"If students are not involved in the assessment process, formative assessment is not practiced or implemented to its full effectiveness."

Provide a response (typed, audio, or video) sharing the following:

A. Describe two strategies from the article that aim to involve students in formative assessment.

1. STRATEGY 1: ...

2. STRATEGY 2: ...
B. To what extent do you implement, or hope to implement, these strategies?

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This reading outlines two scenarios:
one is an example of how a teacher builds student confidence through assessment for learning and the second describes how to help students recover from a chronic sense of failure.

Provide a response (typed, audio, or video) explaining a formative assessment practice that you implement or hope to implement soon that either aims to build learner confidence or that supports students to recover from a chronic sense of failure.

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"Grades should only be based on valid evidence of a student's content knowledge, not on a student's environment or based on evidence that is likely corrupted by a teacher's implicit bias..."

This chapter reviews traditional grading for the following practices:

1. Extra Credit
2. Late Work
3. Participation/Effort (Behavior)

Share your understanding (typed, audio, or video) on the following:

What are alternative grading practices that Feldman outlines for extra credit, later work, and communicating behaviors such as participation and effort? How do these alternatives support assessment for learning (formative assessment)?

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Provide a response (typed, audio, or video) to each question below:

1. According to Feldman, what is the role of homework in learning and how does it connect to formative or summative assessment?

2. What are the roles of formative and summative assessment in grading?

3. How do these distinct roles address inequities in traditional approaches to grading?

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1. Strategy 1: Student record keeping. By asking students to practice self management by being in control of their own learning and keep their own records, teachers are providing opportunities for students to have agency in the process.

2. Strategy 2: Self-assessment. Students need to reflect on their learning and know exactly where they are in order to know where they need to go and how to get there (in terms of their learning).

B. I frequently implement self-assessments for students. Sometimes they are more informal, like a warm-up question where I ask students to reflect on their learning from the day before and make connections and/or predictions. Other self-assessments are more formal, where I provide students with a list of the learning target(s) for any particular assignment and then ask them to self-assess their progress on those targets. While I do have students keep their own records, I don't do this often enough. Usually, I only have students explicitly keep records of their learning during a grading window. I want to build in time weekly for this activity, rather than waiting for grades.

We actually do student led conferences at our school, but I think that I can prepared the students better after learning many instructional ideas during this year.

The second strategy is criteria and goal setting. For students to be able to do this, they have to know the learning targets and the steps to reaching it. Seeing and talking about quality work and lower quality work that needs improvment and having students help to set up what should be included in a good product are ways to show students how to be independant learners and good self assessors.

I have not tried this in my classroom but I would like to next semester. I think that I would start off with showing students some samples of good answers and answers that need improvement. I do already show exemplers in my class but I struggle when doing this at times because students tend to not think out of the box then and I feel like they loose their creativity.

This is tied to the second strategy for involving students in the formative assessment process which is to set clear criteria and goals. I am also working on this because I need to create rubrics. However, settings goals and expectations can also include setting clear criteria for classroom norms or discussion practices. It can also entail clearly stating the learning target so students know where they are headed. I often provide the learning target or learning outcome, but I need to make rubrics for individual learning outcomes.

I do frequently engage students in self and peer assessment, but not enough descriptive feedback. This is something I will have to make effort to provide more descriptive feedback. I usually use rubric for self and peer assessment and for my final evaluation. However, I will make more conscious effort to give feedback not only about what they need to do to reach the learning goal but also about what they have done well.

2. Strategy 2: Questioning Strategies. Asking students before, during, and after lessons both expands student learning and helps teachers to better determine where students are with their understanding of the lesson.

B. I would like to have my students begin to keep a learning log where they track their progress throughout the math units we complete. I will have the students keep this in their binders so that they will not lose it and will ask for their adults at home to sign the learning log every weekend so that they are also aware of their student's progress. I would also like to begin to implement more exit tickets as a quick assessment of student learning following a lesson.

Strategy #2: Self and peer assessment. It is just a logical step after setting the criteria and goal together with students. It provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their goal and practice and improve from there.

In my class, we constantly do self assessment but not as much peer assessment. Thanks to this question, and I will implement strategies to work on peer assessment so that students get to learn how others are thinking. Next time instead of providing students with a Rubric, we can come up with one together.

