found that many students lack the metacognitive skills they need to be able to study effectively, such as the ability to schedule ample time for studying or knowing when to ask for help. Many study participants were surprised when their initial scores were lower than they had expected-they did not have an accurate sense of how well prepared they were. They were then encouraged to plan ahead for an upcoming test, and were shown examples of how they could prepare. The results were significant: Compared to their peers, the students who participated in the metacognitive activities scored a third of a letter grade higher, on average.

4. Be mindful of workload. According to a 2015 study, the likelihood that students will turn in late work increases when deadlines for different projects coincide-something that can easily happen in middle and high school, when students have multiple teachers. Students also experience higher stress levels if they can't manage multiple assignments that are due at the same time. Consider coordinating with other teachers to spread out major deadlines.

And when students face adversity that impacts their ability to finish assignments on time, such as taking care of a family member or having to financially support their family, being flexible about deadlines can help them stay on track.

5. Have clear instructions and examples. Students are more likely to put off a project if they don't understand how to start. Ensure that all students know your expectations and the requirements of the assignment-it's best to put instructions in writing so that students can refer to them as needed. You can also use exemplars, such as examples of past student work, to help them better understand what the assignment is.

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate-and How to Help Them Stop

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Psychologists have uncovered reasons why students put off important work. But there are a few simple things teachers can do to keep students on track. Michael Morgenstern / theiSpot Leonardo da Vinci spent nearly 16 years painting the Mona Lisa-and never completed it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote, "I love deadlines.

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate—and How to Help Them Stop

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate—and How to Help Them Stop

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According to this article the reasons for procrastinating (in case of college students) are their fear of failure and criticism, confusion about the first steps of an assignement, avoidance and also thrill-seeking, which I can all relate to.

This is relevant for Swiss primary teachers as not only college students procrastinate, kids do that too and in order to help them overcome procrastination teachers should be aware of where that might be coming from. The article shows 5 ways to do so, for ex. give supportive feedback.

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Psychologists have uncovered reasons why students put off important work. But there are a few simple things teachers can do to keep students on track.

Michael Morgenstern / theiSpot

Leonardo da Vinci spent nearly 16 years painting the Mona Lisa-and never completed it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." And Frank Lloyd Wright spent a mere two hours designing Fallingwater -after delaying for nine months.

"Procrastination is extremely prevalent," Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, noted in a 2007 study. "Estimates indicate that 80 to 95 percent of college students engage in procrastination, approximately 75 percent consider themselves procrastinators, and almost 50 percent procrastinate consistently and problematically."

If you're a middle or high school teacher, it's likely that you have procrastinators in your class-students who consistently wait until the last minute to turn in their assignments, or put off studying until the night before a test. This delaying has a cost: A 2015 study found that the longer business school students waited to turn in an assignment, the worse their grades were, with last-minute hand-ins costing them five percentage points on average, or half a grade. And a 2015 meta-analysis confirmed this result, finding that procrastination was associated with lower grades across 33 studies that included over 38,000 students (most of whom were in college). Even worse, medical research has linked procrastination to higher levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and fatigue.

It's a common perception that students who procrastinate do so because they don't care about the assignment-and that's usually wrong, argued Devon Price, a social psychology professor at Loyola University, in 2018. More often than not, the underlying reasons for procrastination fall under two categories: fear of failure or confusion about the first steps of an assignment.

"Procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well," Price explained. Procrastinators can stare at a screen or book for hours, paralyzed by fear. At that point, the best solution is to take a short break and engage in a relaxing activity.

Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University and leading expert on procrastination, has performed several studies on why students put off important work. In a groundbreaking 1989 study, Ferrari found that college students often procrastinated because of indecision: They spent too much time worrying about whether they were doing an assignment correctly, prolonging the time they spent on even simple tasks. For these students, procrastination was a coping mechanism to avoid stressful experiences.

"It is very helpful and useful to gather information to make an informed decision, but when one simply continues to gather beyond the point of adequate resources, then they are being indecisive and the waiting is counterproductive," Ferrari told an interviewer in 2010.

In a follow-up study, Ferrari found another reason why some students procrastinate: fear of criticism. He discovered that many college students engaged in self-sabotage because they could then blame low grades on the deadlines rather than their own abilities. These students preferred to "choose situations in which their public image would not be damaged by poor performance." Once again, procrastination was a coping mechanism-in this case, to protect the students' self-esteem and perceptions of their identity.

Ferrari discovered yet another, very different, motive for procrastination in a 1992 study. Some college students delayed starting on an assignment because they enjoyed the perceived thrill of working against a deadline. Putting assignments off until the last minute was a way of "adding drama to life," giving these students a rush of adrenaline.

Indecisiveness, avoidance, and thrill-seeking are thus more likely explanations for procrastination than laziness or lack of motivation. So what can teachers do? Here are some suggestions.

5 Ways to Encourage Students Not to Procrastinate

1. Spread deadlines out. Researchers have investigated the impact of three types of deadlines for a series of tasks: evenly spaced, self-imposed, or a single, final deadline. In the first experiment, students were assigned three papers and were asked to either turn one in at the end of each month, choose their own deadlines, or submit all three papers by the end of the course. In the second experiment, students were given a task-to proofread three passages-and submitted their assignments weekly, at their own self-chosen pace, or all at once. In both experiments, evenly spaced deadlines not only yielded better student work but also decreased the chances that students would miss their deadlines.

The takeaway for teachers? Instead of giving students a big project with a single deadline, break it into smaller tasks with evenly spaced out deadlines. Ask for multiple drafts of a paper, for example. In a project-based learning unit, have students present their progress at specified checkpoints. This can be especially helpful for students who are paralyzed by large projects-by making each part more manageable, you can reduce the anxiety associated with intimidating deadlines.

