11 ms·

Schools are ditching homework, deadlines in favor of ‘equitable grading’

77 points by caseysoftware 3y ago

caseysoftware 3y ago
The full article: https://archive.ph/LqMuk https://archive.ph/LqMuk
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
They should just do away with grades entirely.
- brian_spiering 3y ago
  Accreditation (and funding) in the United States often times requires grades.
- influx 3y ago
  Just give everyone A's and then everyone will get scholarships to college with 4.0 GPAs. I've thought a lot about this, and I'm sure there are no flaws in this plan.
  - mbfg 3y ago
    I'm not recommending this, but really, what is the downside to this for the non-student? Companies now need to rely on something other than grades to decide who to hire? Wouldn't that be a good thing, really? For the student, it would significantly reduce stress, and so if a student was so inclined to learn, they would likely learn more/better. For the the non-inclined to learn student, yeah, not good, but then again, the non-inclined-to-learn learner probably is going to do well anyway. What i do think it would do is cut significantly down on the "i hate school" emotion, and "i hate learning" action. Kids probably would like learning more. And to me, anything you can do to get people to enjoy learning, even just a little bit, is a win.
- zo1 3y ago
  We need to decolonize education, it's not inclusive enough. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
legitster 3y ago
I have a friend who is an administrator at the Las Vegas School District and he was just telling me about this program. In his words, it sounds all well and good that students have all the time they want to learn the materials. In practice though, you now have no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter. There's no way to actually catch them up, so the solution has been to drop testing standards as well. Teachers themselves aren't complaining so much about it because it's a lot easier for them - less grading, less conflict with students, and they can stick to their planned curriculum without slowing down for students. The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing - outside of some grading chicanery there is no reason to believe that it would do anything other than increase the disparity of outcomes between students later in life.
- legitster 3y ago
  A lot of the trends we are seeing in education are mostly driven by the economics. Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive. Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better. And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.
  - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
    > (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at) Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch. For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.
guestbest 3y ago
Schools would be more efficient if students didn’t get in the way of new processes.
brian_spiering 3y ago
I taught in a system that tried to implement "equitable grading" with unlimited attempts until the end of the term. In practice, this idea was untenable for instructors. Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student). Students would wait until the end to complete the work. The result was students spread out through the content. As an instructor, you could not expect students to know the fundamentals necessary for more advanced material later in the term. The procrastinating students then would expect a lot of rapid feedback at the end of the term. Again, increasing the grading load.
- rngname22 3y ago
  Honestly sounds like when a junior doesn't make any pull requests until their 3 month project is feature-complete and then expects the seniors to drop everything to code review their 10k line change, rather than doing incremental releases with incremental code review. AKA one of the biggest adjustments I've had to overcome in working with teams.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    Also like when a freshman doesn't start their project until the night before the deadline, or every other way that people procrastinate that leads to failure. If they start getting some real practice overcoming this in high school that would be an insane benefit.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student). The teachers I know who use this policy also have a sort of "bad faith" exception, where students who are clearly abusing the system and not trying are given an ultimatum. But others are allowed to keep trying.
lesuorac 3y ago
> “If you go to a job in real life, you can’t pick and choose what tasks you want to do and only do the quote big ones,” Sometimes I think teachers are out of touch with the rest of the world. You most certainly can pick and choose only to do the big jobs. Companies certainly want you to focus on the big jobs over the smaller ones. Who hasn't heard of projects being completed past the initial deadline? I think it'd be a bit better to have students root-cause why they couldn't complete the deadline on time but the real world misses deadlines all the time.
- emaginniss 3y ago
  In that case, we should let them slip their deadlines and graduate at 20 or 25
crackercrews 3y ago
This will increase the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Students with parents who care about education will make sure they do good work. These students will be more likely to develop good study habits that they will need later in life. Students whose parents don't care will make use of the lenient system and will not learn good study habits. When they get to a school or university that doesn't do soft grading, they will be in for a rude awakening.
- lenkite 3y ago
  The "equitable grading" will eventually propagate to all schools and universities too. It's just a matter of time. Might propagate to jobs as well in the future.
- uejfiweun 3y ago
  The upper middle class is starting to get a bit too powerful with all these fancy tech salaries. Let’s force them all to pay for expensive tutoring or private school, to put that scum back in it’s place. - The rich media execs that push this idiotic bullshit
  - lacy_tinpot 3y ago
    The funny thing the tech industry was at some point at the forefront of educational reform, and now when some kind of reform is taking place the general consensus has reverted to tests are good, SATs good, college good, etc. How creative and forward thinking.
    - jonfw 3y ago
      The discourse is more like "accountability is good, structure good, deadlines good"
- berdon 3y ago
  While I agree with your sentiments, the rude awakening won't occur in college/university as these institutes are also softening their grading and programs. The rude awakening will occur in life when they realize what they missed.
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/LqMuk https://archive.ph/LqMuk
ur-whale 3y ago
Math is hard, let's go shopping.
giantg2 3y ago
"the systems aim to measure whether a student knows the classroom material by the end of a term without penalties for behavior," Ok, let's give students a test at the beginning of the year to see if they test out. Then the same test at the end of the year to see if the people who didn't test out pass. Would work pretty well to see what improvements were made to their knowledge during the course vs what they came in with. As is mentioned in the article, there are other learning related areas this approach misses.
- devindotcom 3y ago
  heh you kind of are treating kids and education like products and KPIs. what you suggest is essentially standardized testing, and the result was artificial curricula targeted at increasing scores on known metrics like the ITBS or whatever was currently being used to determine progress and budget. Devising a good system for evaluating actual domain knowledge in a diverse and complex cohort like a million 3rd-graders is incredibly difficult! But the more thought put into it the better because it's really important.
