Really Using Student Reports

I don’t know about you, but I LOVE the detailed student report (well, “detail per section” technically). I use it bi-weekly to give my students a grade for their work in the lab. The rubric that I use gives them points for the total time they have logged during the four days they spent working as well as the number of problems they completed, the number of units they have completed and their ability to stay on task during their time in the lab. Every four days I print their detailed report, attach a rubric and highlight the boxes in the rubric where they’ve earned points from their work. It may sound like a lot of work, but it’s much easier than grading a test!!

By the way, the rubric is available in the TeacherShare portion of the resource center, but it’s not what I want to talk about today. (We’ll talk about grading the lab in another post!)

What I thought about today as I was preparing myself for tomorrow’s cognitive tutor report scoring frenzy was how often I actually examine each report to see what’s going on with each student and better yet, how often I allow my students to examine their OWN detailed student report. Yes, I give them a grade and I hand their report to them every four days, but do they really know what they are looking at? Then it hit me, what a GREAT way to have students self-reflect. What if they took a look at the number of errors or hint requests that they were incurring per problem? And even correlate that to whether or not they had looked at or completed the interactive example problem? Or what if they figured their rate of time spent per problem during the four days? What would that tell them about their work ethic in the lab? And what about their mastered skills? What if they figured the percentage of skills they had mastered and not mastered? What if they compared the total time it took them to complete a unit or section to a friend’s time on the same unit or section? There are SO many things they could dissect.

Then, after having them ask themselves these self-analyzing questions, what if I had them assign themselves a fair grade for their work? I wonder what would happen? I wonder if they would be more tough on themselves than I am. I wonder if the self-assessment would motivate them to do better the next time around and to become a little less reliant on the hint button and a little more reliant on the interactive example! Or to become a little more conscious of the time they may be wasting talking to a neighbor as opposed to doing an extra few problems the last three minutes of class.

Well, tomorrow is the test! Tomorrow they WILL examine their own reports (with a little guidance from myself) and I promise to let you know what happens after that!!