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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why do some teachers wait until the very end to assess students instead of doing it all quarter long? DC has one very good teacher who has had assessment grades throughout the quarter with no one grade worth too much. It's been very helpful for DC knowing how much they are mastering the content and adjusting their studying on the go.

DC has many more teachers who have had only had 1-2 small assessments and are having 1 last one huge one this week or next week so DC has no idea how they are doing and whether they are understanding the information. I thought no one assignment could comprise more than a certain percentage of the grade but here it is. Some are getting around it by breaking up these assessments into two parts so they are like a final exam that ends up counting 80% of the grade. How are they getting away with this?[/quote]

Because this is how college works and sooner or later someone needs to help them experience higher-stakes grading.  As a college professor, I have students all the time wanting to know "what their grade is today" - but the answer is that it's the same as it was last week and the week before because we haven't had any new assignments.  Not all teaching necessarily can be incremental (it works better in some fields that in others), and I'm glad when students know that.  They have to learn how to plan and spread out preparation and work on  their own.[/quote]

Teaching and learning by their very nature are incremental.  You don’t choose a new topic and then instantly know everything about it. Just like you don’t start the term telling students here is all the information I expect you to have learned this year, good luck and see you at finals.  If that were the case no one would pay the extremely high price for college because they could just use the library.  What they pay for is the teaching, assessment/feedback, experience along the way.

I agree that students need to learn to plan and prepare, but one of the key ways they learn that in HS is to be given assignments/assessments/feedback along the way that help them see if they’ve in fact mastered enough material.  Especially since most HS courses don’t provide a detailed enough syllabus such that students could plan or even determine if they are on pace.  Most MS/HS students have almost no idea what they are going to be learning from one week to the next until the teacher announces it.  Looking at my HSer’s course syllabi, only three list which topics will be covered in a unit or over the semester.  Which means for more than half, they are finding out week by week. So the only preparing is reviewing already covered material and playing catchup when they get the next topic and then realize they didn’t learn enough about x topic. [/quote]

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