Overview
While we provide useful information to help you determine a grade for your students, Membean does not assign grades to students nor prescribe any specific grading policy. This article contains some tips to help you craft a policy that works best for the needs of your classroom.
Customize Your Report
Reports provide a wealth of data that will prove beneficial for grading. These reports will also help you determine the quality of training time. Customize your report to reflect the data you need for grading and monitoring your students. Make your report do the work for you!
Use Your Time Goal to Reward Diligent Training
Time goals are a quick and easy way for you to see which of your students are training diligently on Membean. Under the Goal Met column of your report, you'll see a green check for students who have met their time goals and a red X for those who have not. If you include the Goal Progress column, you can easily give partial credit to students who don't meet the entire goal. Students should be rewarded for regular training, as the trainer is the heart of Membean.
Set an Accuracy Threshold
If you plan to use accuracy for grading, we don't recommend simply transferring a student's accuracy score directly to the grade book. Membean challenges students with progressively more difficult questions to ensure long term retention. Getting some questions wrong actually strengthens the memory of those words. When you use accuracy for grading, consider setting a lower threshold, such as 65-75%. Struggle is good for memory!
Factor in Assessments
An assessment score reflects the student's knowledge of words that are relatively strong in memory. We recommend that assessment scores should only be used as a portion of the students' overall grade so that training remains the main focus of Membean.
Factor in Writing Assignments
Writing assignments give students an opportunity to apply their new vocabulary. Use writing assignments for a monthly check-in.
Penalize Dubious Minutes
Dubious minutes are reported when a student's training is unproductive. While some teachers deduct points for dubious minutes, we recommend having a conversation with the student and making a plan with them to improve training. You may want to consider penalizing students for dubious minutes if they continue to occur after you've had that conversation.
Tips From Our Teachers
- School 1: "[My colleague] and I are grading students (vocab counts 10% of grades in all our English classes) based on how much time they spend using Membean each week. I check every week on Sunday night and give a 10/10 for 30 min. on Membean if students use it more than one day during the week. I give a 12/10 to students who do an hour a week instead of 30 min. The students who use it love it."
- School 2: "I give a time-based grade one week and a quiz grade the next week. A short quiz is administered biweekly."
- School 3: "Students must log at least 60 minutes of work on the program every two weeks. We give mini-quizzes (15 questions) every other week on the day that students' time requirements are due. These quizzes count as two daily grades each. The program issues and scores the quizzes for you, so it’s extremely simple. We give one longer quiz (50 questions) at the end of every quarter. These quizzes count as a quiz grade every quarter."
- School 4: "I require students to train a minimum of 40 minutes a week and at least 2 times a week. The added criteria is that the students should answer at least 100 questions correctly. If answering this number of questions takes them more than 40 minutes, students are to continue working until they reach this number. This ensures that students don't intentionally waste time because if they do, they need to train longer."