RESOURCES

Our full collection of timely, relevant, and practical resources for the science classroom.

Ep62 – The Big Reason I Now Split Up My Tests for Standards Based Grading

Handouts are available below Big Idea When it comes to writing tests while using standards based assessment, my students need to demonstrate greater depth in their written responses in order to demonstrate greater levels of proficiency. However, because I need students to give more depth, many students now spend more time forming their responses and,…

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Ep61 – Save Time Writing Strength Based Comments by Starting Them in September

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Strength based comments take a lot of time to write. Recently, it took me 7 hours to enter the comments for each of my students in 6 science classes. It takes this long for a number of reasons: it’s difficult to find comments that match the strength…

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Ep60 – One CER Summer Homework Assignment for Teachers

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Are you looking for an easy and engaging activity to introduce CER next year? Here’s one you can try – and to add a bit of fun, you’ll be working with a colleague and collecting some summer vacation artifacts over the summer to use as part of…

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Ep59 – One Easy Way to Get More Marks Out of Science Projects

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   How do we get more marks out of the projects we assign? This is important because I want to reduce the amount of time I spend marking projects while still getting more feedback and marks regarding my students. This is especially important because switching to Standards Based…

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Ep58 – One Way to Create Rubrics for SBG Using Old Standardized Exams

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   An issue some teachers using Standards Based Grading (SBG) are grappling with is that there are no percentages, no cumulative points, no tests out of 50 or 100 or whatever in SBG. Instead, we use proficiency scales and rubrics that assess whether a student’s current level of…

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Ep57 – Can Bionic Reading Improve Comprehension in the Science Classroom?

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Are you looking for a way to improve student reading comprehension in your science classroom? Have you tried Bionic Reading? It’s an app that bolds the first few letters of each word in a text – and it’s theorized to help individuals read faster and comprehend more.…

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Ep56 – Where’s the Content in Standards Based Grading?

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Here’s a question that comes up a lot in my workshops: If Standards Based Grading is meant to assess the science skills (aka. curricular competencies, SEPs – science and engineering practices) a student can demonstrate, what about the science content? Aren’t we doing a disservice by not…

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Ep55 – Are there Retests in Standards Based Grading?

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   How do you give retests when using standards based grading? My answer – I don’t give retests. This is an excellent benefit for me in using standards based assessment because, now, I don’t spend additional time creating and marking retests.   Episode Notes   Traditional marks book…

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Ep54 – How to Use Multiple Choice in Standards Based Grading

Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Can multiple choice questions be used to assess standards? Yes, they absolutely can. But, to ensure we’re using multiple choice to assess standards effectively, we need to re-examine the multiple choice questions we use and come up with certain types of multiple choice questions we consistently use…

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Ep53 – How to Start Your Next Science Storyline Using This Type of Graph

Handouts are available below Big Idea How do you start your science storylines so that students are interested? We all use stories to teach science: when we organize the concepts and activities in a specific sequence so that one idea leads logically into another, we’re telling a story. Textbooks offer one type of story –…

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