- prepend 3y ago
  I would have loved this method, my kids would not thrive with it. I loved CLEP exams and stuff where you just study, take the test, and demonstrate mastery. I wish schools did this more, but I think they want to keep you there. I had a year where I was really independently studying where I would check in each day to show off homework and tests and then just run around outside for the rest of the day. I would have about 15 minutes of “school” each day and then just play. Or I would do the whole month or semester in a day and then run around. It’s hard to know how effective it is. I had fun. And I still remember fractions and George Washington and stuff covered that year. And I did well in “regular” school after that. It’s just a big risk to run with kids so I don’t think schools want to do it at scale.
  - corbulo 3y ago
    I experienced this method in a public high school I went to. It was actually an awesome model and schooldays were 4 hours. The unfortunate thing about high school is the actual materials are really low quality. Looking back, only math is a useful class in high school (of which I only liked Geometry at the time). The other classes are too low res to be deeply engaging if you're really curious. Traditional schooling also has a terrible model of punishing curiosity in that if you demonstrate a passion for the material it likely just ends up with more work/homework (AP classes, special credit) instead of acceleration to the next tier of education on that topic. The grade school education system does nothing to reward academic excellence, literally nothing. If you get an A then thats it. You're still locked in with everyone else, so whats the point?
korroziya 3y ago
[dead]
falcolas 3y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb here - when teachers don't get the support they need, and parents are more interested in babysitting (and/or a high GPA) than having their child learn the material... Isn't this the most reasonable solution schools can implement? I mean, it's not ideal. Not at all. But the incentives and support to do otherwise are not there. Oh, and more controversially, we can't lay parents' attitude and child rearing directly at the hands of the baby boomer generation. The parents of current school-aged children were largely born after the 1980's now. Yes, people born '40 to '80 are shaping school budgets and curriculum. But they are not shaping how children or their parents behave.
purpleblue 3y ago
All these "efforts" are simply going to make the gap between rich and poor much wider. The richer kids will go to private school that won't have these backwards policies, and the poor people will go to public school and graduate uneducated. This is the result of dogmatic, racist far-left policies that don't actually care about the children but want to push an agenda with fake accomplishments like "all these kids graduated!" when in fact they graduate uneducated.
- UberFly 3y ago
  Yes, and most never want to acknowledge the real unintended consequences in things like this. There will just be even more oddball stuff enacted to "fix" the new problems.
moomoo11 3y ago
No wonder rich people send their kids to private school. When I have kids I hope I can do the same. Why would I want them to go through this kind of lunacy lol..
- UberFly 3y ago
  Was just reading that in Seattle 1/3 go to private schools at this point and many of the parents site this kind of activity as the reason.
TehShrike 3y ago
Eric Mazur figured out how to improve on the lecture+test cycle a while ago – explain something to the students, ask them a question, let them talk to each other and try to convince each other what the right answer is, collect the answers, and carry on. Here he is giving an engrossing explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=92s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=92s A text article: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lect...
renewiltord 3y ago
I never did any homework and I topped all my exams. Fine by me. Seems like it would kill the bottom end of schoolkids, though. Grading based on busywork is for mediocre kids.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Free school lunch and breakfast were supposed to help compensate for differences in home life so disadvantaged students could perform better. I think that general approach is probably better for helping kids succeed. Homework wasn't really supposed to teach the subject per se. It was supposed to instill some discipline and personal responsibility. When I homeschooled, chores replaced homework for purposes of teaching those lessons. We seem to have forgotten why we did things the way we did things.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Just because we did them a way though, doesn't mean it accomplished anything. Requiring someone to do something I would think removes their autonomy over it, and if it doesn't have a bearing on their understanding of a subject, is pretty quickly revealed as an arbitrary waste of time that favours people who are already likely to be able to succeed at it. Homework to me is just reps, which are only useful because of how things are tested, which aren't terribly useful, but at least if that's explained up-front then you learn that reps are sometimes kind of useful. People who succeed at homework were raised in a way and lucky enough imo (in that specific context) to be imbued with a sense that everything depends on perfection
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I'm a proponent of homeschooling but the pandemic made it clear a lot of people hate it. They want their kids to go to school and have a teacher. Chores had to be done because chores had to be done, not "because mom said so." If the trash didn't go out, it piled up and became a problem. At first, I would get "Can it wait until the next commercial? I'm watching TV." I would say "Yes." The result: I nagged for hours without results. Then I started saying "No. You can never remember to do it on the next commercial. It's taking too much of my time and energy to keep asking you to do it. Do it now." The result: After a few days of having his fun interrupted, he proactively took trash out before his TV shows started and then asked if there was anything else he needed to do because he didn't want his shows interrupted. But the folks who hate homeschooling and decry it as the work of the devil don't want to hear that chores are a good substitute for assigned homework. However we do it, taking ownership of a task is something we need to instill in kids.
fredgrott 3y ago
honest question... What is the difference between multiple choice tests and Thinking process testing? What is thinking process testing? Some essay tests indirectly measure it... Knowledge skills comes not from multiple tests but from seeing specific groups of things as meta mind-building blocks that we assemble as humans in our brains.
HEmanZ 3y ago
It's interesting, the actual implementation sounds like what I had a couple decades ago in middle and high school. And it sounds exactly like what I had in college. The only thing new is the word "equitable". e.g straight from the article: "Homework, in-class discussions and other practice work, called formative assessments, are weighted at between 10% and 30%. The bulk of a grade is earned through what are known as summative assessments, such as tests or essays.... extra credit is banned..." This just sounds like what college-prep schools have been doing for a long time, rebranded. I don't think it puts any students at more of a disadvantage than they already were.

