Final Post

I loved the example of the graphic organizer on page 142. In my class I have previously used the "spirit" of the idea of the graphic organizer. I try to encourage the student taking responsibility and making corrections to a test on a separate sheet of paper where they will show all of the work or some other explanation for why they missed the problem, as well as the new solution. The benefit is two fold - 1) the student is rewarded for making the appropriate corrections by receiving half of their missed points added back to their score, and 2) I know that they are putting time and effort into correcting the problems and understanding the concepts so that they can avoid future errors. This is more valuable to me than cramming for a test and forgetting the material as soon as they walk out of the classroom. I am definitely going to adapt the organizer on page 142 to my chemistry class. Since chemistry is very close to math in concepts, I won't have to make very many changes to the organizer itself, I would just reformat it for multiple questions (not 1 page per missed question).

While on the subject of grades, I agree with Ms. Blackburn that the students should not just be assigned busy work and work that is graded for "completion" or "effort". While I believe that students need to be challenged with a rigorous amount of work, I do think that the work assigned must be emphasized as important to them and then followed up as important to us by taking the time to actually grade it. I know we all get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of time/effort it takes to grade a class set of papers, and the tendency is to give each paper a once over, and give a completion grade. I personally have done this and am trying to move away from assigning work that is essentially "completion". Chemistry takes a lot of practice and I am still trying to work my way out of grading for completion and not accuracy and understanding. I would enjoy the opinions of others on how they accomplish this.