2. Provide supportive feedback. Students with low self-esteem may be reluctant to put forth their best work if they're worried about criticism or afraid of failing. Avoid giving highly critical or negative feedback, which may have the unintended consequence of making students feel nervous or self-conscious. Students may also respond poorly to feedback that feels controlling, so avoid being too explicit about what needs to be corrected. Finally, be cautious about giving feedback to students in front of their peers-they may feel uncomfortable and become disengaged.

3. Teach time management and study skills. A 2017 study found that many students lack the metacognitive skills they need to be able to study effectively, such as the ability to schedule ample time for studying or knowing when to ask for help. Many study participants were surprised when their initial scores were lower than they had expected-they did not have an accurate sense of how well prepared they were. They were then encouraged to plan ahead for an upcoming test, and were shown examples of how they could prepare. The results were significant: Compared to their peers, the students who participated in the metacognitive activities scored a third of a letter grade higher, on average.

4. Be mindful of workload. According to a 2015 study, the likelihood that students will turn in late work increases when deadlines for different projects coincide-something that can easily happen in middle and high school, when students have multiple teachers. Students also experience higher stress levels if they can't manage multiple assignments that are due at the same time. Consider coordinating with other teachers to spread out major deadlines.

And when students face adversity that impacts their ability to finish assignments on time, such as taking care of a family member or having to financially support their family, being flexible about deadlines can help them stay on track.

5. Have clear instructions and examples. Students are more likely to put off a project if they don't understand how to start. Ensure that all students know your expectations and the requirements of the assignment-it's best to put instructions in writing so that students can refer to them as needed. You can also use exemplars, such as examples of past student work, to help them better understand what the assignment is.

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate-and How to Help Them Stop

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Psychologists have uncovered reasons why students put off important work. But there are a few simple things teachers can do to keep students on track. Michael Morgenstern / theiSpot Leonardo da Vinci spent nearly 16 years painting the Mona Lisa-and never completed it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote, "I love deadlines.

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Summative Assessment in Distance learning

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Summative Assessment in Distance learning

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https://www.edutopia.org/article/summative-assessment-distance-learning

Interesting topic. A teacher once told me the difference between children who get help at home and the one's that don't is huge. But she can't really do anything about it, because  of the distance learning. That made me think about how unfair the grades during these times are.

The article mentiones different ways  to do it. But the last sentence pretty much sums it up: Ultimately, teachers need to use their professional judgement when summatively assessing students.

https://www.edutopia.org/article/summative-assessment-distance-learning

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On Standardized Tests, Students Face an ‘Online Penalty’

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On Standardized Tests, Students Face an ‘Online Penalty’

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The article deals with a current topic regarding to the Covid-19 situation:
A lot of students had to take a standardized online test and performed worse than student who wrote the exam on papers.

In fact, online exams are part of our future and no longer a rarity.  The shown statistics make me even more unsure about how effective online testing really is. There has been cases on two students who are equally proficient in a topic but had different test scores based on how familiar they are with computers. This also depends on the access to computers, which is given by students from wealthier families.
In Switzerland, we have in most schools access to computers, laptops, iPads etc. They can be part of a lesson, but I personally believe that there should be a balance between paper-based tasks and online tasks.

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Prior to the pandemic, dozens of states had begun offering standardized tests online, a trend that's expected to grow rapidly as schools adapt to social distancing. But according to a large-scale 2019 study, students who took such tests online lagged behind their peers who took paper tests, performing as if they'd lost several months of academic learning.

The study also found that children from low-income families, English language learners, and students with disabilities were disproportionately harmed by switching to online tests. These students performed considerably worse than similar students who took paper tests, particularly in English language arts.

These findings may give pause to the many schools shifting to online testing. In Ohio, schools are increasingly giving students the option to take state standardized tests online. In 2014, 65 percent of Ohio schools offered state standardized tests online-a number that grew to 98 percent in 2017. And in California, 22 percent of students -nearly 700,000-took statewide standardized tests online last year. As the pandemic forces schools to look at viable alternatives to in-person testing, many may consider shifting to online versions, but they should consider the impact that shift may have on students, especially marginalized ones.

What We Can Learn From Massachusetts

In 2015 roughly half of the school districts in Massachusetts shifted to an online version of the PARCC test, a national assessment designed to measure student progress, while the other half administered a paper version of the test. News reports and anecdotal evidence frequently pointed to lower scores for students taking the test online, and Ben Backes and James Cowan, researchers at the American Institutes for Research, examined whether the drop in test scores could be explained by differences between the tests or by other factors-for example, higher-performing school districts being more likely to offer the test online.

Backes and Cowan found that students who took the PARCC test online scored significantly worse than their peers who took the same exam on paper, performing as though they had lost the equivalent of 3.4 months of learning in math and 7.3 months of learning in ELA.

"The same student taking the same test will get a different result whether they're taking it online or on paper," Backes told me, calling the results "an online penalty."

In the second year of the online test, scores improved, although students taking the test online still lagged behind counterparts who took it on paper. The disparity shrank by roughly two-thirds in math and by half in ELA, suggesting that familiarity with the online format could help reduce-but perhaps not eliminate-the penalty.

This study highlights the importance of anticipating and addressing potential technological issues when transitioning to computer-based testing, a lesson that can be applied more generally to remote learning during the pandemic. Two students who are equally proficient in a topic can have different test scores based on how familiar they are with computers.

"Ideally, you want to capture something inherent to the students or the teachers, and not these artifacts of the test or the test mode," Backes told me. "You want to know how well are the students performing, how much are they learning, how much are their teachers influencing how much they're learning, things like that."