I have tried to involve students in tracking their progress towards mastery of a learning target with limited success. Even though I thought I created a fun process involving color coded stickers, the students were slow to engage. I think I should continue in the second semester so that the process becomes ingrained as a part of our classroom routine. Secondly, I want to implement more self-assessment in my classroom. I would like to see students self-identifying where they are falling short of the standard and determine what they need to practice in order to improve.

Just as he disagrees with the practice of extra credit, Feldman also disagrees with the practice of penalizing for late work. Feldman outlines a variety of reasons for this. The primary reasons are because some students may need more time to learn, some students may need extra time to complete assignments for reasons beyond their control, and timely work does not accurately reflect student learning.

Another practice Feldman discourages is rewarding academic grade points for participation, effort, or behavior. Feldman does not provide al alternative way of measuring these attributes, but one thing the teacher could do is assign a grade separate from the academic grade to reflect participation or behavior.

Feldman's argument for not including these characteristics in the academic grade supports assessment for learning because such a grading policy clearly informs students and parents that the grade is solely based on proficiency or mastery. It also sends the message that students need to learn in order to achieve a given grade.

This coming semester, I hope to build learning confidence by providing an entry point and practice at all three levels of proficiency (approaching proficiency, proficient and mastery). This will reduce the perception by students of a binary system and instead incentivize students to persevere and work from one level of proficiency to the next.

With regard to late work Feldman emphasizes that "meeting deadlines is important, but its a soft skill behavior that is separate from academic content mastery." Addressing how to teach this skills will be covered in a future chapter.

Feldman suggests that participation and effort be graded separately through a students' conduct grade for "Work Habits" or "Cooperation".

These distinct roles address inequities in traditional grading because in traditional grading practice and performance ambiguously and jointly contribute to the academic grade. This makes it difficult for students to discern between practice and performance. It also awards students for having access to resources outside of the classroom and penalizes students for not having access to resources.

1. Criteria and Goal Setting: In this strategy, the teacher involves students in establishing criteria for reaching a learning goal. The teacher also provides examples so students understand what quality work looks like and how they will be able to accomplish it

2. Questioning Strategies: In this strategy, the teacher asks questions to gain insight on the degree and depth of student learning. Exit slips, thumbs up/down, and red/green cards are all different ways teachers can use questions to receive immediate information on student learning.

   
   

B. I provide students with rubrics to communicate the quality of work expected at each proficiency level (1,2,3,4). I hope to involve students more in the assessment process by co-constructing criteria and by teaching students how to self-assess their work.

I also use the questioning strategies mentioned in the article, but need to strategically use student responses to inform my instruction. For instance, if a subgroup of my students are struggling with the learning goal, I need to develop specific interventions for this group.

My 8 learning targets (LT's) are derived from the 8 Science and Engineering Practices (SEP's). I can teach students how to track progress on each LT so they know their strengths and opportunities for growth. Then, I will provide resources for advancing to the next level on each learning target and teach students how to select the appropriate resources. This process empowers students to make choices to improve their own learning, which makes students feel more confident in their ability to learn and improve.

1. Criteria and goal setting: This strategy encompasses the teacher engaging with students in varies ways. Such as showing student work, distinguishing exemplar student work to help guide students, discussion of learning goals so that students understand the objectives.

To some extent, I utilize criteria and goal setting. I try to give my student samples of projects or writing samples to show them what is expected. Before each unit, I also review the learning goals so they can get a better idea of what they will learn. I also review examples so that students can set goals for better performances.

2. Questioning strategies: This strategy is all about the teacher creating, planning, and executing questioning to further the students' learning. These questions are based on information of the formative assessments and need to be thoughtful, well-prepared, and engaging.

To some extent I also utilize questioning strategies. I absolutely love it when I am prepped beforehand because I can use my google slides and have visuals ready to help further my students learning. Sometimes though a google search would suffice.

2. The roles of formative and summative assessment in grading is really having teachers consider more broadly wha their summative assessment is since that is really the only thing that should be in the gradebook. The formative assessment helps to inform the teacher through hw, or bell ringer activities but the summative measures the learning. Feldman encourages all teachers to strive to let go of the extra credit or other traditional methods to grades - which ultimately means letting go of grades as a control over behavior but instead open up to the idea of grades only reflecting learning.