77 points by caseysoftware 3y ago

caseysoftware 3y ago

The full article: https://archive.ph/LqMuk https://archive.ph/LqMuk

TheCoelacanth 3y ago

They should just do away with grades entirely.

brian_spiering 3y ago
Accreditation (and funding) in the United States often times requires grades.
influx 3y ago
Just give everyone A's and then everyone will get scholarships to college with 4.0 GPAs. I've thought a lot about this, and I'm sure there are no flaws in this plan.
- mbfg 3y ago
  I'm not recommending this, but really, what is the downside to this for the non-student? Companies now need to rely on something other than grades to decide who to hire? Wouldn't that be a good thing, really? For the student, it would significantly reduce stress, and so if a student was so inclined to learn, they would likely learn more/better. For the the non-inclined to learn student, yeah, not good, but then again, the non-inclined-to-learn learner probably is going to do well anyway. What i do think it would do is cut significantly down on the "i hate school" emotion, and "i hate learning" action. Kids probably would like learning more. And to me, anything you can do to get people to enjoy learning, even just a little bit, is a win.
zo1 3y ago
We need to decolonize education, it's not inclusive enough. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14

legitster 3y ago

I have a friend who is an administrator at the Las Vegas School District and he was just telling me about this program. In his words, it sounds all well and good that students have all the time they want to learn the materials. In practice though, you now have no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter. There's no way to actually catch them up, so the solution has been to drop testing standards as well. Teachers themselves aren't complaining so much about it because it's a lot easier for them - less grading, less conflict with students, and they can stick to their planned curriculum without slowing down for students. The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing - outside of some grading chicanery there is no reason to believe that it would do anything other than increase the disparity of outcomes between students later in life.

legitster 3y ago
A lot of the trends we are seeing in education are mostly driven by the economics. Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive. Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better. And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.
- VyseofArcadia 3y ago
  > (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at) Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch. For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.

guestbest 3y ago

Schools would be more efficient if students didn’t get in the way of new processes.

brian_spiering 3y ago

I taught in a system that tried to implement "equitable grading" with unlimited attempts until the end of the term. In practice, this idea was untenable for instructors. Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student). Students would wait until the end to complete the work. The result was students spread out through the content. As an instructor, you could not expect students to know the fundamentals necessary for more advanced material later in the term. The procrastinating students then would expect a lot of rapid feedback at the end of the term. Again, increasing the grading load.

