Whenever possible over the next three weeks, I’m going to draw your attention to opportunities to generate evidence for those top profiles. In this case, we’re looking at the idea of doing “more than just what is required,” which is critical to a GAP 8:
Click to see a legal-size PDF of the profile poster in Room 210.
Nothing in this post is required. There won’t be a Google Classroom assignment with a formal assignment. Instead, I’m asking you to think differently about the work you do and the feedback we generate. It’s not just about our different form of feedback, though; it’s about the sort of collegiality that sits at the top of our set of skills and traits:
Click for a copy of the skills/traits poster from Room 210.
You should work together to make sense of these data, starting with…
[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19
Here is a PDF of the response summaries Google Forms gives us:
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You don’t need to read every response to get a sense of the sort of thinking and understanding we’re dealing with, but every response is here. What do you notice?
I see an unwillingness to leave a question blank, despite a lack of specific knowledge that would answer the question. That’s worth unpacking. It suggests that you are trained to try to earn every point possible in academics, even if you don’t stand a chance of actually doing so. You would never willingly leave an answer blank, even in a grade-abated course, because you latch onto any non-zero chance of earning points. But leaving answers blank is precisely what some of you should have done here.
That’s a general observation that’s worth some writing and discussion from you. Why not leave an answer blank if you know you don’t know it? Obviously, some of it is a lack of reading directions. The context for this diagnostic gives you permission to leave things blank. And that’s a secondary observation: Many students fail to read instructional posts first.
What you could do, if you wanted to generate evidence of “more than just what is required,” is to consider the specific questions from the quiz. What patterns do you see in student responses? How do most people interpret the GAP tiers? Is there a common denominator in what’s missing, poorly understood, etc? What information is missing?
Analyzing this set of data will teach you what wasn’t clear on 9/19, which is the point. If you want evidence of an 8 or 9, you’re going to have to get better at the core skills, traits, and knowledge of the course.
You might also look at…
The Summer Reading Responses
Below is an image gallery of screenshots taken from the summary responses to your summer reading assignment. You might be able to see these by loading the Google Form, but this makes it easier.
You should also read this PDF of responses to one of the questions, which gives you more information to consider.
All of this is an even further step beyond “just what is required.” The data from the quiz on 9/19 will help you adjust to the course as it functions all year, so you have a real motivation to spend time thinking about your work, the work of your peers, etc. This stuff, like the writing you did about summer reading, is functionally very different.
Which is why I’ll leave the prompt even more open-ended. What do you notice about those charts and graphs? What about the data might be meaningful? Why should we care about what you and your peers have indicated in these responses?
Ask questions below about all this, and please let me know if there are any errors loading or reading the data.