It appears that a student’s progress is not accurately assessed under Teacher home page --> Student accounts and progress. A student can simply click on “Finish” for each level and the progress bubble will fill with green to indicate that they have completed it – even if they have completed it incorrectly, or not completed it at all. The only way I can verify that they have completed it correctly is if I click on each level, for each student. That seems like a rather cumbersome approach. Is there another way to verify that they a student has correctly completed a level? Or, to ensure that they can’t simply bypass levels by pressing “Finish”?
One way I dealt with this was to randomly select students to share their work on the projector for the class to see. This encouraged students to not move along unless they have correctly completed the bubble. If a student was struggling on correctly completing a bubble, they were encouraged to ask others for help.
Hope this helps,
Karen
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I actually like the fact that students can just move on and I plan for this in my classroom.
I think it was a conscious decision on the part of code.org to make it this way. I have used other tools where students can not move on unless everything is perfect. This becomes a blocker for some students who couldn’t get past the a bubble and in turn shuts them down.
What I do is give a grade for students for making the all of the bubbles green. I understand that this doesn’t mean that they have necessarily done anything on the bubbles so I don’t make it worth too many points. Then I tell the students that I will be grading a certain bubble for completeness. I pick one that relies on material in the previous bubbles so that I can see if they used things correctly.
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I’d like to second Karen’s idea and add that I do a “code walk” so students can talk through their thinking as they progress and create some really interesting games. Even in the beginning levels there might be some creative ways students are solving problems and it’s good for them to be transparent and reflective on their practice.
Brad
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@rfriedman thanks for writing in. There’s already a lot of great ideas for how to do assessment effectively using our tools but I also wanted to make sure you knew this is a question we’re working on internally at Code.org. It’s true that right now green bubbles essentially just mean that students clicked “Continue”. In other courses in our curricula we do sometimes validate levels for correctness and so a teacher can know quickly whether a student got a puzzle correct or not. For many of our puzzles this can become tricky to do since we’re usually asking students to add their own ideas and content on top of whatever skills they’ve learned. In some contexts we’ve managed to create fairly robust validation systems for our programming levels and it’s definitely something we’re going to be looking into now that the first draft of CSD has been written. Simpler things like just checking that students made some kind of change before clicking Continue have also been discussed.
In short I wanted you to know that 1. you’re right that right now green bubbles in CSD means very little 2. nevertheless many teachers have successfully taught these courses by using techniques like the ones described above 3. as CSD matures we’re actively working on ways to improve your ability to assess student progress and learning.
Hope that’s helpful and thanks for writing in!
GT
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Thanks for trying to correct this.