Handouts are available below

Big Idea

You can’t treat teaching and assessing competencies (ie. science and engineering practices) like a box that needs to be checked off at the end of the term. You can’t treat it like something to do that is separate and on top of the content we teach. To teach and assess competencies effectively requires a change in how we teach and assess, period.

Episode Notes

Here are some key ideas from the episode: 

• When assessing skills, many teachers want to continue to assess just the content using tests and assignments for a majority of the term and then find some way to assess skills at the end of term or the end of the year – for example, through a project or a lab based exam.
• The problem is that many students do not do well demonstrating their skills through these one-off projects because they do not have the opportunity to practice those skills throughout the term.
• Teaching and assessing competencies requires that students are constantly using and being assessed on those skills. That requires a change to our grading system – away from just the tests and assignments categories common in traditional grading and towards skill-based categories like Communicating, Applying, and Comprehending.
• Teaching and assessing to the skills does not mean watering down the content. To demonstrate skills like comprehending, interpreting, and applying requires content knowledge to do so effectively. Thus, there is still an expectation of having a good foundational content knowledge.

Resources

Handout(s): Ep107 – Standards Based Grading is NOT a Cherry on Top

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