Getting Kids Involved

I just got back from the ASCD conference. It was a great conference, over 14,000 people there!. I went to a variety of workshops, mainly on assessment and using data to figure out how we're doing (imagine that!?!?). In many of the workshops I attended, there seemed to be a few overarching themes; one of which was the idea that kids should be involved in the data collection and keeping process....at all levels. During a workshop I attended with Robert Marzano, he discussed the impact of students recording their own progress on work completion. The context of his discussion was essentially homework and how some students weren't really "invested" in the process. He cited numerous studies on how students took ownership of the work simply by having them record their own progress on individual assignments and having them reflect on the nature of the assignment and its level of difficulty (or lack thereof) and role it played on increasing that student's knowledgebase.

Another workshop I went to again talked about empowering students by getting them involved in the assessment process (and by assessment, I don't necessarily mean "test"). The presenters talked about involving students in the development of the rubric that would be used to score an assignment, or at least reviewing the criteria which would be used PRIOR to assignment completion, having the student either take part in part of the scoring or, like Marzano, record and tract his/her own progress. Apparently, this "phenomena" has been shown time and time again....when students track and record their own progress and have a complete understanding of what they need to do to achieve a certain score/grade/point, they are much more apt to want to be successful than when they are given a grade/score, etc by a teacher and those same grades are kept by the teacher.

We can extrapolate this research and findings to our classroom for each of our content areas:
1. Studying math facts and keeping track of the ones that have been memorized.
2. Peer/self editing of writing using the 6 traits rubrics and keeping a writing portfolio along with a record sheet of 6 trait progress
3. Just in general, having students keep track of their progress for every subject.
4. Have students design a class rubric for a project or paper.

What other ideas do you have to apply this research in your classroom? Leave a comment to share.