Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Are you looking for an easy and engaging activity to introduce CER next year? Here’s one you can try – and to add a bit of fun, you’ll be working with a colleague and collecting some summer vacation artifacts over the summer to use as part of…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   How do we get more marks out of the projects we assign? This is important because I want to reduce the amount of time I spend marking projects while still getting more feedback and marks regarding my students. This is especially important because switching to Standards Based…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   An issue some teachers using Standards Based Grading (SBG) are grappling with is that there are no percentages, no cumulative points, no tests out of 50 or 100 or whatever in SBG. Instead, we use proficiency scales and rubrics that assess whether a student’s current level of…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Are you looking for a way to improve student reading comprehension in your science classroom? Have you tried Bionic Reading? It’s an app that bolds the first few letters of each word in a text – and it’s theorized to help individuals read faster and comprehend more.…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Here’s a question that comes up a lot in my workshops: If Standards Based Grading is meant to assess the science skills (aka. curricular competencies, SEPs – science and engineering practices) a student can demonstrate, what about the science content? Aren’t we doing a disservice by not…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   How do you give retests when using standards based grading? My answer – I don’t give retests. This is an excellent benefit for me in using standards based assessment because, now, I don’t spend additional time creating and marking retests.   Episode Notes   Traditional marks book…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Can multiple choice questions be used to assess standards? Yes, they absolutely can. But, to ensure we’re using multiple choice to assess standards effectively, we need to re-examine the multiple choice questions we use and come up with certain types of multiple choice questions we consistently use…

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Handouts are available below Big Idea How do you start your science storylines so that students are interested? We all use stories to teach science: when we organize the concepts and activities in a specific sequence so that one idea leads logically into another, we’re telling a story. Textbooks offer one type of story –…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   How do you have students practice developing models? Check out what I had my students complete recently – it’s my Video Game Cladogram Activity, which shows how different items are linked to each other. I use this activity to have students analyze, categorize, and create models from…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Evaluating arguments, claims, and lab results is a science skill that needs to be taught and assessed in the NGSS as well as the BC Science Curriculum. How do you assess it? Today, I share two types of the questions I generate for labs and tests to…

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