Tag Archives: average

A message to high school teachers

If you are in a semestered high school, you are about to finish semester 1 and start semester 2. That means it’s time to give students final marks in half of their courses. How do you work out their marks? Is it a matter of just looking at your mark book and averaging or tallying up marks from September to now?

Consider this little analogy I’ve shared before… and ask yourself if there’s a kid or two who might deserve a better mark considering how they are doing now compared to 4 months ago:

__________

The Parachute Packing Analogy

I love the simplicity of this example! There are 3 students who are in a parachute packing class:

Students take 3 tests during the course.

Student A starts off strong and gets an A on the first test, gets a B on the second test, is over-confident, flounders and gets a C on their final test.

Student B is a solid B student and gets B’s on all 3 tests.

Student C struggles on the first test and gets a C, starts understanding the concepts and gets a B on the second test, then totally understands all the concepts and finishes with an A on the final test.

All 3 students have a ‘B’ average in the course.

Which student do you want to pack your parachute?

__________

You don’t ‘need’ to mark the way you used to. You don’t ‘need’ to mark the kid getting 46% just by the numbers, especially if their mark was 36% at the start of the year and they are much more successful now. You can bump the one kid up 2% for the ‘A’ because they did poorly on one test the whole semester… And totally justify not giving another kid that 2% because they are short of getting an ‘A’ from consistently getting the harder questions wrong, and have not demonstrated that they are a ‘A’ student.

Equal ≠ Fair

Equal is not equal to fair. You can be fair without treating everyone equal… with assessments, with support, and even with how much homework you give them.

Assessment isn’t just about averaging and tallying marks, and fairness isn’t determined by equal treatment.

Averages and Parachute Packing

This is Part 2 of:

Average tells us nothing.

Here are some very well rounded marks of a hypothetical student in a course:

The student starts out very average with 60% on the first 3 tests:

On the next test, the student shows much greater comprehension:

Then on the final test, the student shows mastery of the PLO’s, the prescribed learning outcomes:

Now if these were tests on completely different units, unrelated to each other, you could argue that the student deserves a 70% final. However if the student was learning information that was cumulative and knowledge at the end of the course required understanding of previous work, then wouldn’t the student deserve a higher mark?

For example, if the student was learning to code, and the simple(r) concepts learned at the start of the course (that the first 3 tests were on) were required understanding to do well in the second part of the course: Shouldn’t the student’s final mark represent greater understanding of the course than the 70% final mark from the average of all 5 tests?

The Parachute Packing Analogy

I love the simplicity of this example! There are 3 students who are in a parachute packing class:

Students take 3 tests during the course.

Student A starts off strong and gets an A on the first test, gets a B on the second test, is over-confident, flounders and gets a C on their final test.

Student B is a solid B student and gets B’s on all 3 tests.

Student C struggles on the first test and gets a C, starts understanding the concepts and gets a B on the second test, then totally understands all the concepts and finishes with an A on the final test.

All 3 students have a ‘B’ average in the course.

Which student do you want to pack your parachute?

Average tells us nothing.

Part 1

It might be an exaggeration to say that it tells us nothing, but averages don’t usually give us enough information to be useful.

Individual student level: In Math class, kid gets an ‘A’ on his test on positive and negative integers. Then he gets a ‘C’ on fractions. Score averages to a ‘B’… but when the kid moves on to algebra, and most of the algebra includes solving problems with fractions, it’s unlikely the kid will do better than a ‘C’. The important information is the ‘C’ in fractions, not the ‘B’ average.

On a team level: When some team members have done amazing things and other tram members have done nothing new, measuring the average means absolutely nothing. You can’t look at averages when some team members will move and some won’t. The reality is that everybody has to be moving in the right direction, and when some are standing still, it doesn’t matter where the average is, it doesn’t matter if the average is moving slightly up.

The fact is that we are failing or we have failed if we don’t figure out where we are weakest and improve where we need it most. Athletes get this. They know that the weakest part of their performance is the area where there is the most room for improvement… this is a mindset we need on our teams to move forward.

Part 2: The Parachute Packing analogy and school grades.