The following directions will be cross-posted to Google Classroom whenever you have a GAP report due. Links to specific instructions, forms, etc., will be posted with the Google Classroom assignment.
First, let’s highlight a 2020 set of general feedback about the required writing for these reports: https://tinyurl.com/gf-gap-paras. This will also be reposted with most GAP-related assignments.
The grade abatement system is best understood as a clinical assessment of what you do over a set period of time. The evidence is objective; it might reflect but ultimately does not depend on who you are. Students tend to mistake the latter for the former: I’m a good student, so I fit a good profile. But this is evidence-based work.
One of the best resources is this essay on the makerspace. It was written before it truly was a makerspace, but the name is just a name; all these innovations have been in play for a long time. In that essay (“Occam’s Razor Wire”), the ninth and tenth sections can be isolated:
The central message is the same as it ever was: Stay focused, individualize the work, and you’ll succeed. The final message, however, ought to be in the front of your mind when doing a self-assessment:
The GAP process does not care how naturally gifted you are. It does not care if you play sports and play them well. It does not care what your parents think of you. It does not care what you look like, how charming you are, or how much latitude you have been given throughout your life to do what you want.
It cares only about what you do.
Notice the revision in there? The original post said that “[t]his course does not care.” But the course is built for you, meaning that it cares very much about who you are and what you want. Instead, it’s the assessment system that doesn’t respond to entitlement
Think of it this way: When your sense of who you are is challenged, you experience something called the backfire effect. You reject your own evidence, because one of your core beliefs is what kind of student you are. You might also have the belief that completing work is the same as doing it well, which can also be challenging to correct.
Evidence has no bias, however; it exists or it doesn’t. If your work deserves a 9, it deserves a 9. If that profile matches up to a 4, that’s what it matches.
The GAP process has considerable depth, yet it is also intuitive and straightforward. Think of it as front-loaded — once you’ve read the instruction manuals and seen it in action, it becomes a simpler process. You can avoid the backfire effect by preparing for it.
You should have read the central instructional post at the start of your time in the makerspace. After that, you can use the step-by-step guide to review:
- Step-By-Step Guide | https://tinyurl.com/step-by-step-gap
You have photocopies of that, too, if they help. It’s all built, of course, on the universal skills, traits, and profiles themselves:
- Universal Profiles | https://tinyurl.com/grade-abatement-profiles
- Universal Skills and Traits | https://tinyurl.com/universal-skills-traits
Finally, you know exactly which days correspond to which GAP scores. You’ve had the calendar for the course since the first week of school. It might be every 15 days, or it could be twice a quarter: You know what to expect.
The report you fill out requires you to prepare in advance. You must, at the end of the report, provide a paragraph or more of analysis. This written analysis must go into the form itself, which means entering all of your self-assessments at once. You don’t want to lose your work because the computer restarted or the tab timed out.
The writing you do is built on the evidence of the panel. The most common options:
- Analysis of a particular self-assigned score (e.g., of a particular skill)
- Explanation of missing or insufficient work
- Insight into your learning process
- Insight into ongoing projects
Defer to the specific instructions on Google Classroom when the formal report is assigned. You may want to write the self-analysis in a separate document to insure its completion. Make sure it gets done, and here’s why: That self-analysis is more important than the numbers.
You can ask questions about these reports (or any other aspect of the assessment model) here, on Google Classroom, or on any of the instructional posts.