Student self-reported use of standards-based grading resources and feedback

ABSTRACT

Standards-based grading (SBG) tightly links student assessment to course learning objectives, providing students with meaningful feedback. A well-designed SBG system should ease first-year engineering (FYE) students’ transition to tertiary education by setting clear expectations and enabling self-monitoring of learning progress. However, when students fail to access and use resources and feedback to guide their learning, the effort to construct an SBG system is not commensurate with the student learning benefits. FYE students in a course using SBG self-reported their access to and use of SBG resources and feedback to guide their work on assignments and prepare for exams. Access and use was low at the start or the semester but improved mid-semester around exam time. In a subsequent semester, strategies were employed to increase students’ engagement with the SBG system. Students’ access and use was significantly higher in the beginning of the semester. Insights on students’ engagement related to course management decisions are offered.     

A rural math, science, and technology elementary school tangled up in global networks of practice

This is an ethnographic study of a newly created math, science, and technology elementary magnet school in a rural community fiercely committed to cultural preservation while facing unprecedented economic instability brought on by massive loss of manufacturing jobs. Our goal was to understand global- and community-level contexts that influenced the school’s science curriculum, the ways the school promoted itself to the community, and the implicit meanings of science held by school staff, parents and community members. Main sources of data were the county’s newspaper articles from 2003 to 2006, the school’s, town’s, and business leaders’ promotional materials, and interviews with school staff, parents, and community members. A key finding was the school’s dual promotion of science education and character education. We make sense of this “science with character” curriculum by unpacking the school and community’s entanglements with historical (cultural preservation), political (conservative politics, concerns for youth depravity), and economic (globalization) networks. We describe the ways those entanglements enabled certain reproductive meanings of school science (as add-on, suspect, and elitist) and other novel meanings of science (empathetic, nurturing, place-based). This study highlights the school as a site of struggle, entangled in multiple networks of practice that influence in positive, negative, and unpredictable ways, the enacted science curriculum.