Students Choosing to Be Held Accountable

In the ideal Standards-Based Grading classroom, the students' grades are an accurate reflection of what they know and can do. As many teachers and researchers have pointed out, grading completion, or combining behavior related grades (such as homework completion, grading effort, and penalizing late work) with academic grades muddies the water and can distort the students' overall grade. I agree with this, but have come to a point where this has been problematic in practice.

The Backstory

In case you haven't read previous posts, we've been moving towards a flipped learning model in our chemistry classes. This required a strong "sell" at the beginning of the year to get students into the habit of watching videos and taking notes for homework, and to teach them to make good, efficient use of this new style. It became obvious over the last few weeks that students were not making good use of the videos (maybe my "sell" was not quite strong enough). 

Accountability, in More Ways Than One

We decided last year to use a website called EDpuzzle (www.edpuzzle.com). EDpuzzle is a video hosting and sharing site that allows you to embed questions into the videos to check for understanding. It also keeps track of what students are watching your videos and how many times. It's been really useful to have that transparency and accountability. We can easily see how many students are watching the videos, and we've shown this to our students to encourage them to watch the videos and take notes.

I also showed them this graph of average test grade for 4 different groups of students to encourage them to watch the videos and take the notes, trying to communicate the connection between doing so and learning enough to do well on the test.

With all this convincing, my completion rates only marginally improved, and only temporarily. They clearly needed more accountability. 

Carrots and Sticks

I had been resisting using grades as a way to motivate students and hold them accountable. Philosophically, this is the opposite direction I'm trying to go, but the carrots of "See, students that take the notes do better on the test" just wasn't working for many of my students. I needed a stick to go with it. We tried "Notes Quizzes" for a couple weeks, which didn't turn out well. I spent a good half-period one day talking with my students about this dilemma and how I was torn between keeping their grades accurate to what they know (i.e. not grading things for completion) and holding them accountable for doing the work. 

What came out of that conversation was that they wanted me to come around on a near-daily basis and check their notes in their packet for completion. They agreed that doing this is far more likely to increase their likelihood of doing the notes, especially over intrinsic motivation and notes quizzes. One class, in particular, had been very disengaged. Since that conversation where they, as a group, chose to be held accountable via their preferred method (one that worked for me, too), I've noticed they have almost immediately become more engaged in what we are doing and on board with the way we are doing it. Student choice led to student involvement and increased morale. Now that I think about it, that's not all that surprising. 

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