3. These distinct roles address inequalities in traditional approaches to grading. In the traditional way (incorporating homework as a grade) can hurt a student who may not have the home support - working parents or non-English speaking parents.

1. Extra Credit: Instead of offering extra credit, teachers should require students to revise and resubmit assignments to improve their grade. This alternative communicates the importance of the teacher's assignments for communicating learning and rejects the notion that assignments can be replaced for tasks that do not assess learning targets, such as bringing extra supplies or watching a film at home. This alternative is also more equitable because it does not require students to have additional resources outside of class.

2. Late Work: Instead of penalizing late work on a students' academic grade, teachers should accept late work until an "end point" in a learning sequence, such as the end of grading period. Allowing students to submit late work communicates the idea that the quality of work reveals more progress towards learning goals than the time it is submitted. This practice also reduces rushing and cheating because students know they can take more time on assignments if needed.

3. Participation/Effort: Instead of factoring participation and effort into academic grades, teachers should ensure each assignment is a reflection of progress towards learning targets. Since these categories are subjective and highly influenced by a teacher's perceptions of an ideal student, they should not be included in academic grades. An alternative is to include comments about student behavior separately from the academic grade (such as a Work Habits score or on report card comments).

Another inequity in traditional grading is that of penalizing late work. The author suggests that late work should be graded because it allows you to see what a student has learned, which is at the heart of EGI. Time is a variable for learning and some students would be disadvantaged if it was taken from them. I also like the idea that there should be boundaries as to how late work can be submitted and graded.

Effort grades are full of biases and should be removed, only students content and skill knowledge should be assessed.

Strategy #1 -- Questioning strategies which will allow a deeper insight as to what students are learning. These questions need to go beyond just recalling information and need to dive into the deeper meaningful "why do you think this/that...etc..." type questions which allow students to provide their insight into what they have learned.

Strategy #2 -- Self and Peer Assessment allows student to do their own self-reflection or to help guide their peers with assessments. This process allows students to self-discover what they can do to improve their learning experience and grow. It also allows students to view their peers as resources for assistance as needed as well as allowing their peers to grow as students. I like to explain to students that we, as teachers do a lot of self-reflection so we can determine what works and why it works and what is not working and why it is not working. This demonstrates to students that this process is lifelong.

I would like to do more student self and peer assessments for the remainder of their school year as I believe it will help students grow and go beyond superficial answers. I believe it will allow students to go deep below the surface and challenge themselves in the learning process and most importantly to grow as people. Of course, in a perfect world -- I would implement all of these once we come back from Winter Break, but that is not a realistic goal at this time.

References

Garrison, C., & Ehringaus, M. (2009). Formative and summative assessments in the classroom. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oT0asRl6DRoTACK-rKnlUknucpYUW8CX/view

adults." This is a key takeaway and point for me from this article as it displays the importance of including students into helping create the formative assessment in terms of the quality of the product that students should produce to be able to demonstrate their depth of knowledge and learning.

As it applies to me in terms of something I have implemented or hope to soon implement -- I do Socratic Seminars and debates in class as students seem to enjoy these tools for learning and will challenge each other. Does it always work with 100% participation? No, it does not. It works the majority of the time. Also focused note taking and highlighting documents to assist students in reading and discovering more before having open class discussions have been successful too. I do believe that I will implement table discussions to develop student discourse in a micro level to see if more student participation takes place.

Something I would like to be able to do better though would be to provide better examples of excellent work as well as examples of subpar work. This would help students to better understand how one should try to produce above the assignment and allows for students to better show depth of knowledge and understanding.

#2. Formative assessments are essentially practice and they tell both the teacher and students how much the latter have mastered towards the learning standards. They should not be counted or included in students' grades. While summative assessments on the other hand, are the only thing that are included in students' grades according to equitable grading.

#3. Traditionally, both formative and summative assessments are part of grades. Since formative assessments are actually students' practice and progress, they may not reflect their mastery of the content. So the grades will not reflect students' real proficiecy.

I feel like in ELA this would be so useful. For multiple choice questions, I would love to use the second scenario of that graph!

2. Questioning Strategies: Asking question to get an understanding of the degree and depth of student understanding.

B. I use self and peer assessment regularly in my class. However, one thing I learned from the article is to have students establish and define what quality work looks like more intentionally. I have also used the exit tickets to ask students questions at the end of the lesson. I plan to continue to use these in my classes.

