Based on a few weeks' worth of class discussions, classmates' input, and my honest and insightful students, I realized that I am in favor to some extent of standards based teaching. I think standards can be useful, depending on the assignment.
First, before I discuss my thoughts on grading, here is how I organize assignments to begin with. Since I started working at my current position, all of my classes have been designed to imitate as best as possible what my life was like as a grad student. Students need to do research, find resources on their own and/or with my help, do group meetings (we have one coming up next week!! I love them!! My students do awesome jobs preparing, presenting what they have researched, and answering my pop questions!! They also let loose by this point in the term!!), and work on an iterative cycle.
Just as I had to revise and revise my thesis, get it torn to shreds, and then revise it again, my students are strongly encouraged to revise their work. It just seems more authentic to me, just as it seems more authentic to never force students to memorize the kind of information I would have just looked up in grad school (i.e., anything from Sigma Aldrich or the CRC). I quiz students on the information that I feel one needs to know in order to understand the material; I tell my students that you can't write an English paper without knowing the alphabet, just like you can't do organic chemistry without knowing functional groups.
In terms of what we have been talking about in class, I feel it is strongly connected to what I learned about motivation from my students this past summer. One of my students in the class was an education major and was able to give consistent, precise feedback on what worked and what didn't. What I learned from her was that my criterion-based grading system, with revisions encouraged, took away from her motivation--she told me that she knew that she could always fix up her assignments later (although, of course, she couldn't take back what she said during debates or "group meetings").
I thought that was really honest and insightful of her to admit that to any of her instructors, and this comment has stuck with me since then. I can't count on meeting anyone that outspoken ever again who is able to speak the lingo of chemistry and education and has a first-hand perspective on my teaching style. My students who are non-majors are not necessarily motivated to master the material I pick out because it is important to the discipline and meets the standards of the institution (and all of the public schools with which we have reciprocity). I need to keep thinking creatively to think of how to encourage my students to want to learn/learn how to learn/develop their identities as learners.
At the high school level, students will need even more scaffolding. They should be allowed to go at their own pace and cover much less material than what is traditionally taught, but they also need even more guidelines than my grown-up learners. Most of my students at the high school level will not end up being chemistry majors and do not know how to study yet, so they will need a little more extrinsic motivation, guidelines on pacing (i.e., deadlines for when their assignments should be polished) and a few assignments in which they only get one opportunity to show what they know (exams, debates, fishbowl discussions, etc.). Ultimately, what this means is that I believe that standards are excellent ways of measuring student success in labs, projects, portfolios (anything that I can think to write a rubric of), but I am not sure that standards would be motivating as an overarching grading scheme for an entire class.
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