Wednesday, April 8, 2009

What does the grade mean?

I teach a class for Education grad students in our School Library Certification program called Technology for School Library Media Centers (SLMC). You can read my tweets about grading final papers on Twitter.

Here are some i-ruminations.

I have 2 students who are particularly good writers. They are engaging. They're thoughtful. They know how to follow my rubric.

(Synopsis of an article, 30%; reflection on the article or its topic, 30%; application of a related idea to current or future practice as a School Library Media Specialist; value added, i.e., some identifiable extra bit of work that a peer might not be doing such as researching the topic online, 10%.)

Every year I can recommend students for Pennsylvania School Library Association's Outstanding Student Librarian Award. Here are the qualifications:

  • Maintains a 3.0 GPA (or equivalent) in their major.
  • Displays outstanding leadership qualities and has potential to be a future leader in PSLA.
  • Demonstrates an interest in professional action.
  • Dedication to the school library field as a profession.

In preparation for doing this next Spring, I've been paying close attention to all of my students and these 2 excellent have risen to the top.

I have several other students who are not such good writers. A couple I've even referred to our writing center for help with grammar, punctuation, idea development, etc. One student whom I referred did not impress me at all with her first paper
(of 4) . By the 2nd paper, it was clear that she needed a referral. She took my suggestion gamely and sought help for the last 2 papers. Last night I did a once-over of the final paper and I was thrilled. Something worked. Yet when I think about students whom I'd like to commend for this PSLA award, she doesn't come first to mind.

Why not? After talking to her about her earlier papers, I knew that writing was not something she considered herself to be good at. But she is a practicing school librarian who just needs a master's degree to her name. She claims she's a doer not a writer, so she taught herself how to use her new SMART Board. Well that's good, isn't it? Show's potential? Writing skills shouldn't limit her. Indeed, the fact that she took my suggestion to get tutoring help sets her even further apart as an achiever than natural writers.

What may be related (or not) is that she came into the class with few technology skills. Students like her tend to write about topics that, though fascinating, have gotten a lot of attention already and hence can become trite for a professor to read: blogs, wikis, social networking.

Naturally, I can't ethically and don't grade students based on what they bring into the class technologically. I grade them on the rubric which deals with the topics; both basic and advanced. But if more novice students with weaker writing skills write about subject matter that can seem trite to me, how will they stand out as potential award recipients? This student wrote her last paper on website evaluation. Those excellent writers wrote on open source applications and smartphones for accessing web content, respectively. The latter topics are atypical and they wrote insightfully. The former topic is more basic but her writing improved drastically. So who gets a commendation? Beats me.

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