"Computer-based tests may measure skills, such as computer literacy, for which student proficiency differs," Backes and Cowan explain in the study. They point to advantages that students from wealthier families have, such as access to computers and broadband internet at home, that can increase their ability to navigate design features of online tests such as drop-down menus and radio buttons, which are commonly used to select answers to multiple-choice questions. Backes and Cowan note that "urban schools are also less likely to have computers with internet access," so their students have fewer opportunities to practice taking digital tests.

Vulnerable Students Hit Hardest

If all students performed equally worse on online tests, scores could be adjusted accordingly. But Backes and Cowan found that online tests increased the gap between high- and low-performing students, primarily children from low-income families, special education students, and English language learners.

In Springfield, which includes Massachusetts's second-largest school district, about 35 percent of Hispanic and 28 percent of Black families reported having no computer access at home. Such disparities may drive the discrepancies seen between paper and online testing.

The use of computers also creates an obstacle for students who need special accommodations like text-to-speech readers or language translators: A 2011 study found that students with visual impairments did worse on computer-based tests that provided a digital reader, compared to similar students who took paper tests with an adult reader.

Online testing is likely to grow in the coming years. The tests are easier to administer and grade, and easier to update when needed. But if some students are receiving lower scores as a result, there could be significant consequences, "including identification for gifted and talented programs, consideration for special education programs, and being flagged for grade retention," according to the study. In addition, many states use standardized test scores to evaluate schools and teachers, so the results could influence accountability measures such as school ranking or teacher compensation.

While teachers may not be in a position to change policies around testing, there are a few strategies that may help.

Be an advocate: Teachers can make the case that vulnerable students should be given every opportunity to perform as well on online tests as they would on paper tests, which includes being provided with language or disability accommodations such as additional test-taking time or live translators.

Raise awareness about effective policies: Backes and Cowan point to a key strategy that Massachusetts implemented to improve the transition to online testing: a two-year "hold harmless provision" that prevented schools from being held accountable for any negative changes in test performance, giving them time to resolve any problems. To help students, schools can apply for grants under the federal E-Rate program to purchase broadband services and equipment, and parents and teachers can contact their legislators to support a $2 billion bill proposed earlier this year to expand E-Rate funds in response to the pandemic.

Offer practice tests on a computer: A 2015 study found an association between students' home computer use and their writing proficiency in computer-based tests. Students who had frequent practice writing on a computer not only had longer written responses but also were more skilled at using editing functions-such as cut and paste-to improve the quality of their writing. When students are unfamiliar with taking tests on a computer, they take more time to construct their responses and spend cognitive resources trying to figure out how to use word processing tools.

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On Standardized Tests, Students Face an 'Online Penalty'

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Prior to the pandemic, dozens of states had begun offering standardized tests online, a trend that's expected to grow rapidly as schools adapt to social distancing. But according to a large-scale 2019 study, students who took such tests online lagged behind their peers who took paper tests, performing as if they'd lost several months of academic learning.

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Allowing Test Retakes—Without Getting Gamed

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Allowing Test Retakes—Without Getting Gamed

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When I think about offering retake tests I feel like I'm sitting on the fence. On the one hand I feel like students should have the chance of retaking tests and actually understand the material since the mastery of a subject is most important to me. On the other hand I worry that students won't study hard enough if there is always the option of retaking the test. In life you also won't get a second chance.
So what to do?

This article offers answers to this questions and give examples how   teachers manage to offer retakes without getting gamed.

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Debates about exam grades and retaking tests tend to coalesce, eventually, around the same arguments. One faction prioritizes subject mastery, the idea that it's more important to get students to take incremental steps towards proficiency than to punish them with bad grades. The other side emphasizes personal responsibility, insisting that there are very few second chances in life, and that regular opportunities to retake tests simply teach kids that consequences are negotiable.

But in a recent Facebook and Twitter poll about whether our teachers allow makeup tests, the discussion took a more practical turn. Most teachers agreed that retesting was sometimes appropriate, but expressed concerns about setting clear limits around the practice. A widespread problem: When given the option of makeup tests, students often gamed the system, failing the initial exam to see what it looked like-and then simply regurgitating the correct answers later. Under those circumstances, it's a net-zero game: Neither subject mastery nor personal responsibility is achieved.

"This has backfired on me so many times," lamented teacher Misty McClaskey in a comment that drew hundreds of sympathetic reactions from our audience. "Students don't study more. They do just as bad or worse on the retake. That's a waste of my time and theirs. And I have found if they know a retake is available, they actually study and prepare less."

Still, teachers weren't giving up on mastery or on makeup tests, and clear solutions emerged in the course of the back-and-forth. A consensus emerged around some key guidelines for retesting:

Consider partial credit: It remains controversial, but most teachers withheld full credit for retakes-though a wide range of standards for partial credit emerged. Some averaged the two grades, while others established a maximum possible score. An interesting wrinkle: a few teachers replaced the initial grade with the newly earned grade, even if it went down.

Make parents aware of the retake: Dozens of educators suggested looping in parents when retakes were requested by students. In some cases, teachers asked students and parents to cosign contracts setting out the terms of the retesting.

Keep the rest of the class on track: Don't slow the march of progress in your classroom to accommodate students who need to retest-unless the exam reveals a broad lack of mastery. Instead, most teachers conduct reteaching and retesting during study halls or before or after school.

Don't give the same test: Yes, it imposes more work on the teacher, but our educators agreed that if you're going to allow retesting, the second test should be different from the original-and just as challenging.

Require students to relearn: Students often fail tests because they haven't put in the work to master the material. Retakes should not be another spin of the roulette wheel-students who want another shot should demonstrate that they've made a genuine effort to study.

Don't assume all subjects are the same: In subjects like foreign languages and math, which rely heavily on sequential skill building, the need for retakes is crucial. Prohibiting retesting can strand students at a critical juncture with no good way to recover. Allow retakes and use the guidelines above.

