I weight my
grades according to skill area; reading, listening, speaking, writing, and
culture. Each area accounts for about 20% of the overall grade. All of the
points my students earn come from assessments. I assign homework and classwork,
but do not give points for doing it. I want to make sure that their grades
truly reflect their mastery of the standards.
Currently,
to align with other teacher of same language in school, grades are weighted as
follows: 5% final/midterm assessment, 35% homework/formative assessment, 60%
unit exams/summative assessments. However, I would like to change that to
reflect modes of communication and project work so that students can show their
mastery of skills and progress in proficiency.
I use a
total point system for grades. I try to limit my trimester point total to as
close to 100 points. This usually includes one or two formal assessments,
written or oral, (20 points), 1 pronunciation assessment (20 points), and
various other mini-assessments. When I rarely assign homework, it is worth 1
point. Most everything else I grade is graded on a 5 point scale.
This also me to give 5 for A+, 4.5 for a A, 4 for a B, 3.5 for a C, etc. There
is no spilitting hairs between 85% or 83%. The assessments are graded on a
rubric of 4 categories at 5 points each. You can check out our sample
rubrics here.
-SpanishPlans
I count
everything once and performance assessments twice. Additionally, my school
follows semesters with three grading terms. Each term is weighted at 30% and
the final exam counts 10% of the overall grade.
I use Power
Grading, a form of standards-based grading. So instead of using the products
students create as determiners for grades, I record the level of the student in
various skills: 30% writing, 30% speaking, 15% listening comprehension, 15%
reading comprehension, and 10% cultural knowledge. Writing and speaking include
student examples of both presentational and interpersonal communication.
I teach at the elementary school (K-4) so grading is a little different. However, I do weight interpersonal communication higher than other skills. At my level, this looks like greetings, leave takings, manners, engaging in simple conversations around feelings, and interacting with me and classmates on a basic communicative level. As my students progress through the grades, they have more and more options for greetings, leave takings, and emotions, as well as adding in modifiers such as muy, mucho, and un poquito. Gaging how varied and often they use this new vocabulary forms the base of where they fall on the 4 point scale for interpersonal skills. ~Julie, Mundo de Pepita
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