“Self and Peer Assessment” encourages students to take an active role in evaluating their own work and the work of their peers. The authors argue that “with peer evaluation, students see each other as resources for understanding and checking for quality work.” This differs from student-led conferences in that they are assessing and evaluating their work products, rather than discussing the learning targets themselves.

B. Both of these strategies emphasize student involvement in the assessment process, but I hope to implement “Self and Peer Assessment” before attempting to integrate student-led conferences, as I feel students will find more intrinsic motivation in evaluating and improving their work rather than discussing their skills and learning targets in the abstract.

-Jonathan Bernard

-Jonathan Bernard

He goes on to advocate against grade penalties for late work, as these introducing penalties into the grading system actually create inaccurate final grades. Even aside from the fact that deadlines with penalties are an inequitable practice which disproportionately affect vulnerable students, it leads to a final grade which does not communicate a student’s actual skills in a learning target, making it extremely difficult for students to accurately discern what skills areas they need to improve.

Grading participation and effort similarly skews final grades, Feldman argues, as they are subjective judgements subject to biases which do not reflect measurable skills or valid evidence of academic achievement. The alternative of focusing only on academic performance supports assessment for learning by giving students a clear path towards what specific skills they need to improve their grades.

-Jonathan Bernard

STRATEGY 2: Self and peer assessment - When clear criteria and learning targets are set and communicated, students can self and peer assess their work by using rubrics and checklists of success criteria.

B. I plan to start this semester by going through the AP Learning Objectives with the students. We will use these to create our learning targets for the project/first unit and determine what the criteria for success will be in the context of the final project as their summative assessment.

I want to practice more peer assessment through checking project drafts and benchmarks between groups. I also want to do more self and peer assessment in FRQ practice where students can check their responses to the criteria set by college board.

Similarly, in my internship course for animal husbandry, I will work the first week and a half to set expectations, develop our "I can" statements for the learning targets, and review the proficiency scale. The hope is for them to use these to peer assess their writing for the class.

Unfortunately, the PBL curriculum I'm using for my AP class is new and I do not have student samples to share. I can do so with FRQ practice (which I have done and the students found very helpful), but I think the second method used in the math class would be valuable for my APES class. I actually would like to do that for review in the first week by applying it to the final exam. They got their responses back and put it in their notebook and I already set the learning target addressed by each question, so that could help them identify areas for growth for this semester (though the targets will be changing and more specific this semester).

Late work - Reducing grades for late work creates inaccurate final grades and disproportionately harms vulnerable students (those with the most barriers or home responsibilities). Removing late penalties allows students to take their time to produce quality work that more accurately demonstrates their full potential and reduces the likelihood of cheating. He doe say it may make sense to set a hard deadline at the point of the unit summative assessment, as doing the late work after that point no longer serves student learning on that topic. Penalties for late work may more accurately and responsibly impact their work habits grade, rather than their academic A-F grade.

Participation and Effort - Excluding these behaviors from grading supports assessment for learning because it ensures that grades are a true reflection of content proficiency, rather than being cushioned or harmed by biased interpretations of what counts as (appropriate/desired) "participation" or "effort." Also, since effort especially is something that the teacher a) cannot fully see and b) does not necessarily equate to learning (ex. lots of time spent on ineffective study practices), it doesn't actually assess for learning.

Strategy 2: Self and Peer Assessment

Currently I don't have students participate in goal setting or criteria building. I do have students participate in several self and peer assessments that we do throughout each unit. Depending on the type assessment, students will work on self and peer assessments in groups or individually.

For late work, rather than penalizing it we should simply give students more time, or whatever time they need (as we all learn differently) and in this way Feldman says we may even get better work back from the students because the stress might be gone. Within reason of course, there are grading deadlines so students must be aware extra time even has a deadline.

Participation and effort, according to Feldman (I completely agree) should have nothing to do with a students academic grade. There is no way for a teacher to KNOW how much effort a student put in, and the bias and subjectivity Feldman mentions that would come into play if they assumed is ridiculous. Assessments for learning should be that, assessments FOR learning without all these little things teachers may do that have nothing to do with actual learning.

Instead of extra credit assignments, he reccomends that if it is that important to make it an assignment that all students are required to do, and if it is not or not even related to the learning then it really shouldn't be a part of the grade. Instead, allow students to turn in the original work late and to redo or improve on work that is not full credit.