Finally, a few of our teachers suggested more comprehensive approaches to retesting that seemed to work-and garnered lots of follow-up questions from experienced teachers looking for tried-and-true methods to use in their classrooms.

Mastery Quizzes

It takes some extra teacher time-most of these retesting alternatives do-but math teacher Laura Kirschenbaum offers what she calls "mastery quizzes," which are tailored specifically to "what the students failed to master on the original exam." These quizzes are short, often consisting of only two to four questions, and can help students earn back up to half the points they lost on the original test.

An advantage of this strategy? Students are retested only on what they didn't know. As Kirschenbaum explains, "It seems silly to retest them on topics they already understand."

Reflective Test Corrections

In Christina Gregory's eighth-grade math class, students are required to reflect on, and write about, the questions they miss on tests. Marked exams are returned with the correct answers, and students then "explain the process they went through" to arrive at their incorrect answers, identify their mistakes and show how they affected the outcome, and share how they intend to "correct this misconception or mistake on future questions."

According to Gregory-who received dozens of enthusiastic responses and questions from interested teachers-these "reflective responses" are about one paragraph long and have several clear benefits: They show students that so-called bad answers are often just a simple, correctable glitch in their processing; they reduce math anxiety by demonstrating that even hard-to-master problems can be solved with more effort; and they get kids to verbalize their thinking and thereby scaffold tough mathematical concepts with language skills.

A Peer-to-Peer Approach

There's a lot of research that suggests that teaching a topic to someone else is one of the best ways to learn it. Preparing to impart knowledge, it turns out, forces teachers to identify holes and weaknesses in their own knowledge, creating a mutually beneficial process of learning for both teachers and students.

Spanish teacher Karen Vargo is on to something, then, when she asks students who did well on a test-usually it's just for the larger, end-of-unit exams-to create a lesson and teach it to those who didn't perform as well. If students who retake the test pass, both the peer student and the peer teacher receive extra points. Vargo credits Sal Khan of Khan Academy for the idea, and says that her students have embraced the approach, which she loves because she sees that "both students are improving."

Metacognition Has Me Thinking...

In Ohio, high school teacher Theresa Grossheim Mengerink allows retakes, but only after a student has submitted a form that asks them to reflect on the past, present, and future of their testing efforts. Kids are asked to reflect on "why they failed and what they are going to do to improve" on the retake, and "how to prevent failure in the future." Questions might prompt students to look at how many hours they actually studied, what strategies they used to master the material, and where and under what conditions the studying occurred.

Research suggests that this kind of metacognition is important for high school students, who are still developing long-term planning skills and benefit from opportunities to practice. According to Laurence Steinberg, one of the world's leading researchers on adolescence, one metacognitive strategy that's remarkably similar to Mengerink's shows great promise: High school-aged students who are taught to plan for a long-term goal, imagine obstacles, and consider strategies for overcoming them show improvements in grades, attendance, and conduct.

The author of this article is the chief content officer at Edutopia. You can follow him on Twitter @smerrill777.

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Allowing Test Retakes-Without Getting Gamed

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Hundreds of teachers discussed the best ways to guide students toward mastery-without being taken advantage of.

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Why Students Cheat - and What to Do About It

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Why Students Cheat - and What to Do About It

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Sometimes I ask myself why pupils cheat and how I could broach this issue in class.This article informs you about possible motives for cheating as well as intervention possibilities/ strategies.

Reasons:
-  Students rationalise cheating because they find it legitimate, don't see a value in the work, feel pressured to obtain expectations
- Their point of view on cheating depends on their development stage. Younger learners are take more risks and gable because they think they get away with it or they feel peer pressured.
- Technology facilitates cheating. Learners have easy access to smartphones and the internet and they see digital plagiarism as "trivial".

Strategies to reduce cheating:

- Turn down pressure cooker: give a free pass, drop lowest score, give an assignment that measures competences
- Be thoughtful about language
- Create student honour councils with honour codes and rules.
-Use metacognition "thinking about thinking"
-Bring honesty and moral discussions into the classroom

I think cheating in Switzerland is more common in secondary school than primary school. However, our school system can exert pressure on learners to be successful (can also be internalised). You should talk about cheating with your class and write down classroom rules that include cheating and their consequences.

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"Why did you cheat in high school?" I posed the question to a dozen former students.

"I wanted good grades and I didn't want to work," said Sonya, who graduates from college in June. [The students' names in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.]

My current students were less candid than Sonya. To excuse her plagiarized Cannery Row essay, Erin, a ninth-grader with straight As, complained vaguely and unconvincingly of overwhelming stress. When he was caught copying a review of the documentary Hypernormalism, Jeremy, a senior, stood by his "hard work" and said my accusation hurt his feelings.

Cases like the much-publicized ( and enduring) 2012 cheating scandal at high-achieving Stuyvesant High School in New York City confirm that academic dishonesty is rampant and touches even the most prestigious of schools. The data confirms this as well. A 2012 Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics report revealed that more than half of high school students admitted to cheating on a test, while 74 percent reported copying their friends' homework. And a survey of 70,000 high school students across the United States between 2002 and 2015 found that 58 percent had plagiarized papers, while 95 percent admitted to cheating in some capacity.

So why do students cheat-and how do we stop them?

According to researchers and psychologists, the real reasons vary just as much as my students' explanations. But educators can still learn to identify motivations for student cheating and think critically about solutions to keep even the most audacious cheaters in their classrooms from doing it again.

Rationalizing It

First, know that students realize cheating is wrong-they simply see themselves as moral in spite of it.

