Entrance Slip: Reading on marks in math or physics (Boaler or Sarte et al paper)

I liked this reading (http://einsights.ogpr.educ.ubc.ca/v14n01/articles/sarte/index.html) because it is highly relevant to me right now. I was in my first ever classroom observation session yesterday and students in Science 10 were learning about gene alleles and traits. Briefly, this has to do with how certain alleles are dominant over other alleles: if B=brown fur, b=black fur, then BB= brown animal, Bb= brown animal, bb= black animal. When I asked one of the students if she understood this concept she said "Yes, when the letters are both uppercase it's homozygous and when they aren't it's heterozygous." I took a step back and asked the student "Yeah, but do you understand where in the body these 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' letters come into play? Like how are these pairs of letters even relevant to our bodies?" She had no answer for me. Now this is just one student, but I feel like she represents more students in the lack of conceptual and contextual knowledge. I believe these students are learning content for the goal of doing well on a test, for the goal of obtaining an excellent grade. Do I blame her? No, totally not. I would have, and did, do the same thing throughout my schooling because my grades defined me as a student.

What can we do to change this type of learning? In my opinion, it is the assessment and the grading that has to change. The reason students are learning this way is because of their objective: grades. If we change the way assessment is done, making it more open ended and more based on how deep or powerful your thinking is about a certain topic, instead of how well you memorized a way to answer a particular type of question, then I believe we can help change the mindset of students. This would theoretically lead them to learning for themselves instead of learning for their grade. So yes, I do believe some form of assessment and grades with percentages are necessary, however the way in which we grade should change to account for learning, not memorizing.

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