rngname22 3y ago
Honestly sounds like when a junior doesn't make any pull requests until their 3 month project is feature-complete and then expects the seniors to drop everything to code review their 10k line change, rather than doing incremental releases with incremental code review. AKA one of the biggest adjustments I've had to overcome in working with teams.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  Also like when a freshman doesn't start their project until the night before the deadline, or every other way that people procrastinate that leads to failure. If they start getting some real practice overcoming this in high school that would be an insane benefit.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student). The teachers I know who use this policy also have a sort of "bad faith" exception, where students who are clearly abusing the system and not trying are given an ultimatum. But others are allowed to keep trying.

lesuorac 3y ago

> “If you go to a job in real life, you can’t pick and choose what tasks you want to do and only do the quote big ones,” Sometimes I think teachers are out of touch with the rest of the world. You most certainly can pick and choose only to do the big jobs. Companies certainly want you to focus on the big jobs over the smaller ones. Who hasn't heard of projects being completed past the initial deadline? I think it'd be a bit better to have students root-cause why they couldn't complete the deadline on time but the real world misses deadlines all the time.

emaginniss 3y ago
In that case, we should let them slip their deadlines and graduate at 20 or 25

crackercrews 3y ago

This will increase the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Students with parents who care about education will make sure they do good work. These students will be more likely to develop good study habits that they will need later in life. Students whose parents don't care will make use of the lenient system and will not learn good study habits. When they get to a school or university that doesn't do soft grading, they will be in for a rude awakening.

lenkite 3y ago
The "equitable grading" will eventually propagate to all schools and universities too. It's just a matter of time. Might propagate to jobs as well in the future.
uejfiweun 3y ago
The upper middle class is starting to get a bit too powerful with all these fancy tech salaries. Let’s force them all to pay for expensive tutoring or private school, to put that scum back in it’s place. - The rich media execs that push this idiotic bullshit
- lacy_tinpot 3y ago
  The funny thing the tech industry was at some point at the forefront of educational reform, and now when some kind of reform is taking place the general consensus has reverted to tests are good, SATs good, college good, etc. How creative and forward thinking.
  - jonfw 3y ago
    The discourse is more like "accountability is good, structure good, deadlines good"
berdon 3y ago
While I agree with your sentiments, the rude awakening won't occur in college/university as these institutes are also softening their grading and programs. The rude awakening will occur in life when they realize what they missed.

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.ph/LqMuk https://archive.ph/LqMuk

ur-whale 3y ago

Math is hard, let's go shopping.

giantg2 3y ago

"the systems aim to measure whether a student knows the classroom material by the end of a term without penalties for behavior," Ok, let's give students a test at the beginning of the year to see if they test out. Then the same test at the end of the year to see if the people who didn't test out pass. Would work pretty well to see what improvements were made to their knowledge during the course vs what they came in with. As is mentioned in the article, there are other learning related areas this approach misses.

devindotcom 3y ago
heh you kind of are treating kids and education like products and KPIs. what you suggest is essentially standardized testing, and the result was artificial curricula targeted at increasing scores on known metrics like the ITBS or whatever was currently being used to determine progress and budget. Devising a good system for evaluating actual domain knowledge in a diverse and complex cohort like a million 3rd-graders is incredibly difficult! But the more thought put into it the better because it's really important.
prepend 3y ago
I would have loved this method, my kids would not thrive with it. I loved CLEP exams and stuff where you just study, take the test, and demonstrate mastery. I wish schools did this more, but I think they want to keep you there. I had a year where I was really independently studying where I would check in each day to show off homework and tests and then just run around outside for the rest of the day. I would have about 15 minutes of “school” each day and then just play. Or I would do the whole month or semester in a day and then run around. It’s hard to know how effective it is. I had fun. And I still remember fractions and George Washington and stuff covered that year. And I did well in “regular” school after that. It’s just a big risk to run with kids so I don’t think schools want to do it at scale.
- corbulo 3y ago
  I experienced this method in a public high school I went to. It was actually an awesome model and schooldays were 4 hours. The unfortunate thing about high school is the actual materials are really low quality. Looking back, only math is a useful class in high school (of which I only liked Geometry at the time). The other classes are too low res to be deeply engaging if you're really curious. Traditional schooling also has a terrible model of punishing curiosity in that if you demonstrate a passion for the material it likely just ends up with more work/homework (AP classes, special credit) instead of acceleration to the next tier of education on that topic. The grade school education system does nothing to reward academic excellence, literally nothing. If you get an A then thats it. You're still locked in with everyone else, so whats the point?