"They cheat just enough to maintain a self-concept as honest people. They make their behavior an exception to a general rule," said Dr. David Rettinger, professor at the University of Mary Washington and executive director of the Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service, a campus organization dedicated to integrity.

According to Rettinger and other researchers, students who cheat can still see themselves as principled people by rationalizing cheating for reasons they see as legitimate.

Some do it when they don't see the value of work they're assigned, such as drill-and-kill homework assignments, or when they perceive an overemphasis on teaching content linked to high-stakes tests.

"There was no critical thinking, and teachers seemed pressured to squish it into their curriculum," said Javier, a former student and recent liberal arts college graduate. "They questioned you on material that was never covered in class, and if you failed the test, it was progressively harder to pass the next time around."

But students also rationalize cheating on assignments they see as having value.

High-achieving students who feel pressured to attain perfection (and Ivy League acceptances) may turn to cheating as a way to find an edge on the competition or to keep a single bad test score from sabotaging months of hard work. At Stuyvesant, for example, students and teachers identified the cutthroat environment as a factor in the rampant dishonesty that plagued the school.

A Developmental Stage

When it comes to risk management, adolescent students are bullish. Research has found that teenagers are biologically predisposed to be more tolerant of unknown outcomes and less bothered by stated risks than their older peers.

"In high school, they're risk takers developmentally, and can't see the consequences of immediate actions," Rettinger says. "Even delayed consequences are remote to them."

While cheating may not be a thrill ride, students already inclined to rebel against curfews and dabble in illicit substances have a certain comfort level with being reckless. They're willing to gamble when they think they can keep up the ruse-and more inclined to believe they can get away with it.

Cheating also appears to be almost contagious among young people-and may even serve as a kind of social adhesive, at least in environments where it is widely accepted. A study of military academy students from 1959 to 2002 revealed that students in communities where cheating is tolerated easily cave in to peer pressure, finding it harder not to cheat out of fear of losing social status if they don't.

Michael, a former student, explained that while he didn't need to help classmates cheat, he felt "unable to say no." Once he started, he couldn't stop.
Roman Pelesh
Technology Facilitates and Normalizes It

With smartphones and Alexa at their fingertips, today's students have easy access to quick answers and content they can reproduce for exams and papers. Studies show that technology has made cheating in school easier, more convenient, and harder to catch than ever before.

To Liz Ruff, an English teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, students' use of social media can erode their understanding of authenticity and intellectual property. Because students are used to reposting images, repurposing memes, and watching parody videos, they "see ownership as nebulous," she said.

As a result, while they may want to avoid penalties for plagiarism, they may not see it as wrong or even know that they're doing it.

This confirms what Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University Business School professor, reported in his 2012 book; he found that more than 60 percent of surveyed students who had cheated considered digital plagiarism to be "trivial"-effectively, students believed it was not actually cheating at all.

Strategies for Reducing Cheating

Even moral students need help acting morally, said Dr. Jason M. Stephens, who researches academic motivation and moral development in adolescents at the University of Auckland's School of Learning, Development, and Professional Practice. According to Stephens, teachers are uniquely positioned to infuse students with a sense of responsibility and help them overcome the rationalizations that enable them to think cheating is OK.

1. Turn down the pressure cooker. Students are less likely to cheat on work in which they feel invested. A multiple-choice assessment tempts would-be cheaters, while a unique, multiphase writing project measuring competencies can make cheating much harder and less enticing. Repetitive homework assignments are also a culprit, according to research, so teachers should look at creating take-home assignments that encourage students to think critically and expand on class discussions. Teachers could also give students one free pass on a homework assignment each quarter, for example, or let them drop their lowest score on an assignment.

3. Create student honor councils. Give students the opportunity to enforce honor codes or write their own classroom/school bylaws through honor councils so they can develop a full understanding of how cheating affects themselves and others. At Fredericksburg Academy, high school students elect two Honor Council members per grade. These students teach the Honor Code to fifth graders, who, in turn, explain it to younger elementary school students to help establish a student-driven culture of integrity. Students also write a pledge of authenticity on every assignment. And if there is an honor code transgression, the council gathers to discuss possible consequences.

4. Use metacognition. Research shows that metacognition, a process sometimes described as " thinking about thinking," can help students process their motivations, goals, and actions. With my ninth graders, I use a centuries-old resource to discuss moral quandaries: the play Macbeth. Before they meet the infamous Thane of Glamis, they role-play as medical school applicants, soccer players, and politicians, deciding if they'd cheat, injure, or lie to achieve goals. I push students to consider the steps they take to get the outcomes they desire. Why do we tend to act in the ways we do? What will we do to get what we want? And how will doing those things change who we are? Every tragedy is about us, I say, not just, as in Macbeth's case, about a man who succumbs to "vaulting ambition."

5. Bring honesty right into the curriculum. Teachers can weave a discussion of ethical behavior into curriculum. Ruff and many other teachers have been inspired to teach media literacy to help students understand digital plagiarism and navigate the widespread availability of secondary sources online, using guidance from organizations like Common Sense Media.

There are complicated psychological dynamics at play when students cheat, according to experts and researchers. While enforcing rules and consequences is important, knowing what's really motivating students to cheat can help you foster integrity in the classroom instead of just penalizing the cheating.

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Why Students Cheat-and What to Do About It

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A teacher seeks answers from researchers and psychologists.

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--> get information about the own teaching and find out what kids already know
--> keep it quick and in a relaxed way.
--> gives students a possibility to really show what they know

Nice way of assessment! Would like to included that in my own classroom as I think some of the students show more during an interview than on a paper based test.

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I chose this topic because I am not a big fan of distance learning. Maybe these apps change my opinion - let's see ;-)

1) Flipgrid (for free)
Flipgrid is a tool where students and teachers can record short online videos. Teachers can easily create accounts and the students can join the "classroom" via code.

