Reading Chapter 3, I ran across this gem of an idea...
Some teachers wonder why a class should spend time looking at other students' work when they could be doing their own work, but as many teachers have discovered, students are much better at spotting errors and weaknesses in the work of others than they are in their own. Once students have pointed out such errors or weaknesses, they are more likely to avoid repeating them in their own work.
On the page prior to this quote, there was an example of a middle school science teacher teaching about writing lab reports. The teacher provided each group of students a set of 5 sample lab reports of varying quality and asked the students to rank them in order of quality. Neat idea, but I don't teach science.
I didn't really think much about it until I turned the page and read the quote above, which made me think about AP Exam Review. I know the College Board posts student samples, but those tend to be mostly high scoring papers, not a variety of papers. When we are training to grade a question, we are given a packet of 30 or so student papers so that we can see a variety of scores (0 through 4). Those training papers are not allowed to be posted, but I am thinking we could develop our own database of student examples throughout the year to be used during AP review. Even if it was just part of a question, like the cereal comparison problem, part a from 2008, having our students read and rank the responses in order of quality might be a worthwhile exercise.
1 comment:
I love this idea. We've done a little bit of that (with the good examples provided, plus me making up a couple not so good)and then graded their work on the same question. I think it would be really helpful.
I was actually thinking of keeping some of my students work (from a variety of levels) so I can use them like that next year.
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