As for Late Work he makes a case for accepting it late without a penalty stating that if students have enough time then they will turn in better quality work and penalties for work being late just puts behavior into the grade which is what we want to avoid doing.

Participation is the biggest no no for a letter grade because it is very bias by the teacher who has her own idea of what being a good student and participating means which doesn't align to all cultures, gender etc.

1) Criteria and goal setting (i.e. establishing clear learning targets and ensuring that students understand the criteria for reaching them)

2) Questioning strategies (i.e. asking questions that allow for deeper thinking and provide relevant information about students' understanding of the material)

I am hoping to be more consistent in implementing better questioning strategies, particularly exit slips. I also want to be more intentional about involving students in self-assessment through the use rubrics and proficiency scales.

2. The role of formative assessment is to allow students the opportunity to practice their skills in a low-stakes environment, allowing teachers and students to assess their level of mastery and address any misconceptions that come to light before the summative assessment. The role of a summative assessment according to Feldman is to “evaluate student’s content mastery” (129).

3. By splitting assessments into these distinct roles, we are able to turn grades into a clear reflection of a student’s actual skills in relation to learning targets, rather than a reflection of how much time and resources a student has at home, or how comfortable a student is with making mistakes on their road to mastery.

-Jonathan Bernard

When it comes to extra credit, I let students know that I don't do that, and that they need to work on their existing assignments. Furthermore, I do accept their late work without penalizing them, and do my best to avoid being influenced by students' participation/effort.

One way these roles address inequities in traditional grading by taking chance things out of the equation (like having other homework, being responsible for family, jobs, etc.) and not penalizing students who might not be able to complete their homework. For summative, it allows for students to realize they get a second chance if they have a bad day for any of the reasons above, or if they need more help on a topic. They are not experts at what they are learning, that is why they are learning it, and learning is a process-not something your entire grade should be based off that you did 1 time.

1. Parking lot- provide students space where to students pose questions, clarification about the learning objectives

2. Students Record Keeping and Writing a reflection- students write their progress towards the learning targets and writing their action steps to achieve the learning goals

To address students' chronic failure, I hold a one-on-one mini-conference and we go over each learning target they miss. I ask them what support they need. I offer a tutoring session after school and before school. We work on achieving a small goal. I involve them by asking them to pinpoint the learning targets/skills a student has trouble with

According to Feldman, if the assignments are not important exclude them from grading. Instead, only include the assignments, that are required to do to show mastery of learning targets.

Eliminate extra- -credit points, and participation points, and reduce points from late work.

Formative assessments inform the teachers and students of students’ learning. It monitors students’ progress. It identifies students’ misconceptions and learning skills they struggled with the most.  It is an opportunity to practice what they learn. It should not be considered as a student’s final grade. Formative assessment predicts the students’ performance on Summative assessment. Before the summative, the teachers can design an intervention activity to help the students do well in the summative assessment.  The summative assessments determine students’ grades.

A. Strategy 2 - Questioning Strategies

Questions are often informal ways of doing formative assessments, but they are quick and can be used very flexibly. Depending on the type of questioning and the depth of question, this strategy could reveal lots of information about our students.

Strategy 1: Student Record Keeping.

I have students keep records with their history binders. All formative assessments stay organized in the binders and their work is checked periodically. This helps learners to stay organized and be aware of the growth throughout a unit.

Strategy 2: Questioning Strategies

I regularly have students pair-share or discuss questions with their tables. This helps students to discuss answers with peers and see where their ideas are in relation to their neighbors. When students discuss (prior to the share out) I'm able to observe the conversations and get a sense of student's progress.

#1: Using student work to show as exemplars for other students

I implement this strategy sometimes before students move into their corrective activity. I will keep the student anonymous and have other students compare the exemplar to the rubric. I ask students to justify the given score.

#2: Having students engage in self & Peer Assessments.

I implement self assessments often. I often have students assess themselves using the proficiency rubric before turning in their assessment for me to grade. I ask them to justify their score using the rubric.

An alternative to late work that was mentioned in the chapter is to eliminate a penalty for turning in late work. Allowing students to turn in assignments whenever they can will allow learning to be continuous throughout the course. Students learning should be the main priority, even if it is done later than others in the class. This would support assessment for learning because it would put the focus on learning and mastery content verses meeting deadlines and due dates. I think it would encourage students to preserver when circumstances are not ideal, preventing them to meet deadlines or due dates. Eliminating penalties for late work would allow students to engage in their learning at any time while they ate taking the course.