2) WeVideo (free and paid)
WeVideo is an online video editor. During the pandemic the programm offered free upgrades.

3) Google forms (free)
Oh I love that one! Google forms is an easy tool to create survey. What I didn't know is that the quiz feature can block users from opening other windows (so there is no cheating).

4) Google Meet (free?)
Google Meet is a variation to Teams, Zoom etc. Lessons can be recorded.

5) Google Classroom (free?)
A platform to assign, collect and give feedback on student work.

Because of the fact I don't like distance learning I was interrested in new tools. Some were new to me others were not. I think there are milions of tools that would make distance learning easy. I am also impressed by the tools Laura is using.

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Distance learning has become the new norm in education since the advent of school closures as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and teachers have adapted-with the help of some truly amazing online applications.

Throughout my three months of distance learning, the following five online education applications were my lifelines; they genuinely helped bring my courses to life when I couldn't be present in person with my students.

If we find ourselves in distance learning mode again this fall, they will be on the front lines of my course delivery.

My Essential Distance Learning Apps

1. Flipgrid: Flipgrid is a free online application that allows students and teachers to record short, online videos. Teachers can easily create accounts and then within accounts create "classrooms."

Similar to Google Classroom, students join classrooms via a code. From there, teachers can create posts for students to respond to via short videos. The settings can be manipulated to allow only teachers to see responses or for students to be able to see and respond to each other's videos.

Flipgrid is a fantastic oral communication application that is easy to use. It can be adapted to almost any age group or subject area effectively. I know my own kids (grades 3 and 5) were also using it in their distance-learning classes, and they loved it as much as my high school students.

2. WeVideo: An online video editor with free and paid accounts, WeVideo has offered free upgrades to accounts for teachers and students during the pandemic, which I took immediate advantage of. I'm hoping that if distance learning continues they will extend this program.

WeVideo is another application teachers and students can join via a Google account, and it also can link and upload directly to Google Drive, which was an added convenience when students were submitting work. Teachers can also make a "class" within the application and have students join their class via a special code.

The actual video editor program is absolutely the easiest and most user-friendly I've found. I also like that WeVideo has stock images, videos, templates, music, and sound effects, which make video creation a snap.

My students said the program made it simple to share their work. Through this application, I was able to transform many of my assignments to a video communication format, and I couldn't be happier with the results.

3. Google Forms: This application is often used to gather information in a variety of contexts (surveys, quizzes, etc.). Its quiz feature can be enabled to block users from opening other windows. It also offers auto grading for multiple-choice tests.

I've used Google Forms in my classroom regularly; however, it became a daily application in my classes during distance learning. I used it for pre-assessments, quizzes, and surveys.

Google Forms is user-friendly and free if you have a G Suite account. It's a great way to ensure students are on track and to allow them an anonymous way to share feedback with you as a teacher.

4. Google Meet: Our district used the online meeting platform Google Meet to deliver our course material live or, depending on grade level, to record lessons and then post them to Google Classroom.

A feature I really like about this application is the option for students to show their faces, allow only their voices, or stay silent. There is also a chat feature on the sidebar if they'd like to communicate through writing.

Teachers (or students) can share their screens for all participants to see as well as record the meeting. I recorded all of my daily lessons-showing my screen only and talking through the lesson-and then posted the recordings to Google Classroom at the request of my students. This is a practice I'd like to continue even after distance learning as students really liked the option to return to a recording of the day's lesson to review it at their own pace.

5. Google Classroom: This popular application allows teachers to create online forums to share course curriculum, news, or lessons as well as a platform to assign, collect, and give feedback on student work.

I've used Google Classroom for years, but it became the cornerstone of my classroom throughout distance learning. This is where I posted the daily agenda as well as attached any necessary assignments, videos, or links. As previously mentioned, I also linked my Google Meet live lesson recordings for students to review if required. Essentially, Google Classroom became my online course management tool where students could easily access course work in an organized and engaging manner.

Although the 2019-20 school year didn't end the way any of us in education predicted or wanted, at the very least, distance learning allowed teachers to explore new online applications that can and will be relevant to our future course delivery in any format.

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Distance learning has become the new norm in education since the advent of school closures as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and teachers have adapted-with the help of some truly amazing online applications.

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SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING

Read about how to improve your relationship to your students and how this will change their school life.

I think that in Switzerland their are so many rules and borders. Swiss schools mostly forbid contact to students, that would be important sometimes (like a hug, when the kid is only crying or something). But in this article, they show you how you can improve the relationship by knowing your students better. Improving the relationsship between student and teacher makes a difference in so many ways. It is really worth reading!

https://www.edutopia.org/article/power-being-seen

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This article is about why more and more teachers are going gradeless and I think this is a very important point. Most of the time we just study for the grade and not for the knowledge itself which is a pitty! We as teachers should show our pupils that they are learning for themselves and that it’s about trying out and „aha moments“ and not about a number on their report card.

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Going "gradeless," an increasingly popular movement to shift classrooms away from a traditional percentage-and-letter-grade system in favor of a more holistic approach to assessment-using, for example, standards-based grading, competency-based models, or portfolios- is gaining traction across the country, writes Zach Schermele for Teen Vogue.

This shift comes as a result of an overreliance by schools and districts on high-stakes grading as the key measure for gauging student progress, critics say-which ultimately puts the focus on achieving a good grade, instead of where it should be: on the messy process of learning. Other critics of the practice insist that teachers spend far too much time grading-and justifying those grades with reams of feedback-leaving them with less time for the crucial task of preparing and teaching lessons. When teachers rely too heavily on grading, research shows students, especially struggling learners, often end up unmotivated and discouraged.

