Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Unfair Assessment I have been a successful middle school teacher. I know it sounds strange when I call myself successful, but I have received recognitions at the school and county levels for the quality of my teaching. I have a big dilemma this year. I have two students who are not your ordinary students. Selena is a Hispanic student who is an English Language Learner, but her English proficiency is quite high. She fully participates in all class activities, she functions well in group and individual work, and she is always motivated. She is an ideal student. However, she never makes passing grades on tests. Her current grade is an F. Shelly is a White student. She shows no interest in course activities. You cannot even know if she listening or not most of the time. She chooses not to do group work. If I force her, she does not really contribute. She also does not turn in any assignments. What puzzles me is that she usually receives the highest grades in tests. Her current grade in my course is a high B. If she had turned in the assignments, her grade would be an A. The course grade in my class is determined mainly based on what students make on tests, because I feel that tests are the only means for me to know whether students have retained what they learned or not. Lately I have been thinking that my grading is not doing justice to Selena. At the same time, I think Shelly does not deserve a B with the attitude she has displayed. I need to revise my assessment system. Please help me with this. Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) I do indeed understand this dilemma - I think it is very difficult to balance student performance on assessments with those students who work very hard and those students who just seem to be naturally gifted on tests and assessments. Solutions for Selena: I think Selena would benefit from group projects where she can shine as a group member and find ways to learn from other students. Selena could also potentially work well on a group quiz where she can work with other students and compare how they got to a specific answer and how she got to her answer. It seems obvious that Selena wants to do well and you can capitalize on that as a teacher by helping her to do well on all forms of assessment. In order to find ways to validate her work ethic, perhaps one of her tests might be replaced with some sort of performance task activity where she can display that she knows the material another way. Perhaps she could be given a mini in class project where she can ask you as many questions as she likes to grow more comfortable with the material - then as the class continues she could be given fewer and fewer opportunities to ask questions and do more and more of the test type work on her own. This could validate her wanting to ask questions and participate, this will also grow her ability to become more dependent on learning and listening to you as the teacher in the beginning and then more and more dependent on herself as the class progresses. Solutions for Shelly: Shelly needs to be challenged more by the tests, I would recommend creating a different test for Shelly that would take her to a different level of understanding and really give her a challenge that may force her to spend more time on the homework and other activities that she currently does not do. If she continues to get rewarded for her current behavior of doing well in the class with little work, she will continue to do that. She needs to be motivated to work harder to do well on the test. Perhaps if she starts to do a little worse on the test, she will find that she needs to start studying and working on the homework. Perhaps one day you could choose to take up the homework as a test grade, this could benefit both Shelly and Selena - Selena could do well because she is one to work hard and do her homework, Shelly will realize that if she does not do her homework this time, that it will effect her test average which is what is getting her the good grades she needs to make it through the class.