An alternative to counting participation in the academic grade would be to exclude it from grading altogether and focus on the demonstration of the content/standards. Progress of participation and behavior could be monitored and recorded though Work Habits or Cooperation Grades. This would support assessment for learning because students would only need to worry about grasping the concepts in order to achieve a high mark in the class. It would ensure students are not assuming or feeling like there is something personal went into how their grade was calculated.

1) With self and peer assessments students get the opportunity to look at their work and evaluate their learning metacognitively. When looking at a peers work, they have a chance to partner with one another and begin to see how they can work together to achieve a common goal. The classroom becomes a space for teamwork and reflection instead of grade-based competition.

2) With student record keeping students monitor their own progress towards learning goals as opposed to relying on teachers to assign a grade to their learning. They can see how and why their graded work is either approaching, meeting, or exceeding the learning criteria. B. I have actually used both of these methods in my classroom. I ask students to self and peer assess during and at then end of every major writing assignment. The peer assessment is a part of the pre-writing process and is completed during class before students submit a final draft. As far as student record keeping, in the past, I printed out a table with each learning target and multiple columns to the right and instructed students to track their progress throughout the semester as they received graded work back. When I noticed students weren't using the chart regularly, I stopped providing the document. I can see how that was to my and their detriment and I want to start using it or something like it again.

1. "Criteria and goal setting with students engages them in instruction and the learning process by creating clear expectations." I use the strategy of creating criterie for success. Often times, students and I create the criteria together. One thing that I would like to start doing more frequently is setting goals with students. I believe adding the goals would give students a clear path.

2. The second strategy I use in the classroo is Questioning. This is my go to strategy in any situation. My favorite questions are, "what in the text makes you say that?" and "can you tell me more?" these two questions usually get the job done.

1. Strategy 1: With questioning strategies it allows for deeper thinking and provides insight for the teacher about the student's depth/degree of understanding. It may at time elicit immediate information about student learning. It can be anything from an exit slip to a visual check in with hand gestures.

2. Strategy 2: Criteria and goal setting engages students in the learning process because they are able to set clear expectations. They are able to establish what quality work looks like and understand where they are, where they need to be, and how to get there.

B. In my own classroom I currently use both of the strategies mentioned above. For questioning strategies I will sometimes as students to show me on a scale of "fist to five" their understanding before transitioning during the lesson. I also incorporate Costa's Levels of Questioning. Students are given tasks where they answer leveled questions, but they also get opportunities to design their own questions using the content covered. I also use criteria and goal setting. I will often have exemplars and non-exemplars from previous year to show students and we will have a discussion about what score they would give and why. By allowing students to see these samples it gives them a better picture of what is expected.

Instead of extra credit assignments, he reccomends that if it is that important to make it an assignment that all students are required to do, and if it is not or not even related to the learning then it really shouldn't be a part of the grade. Instead, allow students to turn in the original work late and to redo or improve on work that is not full credit.

As for Late Work he makes a case for accepting it late without a penalty stating that if students have enough time then they will turn in better quality work and penalties for work being late just puts behavior into the grade which is what we want to avoid doing.

Participation is the biggest no no for a letter grade because it is very bias by the teacher who has her own idea of what being a good student and participating means which doesn't align to all cultures, gender etc.

As far as grading goes, formative assessments are practice in many forms including exit tickets, howework, classworketc that are NOT part of the grade. The sumative assessment is the only thing that should be included in the actual class grade. The sumative assessment is the place at the end where you demonstrate what you have practiced and learned.

When teachers include homework in the grade it is inequitable since some students have a lot of family responsibilities, others have sports commitments or other non academic commitments and are unable to complete homework. There is also the student that doesn't need to practice certain concepts because they got enough practice in class or they already learned it or it just clicked right away. For all these reasons doing homework can be seen as doing what you are told even if you can't or don't need to which is why it shouldn't be included.

(determining what should be included in criteria for success)

*Use student work, classroom tests, or exemplars of what is expected will help students understand where they are, where they need to be, and an effective process for getting there.

*According to Feldman, homework is a formative assessment in learning were we may be able to check what skills students have learned or not yet from the lesson. We, teachers, may use homework as formative assessment to modify instruction and address students errors and misconceptions before students take the summative assessment.