Here are four reasons that teachers give for abandoning the traditional grading system:

Even High Performers Are Often Stressed and Miserable

English teacher Gina Benz transitioned to a gradeless model two years ago after several AP students she knew ended up in the hospital. "The need to keep a high GPA, get that high ACT score, and get into that certain college was taking a toll," Benz told Schermele, adding that her own crushing workload contributed to her decision to make the shift. She began teaching in ways that encouraged her students to "test out ideas, make discoveries and embrace failure in an environment where learning is transformational, not transactional," Benz said. Instead of "slapping a letter or number at the top of an assessment," she provided her students with high-quality feedback, and her students began reaping benefits-greater "joy of learning and better emotional health."

And no, said Benz, their AP test scores didn't drop.

The Burden of Grading Crushes Innovation in Teaching

When teachers spend inordinate amounts of time grading, "we rob ourselves of the time that we need to teach. We've all been in a situation where grading piles up, and so we put the class on a task to make time for grading. This is wrong. And it should be the other way around," writes teacher Andrew Miller, who is the director of personalized learning at Singapore American School. "Teaching and learning should take precedence over grading and entering grades into grade books."

Examining the history and research of grading practice in a 2014 study, researchers Kimberly Tanner and Jeffrey Schinske draw similar conclusions. "The time and energy spent on grading has been often pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching. In some cases, the demands of grading require so much instructor attention, little time remains for reflection on the structure of a course or for aspirations of pedagogical improvement," they find. "Underlying the less encouraging news about grades are numerous opportunities for faculty members to make assessment and evaluation more productive, better aligned with student learning, and less burdensome for faculty and students."

Grading Can Undermine Student Engagement and Promote Superficial Learning

High school English teacher Aaron Blackwelder, inspired by researchers such as Alfie Kohn, transitioned to a gradeless classroom nine years ago. His "Aha!" moment came during a student-teacher conference in which he asked a student to evaluate an essay she had written. "There was no discussion about the strengths of the work nor mention of what could be improved," Blackwelder, who co-founded the website Teachers Going Gradeless, told Schermele. "It was a conversation about a grade and not the learning...I realized the problem was with grades and grading."

The impact of traditional grading on student motivation and performance is why Cleveland State University lecturer Marcus Schultz-Bergin began exploring a gradeless classroom. "Grades tend to put an end to the student caring about the assignment, whereas feedback continues a conversation," he told Schermele. "Professors and students, by and large, hate grades and yet feel there is no other way. Most people seem to clearly recognize the problems with the current system and dream of something better, but don't think anything else is possible."

Portfolios and mastery-based assessments are increasingly accepted

Frustrated with his school's A-F grading system, Scott Looney, the head of the Hawken School in Cleveland, together with 28 other independent schools, formed the Mastery Transcript Consortium in 2017 with the goal of phasing out traditional graded transcripts in favor of digital, interactive portfolios that show academic and enrichment skills, areas of growth, and samples of students' work.

"The purpose of education is not to sort kids-it's to grow kids," Looney tells Edutopia. "Teachers need to coach and mentor, but with grades, teachers turn into judges. I think we can show the unique abilities of kids without stratifying them." The group has since grown to include 157 schools, including a long list of prestigious schools like Phillips Exeter Academy and newer schools like the Khan Lab School. Major universities have signaled a willingness to accept the non-traditional academic records without any penalty to students-undermining one of the last claims to the superiority of traditional letter grades.

Meanwhile, the push to modernize student assessment nationwide is gaining steam. At least 16 state legislatures and boards of education adopted policies to encourage public schools to look beyond traditional grading systems to assess student competency.

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Going "gradeless," an increasingly popular movement to shift classrooms away from a traditional percentage-and-letter-grade system in favor of a more holistic approach to assessment-using, for example, standards-based grading, competency-based models, or portfolios- is gaining traction across the country, writes Zach Schermele for Teen Vogue.

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Summative Assessment in Distance Learning

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Summative Assessment in Distance Learning

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The article gives some useful tips for assessment in distance learing. The main points I think are:
- not to assess everything; it is more effective to assess the important things
- trust students
- split big tasks into shorter tasks and use it over a long term

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Summative Assessment in Distance Learning

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Whether schools are using regular grades or not, teachers need to accurately assess learning while their students are at home. These are some helpful ideas to consider.

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This article focuses on writing and gives an example how fan fiction can be motivating for the students to start writing.
It also says that it's important that the students just write, write and write and as a teacher you shouldn't always care about the grammar and you don't have to assign every single text.

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How Fan Fiction Can Transform Student Writing (and Reduce Your Grading)

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Fan fiction assignments can help make young readers and writers more passionate, confident, and expressive, while easing your workload.

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I find this video quite useful, as I want to give feedback on a regluar basis once I have my own class but don't really know how to do it without it being too time-consuming. I'm really glad for some of those tips, especially for the idea that the learners can chose for which work they would like feedback.

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Giving students good feedback is crucial, but it can also be incredibly time-consuming. So we went straight to the source-experienced teachers-and identified some of the best advice we could find for striking the right balance between effective assessment and a reasonable workload.

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6 Teacher-Approved Tips for Faster, More Effective Feedback

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Giving students good feedback is crucial, but it can also be incredibly time-consuming. So we went straight to the source-experienced teachers-and identified some of the best advice we could find for striking the right balance between effective assessment and a reasonable workload.

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate—and How to Help Them Stop

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate—and How to Help Them Stop

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I choose this article because I'm one of those guys, who procrastinate a lot of things (except this task...). In fact, 50 percent of the students procrastinate on a regular basis. However, the article is about the reasons why students procrastinate, what are the impacts of procrastinating and what can you do about it.

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Psychologists have uncovered reasons why students put off important work. But there are a few simple things teachers can do to keep students on track.

