Creating student-friendly checklists as formative assessments to drive standards-based teaching and learning
Checklists are a step below or before rubrics. They are formative assessment tools that the students can use as part of their process while doing an assignment. Checklists can be used to scaffold big, complex, or multi-part assignments. Checklists are more student-friendly than rubrics, which sometimes have too much teacher-y language crammed on them.
Check out the sample checklists. The "Teacher Guidelines for Creating Students Checklists" explains most of Burke's major ideas, which I summarized below the picture:
- use vocabulary from the state standards and from class (important people, new vocab words, etc.)
- chunk the checklist into small, logical groups
- arrange the checklist in sequential order -- the same order that the kids will do their work in
- make the grading easy -- 1 for done, 0 for do over or incomplete
Checklists can be used by students to check their own work or a classmate's work. The checklist should be written in question form (Do you have a title? Did you show all your work?) so that the student must answer with a Yes or No.
Some checklists may require students to rewrite their information; for example: Did you include two statistics? ______ and _______.
Here's an example of a checklist for graphing linear equations using slope-intercept form. What do you guys think?
My opinion:
- There is no quality measure on checklists -- it's just "did you do it?" We like to hold our students to a higher level of rigor than just completion, but checklists can be a good first step. I like to use them more to help get students organized when I require them to have a lot of parts in a big project, rather than (for example) writing an essay.
- I might add in a column on the right for written feedback. I'd like to have space to make notes on the quality of their work, give suggestions, or give praise.
- I do not like that she grades them. If they're supposed to be for formative assessment, why do you need to stick a grade on it? The student will see the total number of points and zone out the other, useful information provided by the checklist.
- Checklists do make it easy to see where reteaching needs to happen. If I notice that none of my students can check off a certain section, I know that nobody got it.
- Checklists can easily be turned into rubrics. If the student is already familiar with the criteria of the assignment from the checklist, it will be a lot easier for them to understand the rubric with the same language.
I have found checklists to be extremely helpful to keep kids on task and to help SPED kids keep up with the rest of the group. I learned the hard way that I need to require that students write actual information into the checklist. Otherwise, many just check "yes" all the way down without really looking at it.
ReplyDeleteThat math checklist isn't really a checklist - it's a flowchart! Still a cool assignment, though.
ReplyDeleteI think the relationship between checklists and rubrics is tricky. If you manage to put quality measures into the checklist, then do you really need a rubric at all? I agree with Elyse's distinction that checklists are for managing big projects, and rubrics are for measuring the quality of essay-type assignments. A major essay can have a checklist in order to make it manageable, but there can be items on the checklist that help guide students to completing the paper that don't necessarily show up on the rubric.
Lisa - You bring up an important point - it is essential that students understand what each item actually means on the checklist. Again, having students complete a checklist with an example seems like a useful classroom exercise. I like the idea of having students fill out information on the checklist itself. But doesn't it get cluttered? Can you upload an example?