Something that's been brought home to me by my 8yo doing virtual school is the absolute pointlessness of test grades: a thread.
-
Show this thread
-
As part of virtual school, 8yo often has to do online quizzes- the same sort of thing he might do in a class, except that, by necessity, these are all multiple choice, which means that, as soon as he hits submit, he gets a graded result. He also gets the option to try again.
2 replies 0 retweets 32 likesShow this thread -
We don't always take the try-again option, but I very much like that it's there - because it means that, when he *does* do badly on a quiz, I can sit down with him for the redo and walk him through each question, figuring out where he missed something or went wrong.
1 reply 0 retweets 30 likesShow this thread -
I don't give him the answers: I just make sure that he fully understands each question, and tell him if he makes a mistake. This enables him to think through the material, figure out the issue and, eventually, get it right - and that means he's LEARNED.
1 reply 0 retweets 40 likesShow this thread -
But in a regular school setting, you don't get the redo option. You just get a grade like 10/25, and a markup that either gives you the answers without explaining how they were reached or simply says the one you gave was wrong, neither of which helps the child to learn.
3 replies 0 retweets 33 likesShow this thread -
It ought to be intuitive that a wrong answer means more explanation is needed. Instead, we rely on giving a numerical mark, which not only puts the onus of correcting any mistakes on the student, but disincentivizes that correction, b/c the right answer no longer counts.
1 reply 4 retweets 48 likesShow this thread -
I accepted this as a student because nobody ever suggested an alternative, but as a parent now, whenever I sit down to work with my kid, it just feels totally ass-backwards that finalising a grade is prioritised over fixing any deficiencies that grade revealed. Why?
2 replies 0 retweets 39 likesShow this thread -
The further my kid progresses through the education system, the greater the disconnect I feel with the idea that I'm meant to support it uncritically, and the more I feel that teenage!me, who ended school *furious* with how the secondary system worked, was correct.
2 replies 1 retweet 37 likesShow this thread -
All this is a way of saying: as a millennial who lived through the massive dissonant shift between What School Was Meant To Prepare You For vs How Employment Works Now, my baseline faith that a specific mode of schooling is Vital To My Child's Future is, uh, nil.
1 reply 1 retweet 50 likesShow this thread
-
-
Replying to @fozmeadows
When I taught at Sylvan, one of the things that blew my mind was that we strove for mastery and would go backwards and reteach weekly until mastery was reached. And it worked. Sad that this was a private institution that charged so much an hour.
0 replies 0 retweets 1 likeThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.