Mo Physics Mo Problems

If you've read any of my previous posts you know how I feel about the current state of student assessment. For those of you who are not caught up, simply put, this is how I feel. In my last post, I ended with the question "What makes a good assessment?"  I have come to realize very quickly, and this is not an original idea, that the best assessment is one that the teacher doesn't write. At the end of last term, I gave my AP physics students the option of taking a traditional paper and pencil test as we had been doing all term or completing something I've termed an Objective Mastery Defense.  Turns out the students like it and some said that it was the best innovation I have brought to the classroom.  What is it and why did they love it?  I'll save myself some typing and let my students explain it all.  I took all the video today and cut it on my phone during 4th block. So, please forgive the uneven audio levels.  It's my hope to have a more compl

Testing is one of the most debated topic in education today. So, doing a post on it may seem a little bit overwhelming.   But, to make it more manageable, I just want to bite off a small piece of the issue and express my opinion.  I'll be sure to take many more bites in the future of this blog. When I began to thinking about the way I view testing and the learning process, this clip from "The Right Stuff" is the first that came to mind. In any classroom environment, every student starts at a different level of understanding when introduced to a new learning objective.  Every student makes progress towards learning objectives at a different pace.  I don't think there is much debate about this point.  Yet, in many classrooms, all students are given a summative assessment on these objectives on the same date.  As teachers, we have the ability to determine when tests will be administered.  The only real firm date we have at my high school are the ends of the ter

As we at Brookfield Central finish up our 1st term final exams, I want to tell you a story that helped push me to a realization. A student came up to me the other day to talk about her test in AP Physics.  She said that she would have done so much better were it not for her stupid mistakes.  She went on to show me not how she made math errors in the free response portion of the test, but how she had the correct answer circled in the multiple choice section of the test but then second guessed herself and changed the answer. She went on to show me that all of the 5 multiple choice questions she got wrong, out of 10, were ones where she had first circled the correct answer only to switch it to a different answer. Now, it's important to point out that this student wasn't looking to get points back by showing me this. She was just looking for some sympathy.  She wanted to show me that she knew the material despite her poor grade.  It was frustrating  for me to see that this test h