Specifications grading & New England IBL Community

Dear Colleagues, Friends, & Supporters,

We just facilitated IBL workshops at Holyoke Community College (MA) and the north-eastern MAA meeting. It was wonderful to connect with colleagues close by. We are excited to work with a group of colleagues toward a regional IBL community. We are planning a day-long IBL conference in New England in the fall. If you are interested in being involved with a regional IBL community, send us an email!

With summer starting, our next blog invites you to think deeply about grading: Christine von Renesse used specifications grading in all her courses during the last academic year and is sharing her experiences.

If you are interested in a traveling workshop, please let us know.

We hope you will have a wonderful summer,

Julian Fleron, Phil Hotchkiss, Volker Ecke, & Christine von Renesse.

p.s. In case you have missed it: our website now allows faculty to create a free account and access teacher materials to some of our books. We are working on completing the teacher materials for all the books. Please have a look and tell us what you think.

We always love having visitors. Let us know if you are interested in visiting us at Westfield.

Specifications Grading (and IBL)

There were several things I didn’t like about grading...I didn’t like agonizing about the exact number of points to give, grading homework felt more summative than formative to me and I wasn’t sure if students learned from my written comments. I was also confused about the fact that a “B” could look many different ways. Then I read the book “Specifications Grading” by Linda B. Nilson. While this book doesn’t focus on mathematics it gave me lots of ideas and the goal to change what I am doing...

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