North Eugene High School

IDEAS
INVENTION, DESIGN, ENGINEERING, ARTS & SCIENCE      

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Bringing curriculum to life in a high school designed for the modern world.

 

Meaningful Grades

 

Useful Assessment and Reporting

In many traditional classrooms, very little meaningful data is presented in a student's grade or a transcript. For example, consider the student who receives a “B” in an English class. What does a “B” tell us about that student’s skills and abilities? Is the student getting A’s on papers and tests, but not doing the homework because he considers it busy work? Is the student’s native language something other than English and despite re-writing papers two or three times is unable to achieve high scores?

The problem can more clearly be demonstrated in the scenario regarding late papers. Most teachers who accept late work usually give some sort of penalty. On a major research paper, it might be ten points per day, or a grade per week. A paper that might have otherwise earned a “B+” might be lowered to a “C-” after a few days. As soon as the teacher enters the “C-” into the grade book, we have lost almost all meaningful data about that student’s skills and abilities. We can no longer tell why that student received that grade.

With our online grade book, parents and students can access detailed evaluations of student work based on a set of six traits used school wide. These traits include:

Knowledge: How well did the student understand the material covered.
Writing Mechanics : How well did the student adhere to the conventions of good writing (spelling, grammar, organization, etc)
Critical Thinking: How well did the student demonstrate an ability to evaluate, predict, or reflect on the topic.
Work Ethic: How well did the student meet the requirements of the assignment (due date, appearance, length, etc)
Collaboration: Generally used on major projects, this trait evaluates their teamwork skills.
Presentation: Generally used on major projects, this trait evaluates presentation skills

Online gradebook

When a student turns a paper in late, only the Work Ethic category is affected. The paper might still be an excellent demonstration of mastery of content and writing skills. All six of these grades are recorded separately in our custom-built grade book system. On a major project there might be several evaluation measures in addition to those mentioned above including collaboration skills and presentation skills. A test, on the other hand, only shows one thing … course content.

When a student or parent views a grade report published on the web, the IDEAS grade book tallies and averages the scores of each category separately. For example, in calculating the student’s score in Writing, the grade book gets all the writing scores from any assignment that was evaluated in that category and calculates a grade based on the sum of those evaluations. The grade book then generates a report that shows the student’s performance in each of the skills being evaluated by that course.

All this information will be available to parents and students online on the secure IDEAS web site. This unprecedented degree of access is just one of the advantages of using technology to it’s fullest extent.

 

 

 

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TECHNOLOGY IS A POWERFUL TOOL

Technology will be utilized as an extremely powerful and flexible tool. The vital component is not the technology, but the project-based learning curriculum. The technology simply amplifies the information flow and lends power to the learning. Plus...kids like it!

 

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Technology