*Since homework should not be included in students grade, students will look at homework (formative assessment) as a formative aid that guides/redirects learning while grade is entirely on summative assessments accurately reflecting a students' level of mastery in a subject.

One thing I'd like to change though, is that I don't allow them enough time to reflect on their progress towards the goal. This is why I chose student record-keeping as the second strategy. I want to create a set routine that allows time for students to reflect on the scores that they are keeping track of and how/why they can improve those scores. Students who are more aware of their progress are more likely to create goals designed for their needs and skills.

Secondly,I would make sure to have clear learning targets, hence, students should know exactly what is expected of them and why they are learning it.

Assessments should be focused on what students have learned and not categorizing students based on achievement.

Alternative Grading Practices for Late Work: Lowering a student's grade because they turned in work late is assessing behavior and not proficiency. This grading practice inaccurately reflects the proficiency levels of a student towards a specific learning target. Instead, teachers can practice other methods for accepting work late such as hard deadlines after summative assessments or a week or two weeks before final grades are due to give themselves enough time to assess student work.

Alternative Grading Practices for Behaviors: Student behaviors are distinctly different from their demonstrated proficiency towards specific learning targets. Therefore, student behaviors should not be included or considered in academic marks. Instead, teachers should emphasize desired behaviors and communicate them in separate categories that don't impact grades but still appear in student performance documents.

How do these alternatives support assessment for learning?

All of these alternatives support assessment for learning because they help teachers avoid bias grading practices by emphasizing skill-based assessment rather than desired behaviors or unnecessary incentives. These alternative supports keep the teachers and the students focus on skill development and content knowledge.

2. In terms of grading, formative assessments should serve as opportunities to practice content or skills. If formative assessments are graded, they should include actionable feedback with opportunities for students to redo assignments that assess the same learning target. Summative assessments are students' chance to demonstrate their level of proficiency. Although summative assessments are generally the "final" grade, they should provide insight on how to improve the instructional model for upcoming units.

3. Formative assessments address inequities in traditional grading because it allows students to learn safely. It provides several opportunities to try and fail without consequence. Summative assessments address inequities in traditional grading by removing the uncertainty from expectations. Students should have confidence going into summative assessments because they have practiced with guiding feedback.

Having students evaluate their own work and work of other students helps students put themselves in the position of the teacher, so they get a deeper understanding of what is required in their own work.  Still, such work needs to be reviewed by the teacher as students could otherwise end up confirming each other’s misconceptions.

I hope to implement defining what good norms are and quality work is at the start of the next semester.  Regarding students evaluating each other’s work, I can incorporate that as well, but I need to be careful that they don’t confirm each other’s misconceptions.  I think that I can do this, but it must be accompanied by a classroom share-out afterwards so that I can correct any misconceptions; otherwise, I would have to waste time unteaching students whatever misconceptions they confirmed with each other.

What I can incorporate is showing students either of what good work looks like at the start of a unit or by giving them a version of the unit test for them to analyze and discuss throughout the unit.  The former I think is more geared toward writing, and the latter more geared toward problem solving.  What I also may do is give an example of logical writing about math or science topics that they already know about at the start of a unit so they can understand the quality of the writing that I expect in presentations later on in the unit.  Indeed, doing this may help them further engage their analytical problem solving abilities, helping them learn and master the material more quickly, building their confidence levels significantly.

The role of formative assessment is practice and improvement through feedback; i.e. assessment for learning.  So, as regards grading, the role of formative assessment is to prepare students to do well (get a good grade) on summative assessments, showing that they have learned the material.  The role of summative assessment is to evaluate through a grade how well the student currently understands the material tested.

These roles address inequities by having students value mistakes as opposed to copying homework; having time and energy utilized more effectively by both teachers and students by only focusing on the students’ understandings and not other things irrelevant to students’ understandings; having students take responsibility for their own learning, seeing that in school, just like everywhere else, you have to practice (do homework) to do well (unless you already understand the material); having students see that grades are not about points you get from various areas but rather that they are about how well one understands the material; it allows for different learning styles that may not need as much homework; students are not penalized for environmental factors; students listen to our feedback on homework rather than see a grade for it and not look at the comments because they feel that they have already been judged on it and its too late to learn it.