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Re: extra credit, GPA, etc.



This is also a very sane idea. I go with the suggestion made for the TST
and RTP labs by the authors. Since the labs are where they learn the
concepts, I do not grade them, but just give them credit for completing
them. Then I assign the homework which goes with the labs, and grade the
daylights out of it. The homework reveals whether they understood the labs.
I point out to them that doing a lab incorrectly does not excuse them from
understanding the concepts that the labs are teaching. Each student is then
accountable for his or her own work. The homework is actually very easy to
grade. A large part of it consists of drawing graphs of various quantities
like force, V, A, displacement corresponding to particular verbal
description or to graphs of other quantities. Mistakes are immediately
apparent.

One difficutly with grading is that when you follow the reseasearch you find
that many tasks should be exploration. As such exploration can not be
graded except by completion, because wrong answers contribute to the
learning just as much as right ones. It can be marked, but not graded. The
bulk of the grade must then come with a final summative assessment. This
particular routine is embedded in Hake's SDI labs where the labs are marked,
but not graded, and the final grade comes from a lab test. The marking is a
good example of formative assessment, while the lab grade is summative
assessment.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


Another $/50:
My course grade includes a lab component (~40%). All of our labs
are done in teams of three students with the lab report written by one
member on a rotating basis. Since the team gets the grade, I have used
extra credit in the form of another lab to allow students to make up for a
bad lab grade. Partly this was to quiet the howls from students whose
grades sank as the result of one team member. Partly this is from my own
experience. When a researcher has a bad day in the lab (and we
all do), the
researcher does more work.
The extra credit lab is done on their own time by teams (max: three
students) of their own choosing from a list of supplemental labs that I
provide. They are not any more cookbook then the typical lab and require
the same write-up as the scheduled ones. The labs are typically
the labs I
wanted to do but couldn't fit into the time constraints of the
course. There
is no extra credit for the rest of the individual grade of tests, quizzes
and joint projects.


THO

Thomas O'Neill
o'neill@csvrgs.k12.va.us
Physics
oneill@csvrgs.k12.va.us
C Shenandoah Valley R Governor's School 540.245.5088