korroziya 3y ago

[dead]

falcolas 3y ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here - when teachers don't get the support they need, and parents are more interested in babysitting (and/or a high GPA) than having their child learn the material... Isn't this the most reasonable solution schools can implement? I mean, it's not ideal. Not at all. But the incentives and support to do otherwise are not there. Oh, and more controversially, we can't lay parents' attitude and child rearing directly at the hands of the baby boomer generation. The parents of current school-aged children were largely born after the 1980's now. Yes, people born '40 to '80 are shaping school budgets and curriculum. But they are not shaping how children or their parents behave.

purpleblue 3y ago

All these "efforts" are simply going to make the gap between rich and poor much wider. The richer kids will go to private school that won't have these backwards policies, and the poor people will go to public school and graduate uneducated. This is the result of dogmatic, racist far-left policies that don't actually care about the children but want to push an agenda with fake accomplishments like "all these kids graduated!" when in fact they graduate uneducated.

UberFly 3y ago
Yes, and most never want to acknowledge the real unintended consequences in things like this. There will just be even more oddball stuff enacted to "fix" the new problems.

moomoo11 3y ago

No wonder rich people send their kids to private school. When I have kids I hope I can do the same. Why would I want them to go through this kind of lunacy lol..

UberFly 3y ago
Was just reading that in Seattle 1/3 go to private schools at this point and many of the parents site this kind of activity as the reason.

TehShrike 3y ago

Eric Mazur figured out how to improve on the lecture+test cycle a while ago – explain something to the students, ask them a question, let them talk to each other and try to convince each other what the right answer is, collect the answers, and carry on. Here he is giving an engrossing explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=92s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=92s A text article: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lect...

renewiltord 3y ago

I never did any homework and I topped all my exams. Fine by me. Seems like it would kill the bottom end of schoolkids, though. Grading based on busywork is for mediocre kids.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Free school lunch and breakfast were supposed to help compensate for differences in home life so disadvantaged students could perform better. I think that general approach is probably better for helping kids succeed. Homework wasn't really supposed to teach the subject per se. It was supposed to instill some discipline and personal responsibility. When I homeschooled, chores replaced homework for purposes of teaching those lessons. We seem to have forgotten why we did things the way we did things.

brailsafe 3y ago
Just because we did them a way though, doesn't mean it accomplished anything. Requiring someone to do something I would think removes their autonomy over it, and if it doesn't have a bearing on their understanding of a subject, is pretty quickly revealed as an arbitrary waste of time that favours people who are already likely to be able to succeed at it. Homework to me is just reps, which are only useful because of how things are tested, which aren't terribly useful, but at least if that's explained up-front then you learn that reps are sometimes kind of useful. People who succeed at homework were raised in a way and lucky enough imo (in that specific context) to be imbued with a sense that everything depends on perfection
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I'm a proponent of homeschooling but the pandemic made it clear a lot of people hate it. They want their kids to go to school and have a teacher. Chores had to be done because chores had to be done, not "because mom said so." If the trash didn't go out, it piled up and became a problem. At first, I would get "Can it wait until the next commercial? I'm watching TV." I would say "Yes." The result: I nagged for hours without results. Then I started saying "No. You can never remember to do it on the next commercial. It's taking too much of my time and energy to keep asking you to do it. Do it now." The result: After a few days of having his fun interrupted, he proactively took trash out before his TV shows started and then asked if there was anything else he needed to do because he didn't want his shows interrupted. But the folks who hate homeschooling and decry it as the work of the devil don't want to hear that chores are a good substitute for assigned homework. However we do it, taking ownership of a task is something we need to instill in kids.

fredgrott 3y ago

honest question... What is the difference between multiple choice tests and Thinking process testing? What is thinking process testing? Some essay tests indirectly measure it... Knowledge skills comes not from multiple tests but from seeing specific groups of things as meta mind-building blocks that we assemble as humans in our brains.

HEmanZ 3y ago

It's interesting, the actual implementation sounds like what I had a couple decades ago in middle and high school. And it sounds exactly like what I had in college. The only thing new is the word "equitable". e.g straight from the article: "Homework, in-class discussions and other practice work, called formative assessments, are weighted at between 10% and 30%. The bulk of a grade is earned through what are known as summative assessments, such as tests or essays.... extra credit is banned..." This just sounds like what college-prep schools have been doing for a long time, rebranded. I don't think it puts any students at more of a disadvantage than they already were.