Perhaps your classes are getting into the swing of this sensemaking thing--they're engaged and model-building is starting to come more easily. Suddenly you realize that you have not recorded a single grade in the grade-book for two weeks! And to make matters worse, progress reports or grades are due in the near future! How can you turn all of this sensemaking into points that reflect not only an individual student's effort but that also reflects their learning and accountability to state and school science standards?
This is one of the greatest challenges of teaching the MBER way. There are no easy answers, but here are some ideas that have worked for MBER teachers:
- For many artifacts, such as doodle sheets, students need not be graded, but should receive credit for completion. There are many ways to do this - stamps, participation points etc. One that has been used successfully by many MBER teachers is Obligation Points (explained here, in the Teacher Toolkit: https://www.modelbasedbiology.com/content/obligation-points
- Final products of group work, such as posters of consensus explanations, can be graded. Each member of the group gets the same grade.
- Once students have written individual explanations using the model, created group consensus explanations, had a chance to see the explanations of other groups, and had an opportunity to revise their explanations, evaluate by having each student write a final explanation individually. Grade these final explanations.
- Write-ups of labs and activities can be graded individually.
- Most teachers give summative evaluations at the end of each model or group of models that are a combination of objective and subjective questions. It is possible to write objective questions that require students to think and apply model ideas, but ideally summative evaluations for MBER work always include a subjective component, specifically, writing explanations using the models. This is what we are teaching students to do on a daily basis, so this is what we need to test.