What Happens When Students Design Their Own Assessments?

With classmates, parents, teachers, and even the Roanoke County schools superintendent standing before him, high school senior Bubba Smith took a deep breath and set the two-story Rube Goldberg machine into motion.

The contraption, which performed a series of complicated actions to lift a banner, was part of Bubba's fourth-quarter grade for his AP Physics class. Students in physics and the AP Calculus class worked on the machine for nine weeks and then presented it during Hidden Valley High School's end-of-year exhibition of students' projects, most of which they designed themselves.

"We were doing stuff we don't normally do in a classroom," Bubba said of his project. "We don't play with PVC pipes and ropes in the classroom."

His classmate Ryan Crosser agreed. "A normal project is the same thing over and over again. It's very structured—school is very structured," he said.

Student-led assessments like this one are, in many ways, antithetical to the structure of the typical fill-in-the-bubble test. Students are asked to demonstrate their learning and knowledge in a meaningful way and to reflect on their own performance.

To read the full post click here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/05/24/what-happens-when-students-design-their-own.html