Reassessment Survey

In my last post I said that I planned to give my freshmen a short survey to see how well they understood my SBG and to ask why they don't make reassessment or tracking their academic progress more of a priority. I made the survey in my Google docs account and sent it to them as a link; 15 out of 18 of them responded and their results were anonymous. Here are the results:

My conclusions from this survey are colored below.

The good news? Those who reassessed unanimously thought that that reassessing was helpful in meeting the standards. That is reassuring. 

The feedback from the students who didn't reassess at all was also interesting.

• One student said he/she didn't understand it and simply doesn't want to

• Another thought it wouldn't help, but this term plans to use their planner to remind themselves to do it
• The others said that they would consider doing it, but it would happen only if they had time and they thought their grades needed improving

Hence a little more than half of my kids are committed to doing better (which is majority, at least), and the rest are basically not motivated to make this a priority. Over Christmas break I plan to consider how to make reassessments an integrated part of class rather than something they do only if it's a priority. For example, I may try something a colleague of mine here did, which was to make reassessment actually homework for students toward the end of the term. That would be a great way to get them to review too if I was creative with crafting a reassessment that would force them to synthesize material from multiple units.

Furthermore, to help those students who struggle to make time for reassessing, this term I decided to ask all of my students to email me instead of make an appointment in order to receive the reassessment. With this new system, I am forced to write down my reassessments (making my own record-keeping more effective) and they have to set a deadline for themselves as to when they will have the reassessment ready for handing in, and I will hold them to that deadline. So far I have already had about a quarter of my class email for the reassessment of a recent unit goal assignment, and about another quarter have told me in person they plan to email me, but they haven't done so yet. This makes me conclude that many would reassess if they had better time management, but so far I'm fairly pleased with these results if at least 50% of my students are already finding this system helpful and the others are aware that it could be helpful.

Final thought: parents are excited about this system when I meet with them during conferences, and for students who are doing poorly, the parents are much more willing to put the onus on their child to do better when they hear that the student is not taking advantage of reassessment opportunities. So it's been nice for me to also watch parents redirect the conversation to how their child can take the initiative to improve instead of having their hands held.