Michael Morgenstern / theiSpot

Leonardo da Vinci spent nearly 16 years painting the Mona Lisa-and never completed it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." And Frank Lloyd Wright spent a mere two hours designing Fallingwater -after delaying for nine months.

"Procrastination is extremely prevalent," Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, noted in a 2007 study. "Estimates indicate that 80 to 95 percent of college students engage in procrastination, approximately 75 percent consider themselves procrastinators, and almost 50 percent procrastinate consistently and problematically."

If you're a middle or high school teacher, it's likely that you have procrastinators in your class-students who consistently wait until the last minute to turn in their assignments, or put off studying until the night before a test. This delaying has a cost: A 2015 study found that the longer business school students waited to turn in an assignment, the worse their grades were, with last-minute hand-ins costing them five percentage points on average, or half a grade. And a 2015 meta-analysis confirmed this result, finding that procrastination was associated with lower grades across 33 studies that included over 38,000 students (most of whom were in college). Even worse, medical research has linked procrastination to higher levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and fatigue.

It's a common perception that students who procrastinate do so because they don't care about the assignment-and that's usually wrong, argued Devon Price, a social psychology professor at Loyola University, in 2018. More often than not, the underlying reasons for procrastination fall under two categories: fear of failure or confusion about the first steps of an assignment.

"Procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well," Price explained. Procrastinators can stare at a screen or book for hours, paralyzed by fear. At that point, the best solution is to take a short break and engage in a relaxing activity.

Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University and leading expert on procrastination, has performed several studies on why students put off important work. In a groundbreaking 1989 study, Ferrari found that college students often procrastinated because of indecision: They spent too much time worrying about whether they were doing an assignment correctly, prolonging the time they spent on even simple tasks. For these students, procrastination was a coping mechanism to avoid stressful experiences.

"It is very helpful and useful to gather information to make an informed decision, but when one simply continues to gather beyond the point of adequate resources, then they are being indecisive and the waiting is counterproductive," Ferrari told an interviewer in 2010.

In a follow-up study, Ferrari found another reason why some students procrastinate: fear of criticism. He discovered that many college students engaged in self-sabotage because they could then blame low grades on the deadlines rather than their own abilities. These students preferred to "choose situations in which their public image would not be damaged by poor performance." Once again, procrastination was a coping mechanism-in this case, to protect the students' self-esteem and perceptions of their identity.

Ferrari discovered yet another, very different, motive for procrastination in a 1992 study. Some college students delayed starting on an assignment because they enjoyed the perceived thrill of working against a deadline. Putting assignments off until the last minute was a way of "adding drama to life," giving these students a rush of adrenaline.

Indecisiveness, avoidance, and thrill-seeking are thus more likely explanations for procrastination than laziness or lack of motivation. So what can teachers do? Here are some suggestions.

5 Ways to Encourage Students Not to Procrastinate

1. Spread deadlines out. Researchers have investigated the impact of three types of deadlines for a series of tasks: evenly spaced, self-imposed, or a single, final deadline. In the first experiment, students were assigned three papers and were asked to either turn one in at the end of each month, choose their own deadlines, or submit all three papers by the end of the course. In the second experiment, students were given a task-to proofread three passages-and submitted their assignments weekly, at their own self-chosen pace, or all at once. In both experiments, evenly spaced deadlines not only yielded better student work but also decreased the chances that students would miss their deadlines.

The takeaway for teachers? Instead of giving students a big project with a single deadline, break it into smaller tasks with evenly spaced out deadlines. Ask for multiple drafts of a paper, for example. In a project-based learning unit, have students present their progress at specified checkpoints. This can be especially helpful for students who are paralyzed by large projects-by making each part more manageable, you can reduce the anxiety associated with intimidating deadlines.

2. Provide supportive feedback. Students with low self-esteem may be reluctant to put forth their best work if they're worried about criticism or afraid of failing. Avoid giving highly critical or negative feedback, which may have the unintended consequence of making students feel nervous or self-conscious. Students may also respond poorly to feedback that feels controlling, so avoid being too explicit about what needs to be corrected. Finally, be cautious about giving feedback to students in front of their peers-they may feel uncomfortable and become disengaged.

3. Teach time management and study skills. A 2017 study found that many students lack the metacognitive skills they need to be able to study effectively, such as the ability to schedule ample time for studying or knowing when to ask for help. Many study participants were surprised when their initial scores were lower than they had expected-they did not have an accurate sense of how well prepared they were. They were then encouraged to plan ahead for an upcoming test, and were shown examples of how they could prepare. The results were significant: Compared to their peers, the students who participated in the metacognitive activities scored a third of a letter grade higher, on average.

4. Be mindful of workload. According to a 2015 study, the likelihood that students will turn in late work increases when deadlines for different projects coincide-something that can easily happen in middle and high school, when students have multiple teachers. Students also experience higher stress levels if they can't manage multiple assignments that are due at the same time. Consider coordinating with other teachers to spread out major deadlines.

And when students face adversity that impacts their ability to finish assignments on time, such as taking care of a family member or having to financially support their family, being flexible about deadlines can help them stay on track.

5. Have clear instructions and examples. Students are more likely to put off a project if they don't understand how to start. Ensure that all students know your expectations and the requirements of the assignment-it's best to put instructions in writing so that students can refer to them as needed. You can also use exemplars, such as examples of past student work, to help them better understand what the assignment is.

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3 Reasons Students Procrastinate-and How to Help Them Stop

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Psychologists have uncovered reasons why students put off important work. But there are a few simple things teachers can do to keep students on track. Michael Morgenstern / theiSpot Leonardo da Vinci spent nearly 16 years painting the Mona Lisa-and never completed it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote, "I love deadlines.