Schooling Magazine

Final Exams SBG-Style

By Mrsebiology @mrsebiology
I have to give a common final exam.  This exam consists of a lengthy multiple choice test (guess-fest?).  I'm not a fan of final exams, and I've written about it before.  However, I am mandated to give this test, so my responsibility right now is to help prepare them to be as successful as possible.  And I'm going to do that in line with my wacky scoring system by making a study guide that tries to actually help them guide their studying.  You can check it out below. In my scoring system, a 9 is proficient, and a 10 indicates advanced mastery through synthesis and application.  Since their final is a multiple choice test, there really isn't anywhere that advanced mastery can be demonstrated, in my opinion - that comes through student creation of evidence rather than being provided with choices of evidence packaged neatly in question form.  That's why I have 9s all over this document instead of 10s.  What I will do after the final is administered is place all of the I can statements listed in my final exam category of our gradebook and give students a score for each I can statement. Tools like Juno make this task a lot easier, because it allows for score breakdown by I can statement.  
But what I wanted students to do to prepare for the exam was not answer a bunch of questions that makes science look like all science is about is sitting around memorizing a bunch of disconnected facts.  What I wanted to know when writing this study guide were these three things:
1) Did students understand what mastery looked like?  (The "What it looks like if I've got it" column)
2) Could students, through determining what mastery looked like, determine if they have really mastered it or not? (The "I'm at a 9/not at a 9" columns)
3) Could students determine the next steps to fixing their knowledge if they decided they had not yet reached mastery of an I can statement? (No column for this, but the in-class fix-it activity that will follow student completion of this form will consist of a mass knowledge-fixing-fest.)
I think this is much more valuable than having students sit around for a few days answering pages upon pages of questions (what I used to have them do when I first started out in the education biz).  Bottom line, in studying for any final assessment of knowledge, students need to determine what they don't know and then figure out how they're going to know what they don't know.  It's just part of students really owning their own learning - they have to own up to what they know and to what they don't - and commit to and come up with specific strategery concerning how to fix what's broken.

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