Redo Policies Promote Inequity

I understand that teachers implementing redo or retake policies have the best of intentions. The thought behind these policies is to allow students that are having difficulty with a concept the opportunity to take a little extra time and “show what they know.” While I am in full agreement that students should not be punished for learning at different rates, these policies are doing unintended harm to the exact population they were designed to help. Here we will break down these policies, discuss why I find them problematic and offer an alternative.

Approaches to Redos

There are many different approaches to redos that I have come across. Some teachers allow unlimited redos to any student that wants to improve their score. Others limit it to only the students that score below a certain mark, while some may only offer a fixed number of attempts. Some require additional work to qualify for the redo, while others don’t. These approaches vary by district, department and teacher. The most common approach the I have seen is for teachers to offer a limited number of redos, which require qualifying work prior to each attempt. They usually follow a similar pattern. Content is presented. The test is taken and scored. Students complete corrections or supplemental work outside of class time. They schedule a time, also outside of class time, to retake the assessment. Repeat until the student is out of attempts, happy with their score, or frustrated and stops coming. All of this is occurring while the class has continued on to the next concept.

Why is This Problematic?

Although I am aware of the perceived “unfairness” of these policies to the highly motivated, high achieving students, while they still may not be learning (which is a conversation for a different post), their use of these policies is to increase a high score to an even higher score. There is little motivation for them in terms of learning. For that reason, I am going to focus on the striving learners that often find school to be challenging. This is the group of students that takes a little longer to complete their assignments, needs a little more attention and guidance from their teachers, and still has trouble meeting with success. Part of the issue is that we often mistakenly associate speed with intelligence, not taking into account that it just takes some students a little longer to process information. We pace our classes so that we cover the curriculum over the course of the year and put arbitrary deadlines on learning. This is putting some students at a disadvantage before the course even starts. Our students who take the “normal” amount of time get to do our assessments during class time. Striving learners must often forfeit lunch, study halls or before/after school time to complete these assessments. I understand that the options are limited, as we only have so much time in a day and we don’t want students falling further behind by missing valuable lessons. They ultimately complete the assessment and are often disappointed by a poor result. Here is where I completely agree with the intention of the redo. Students are now given an opportunity to review, remediate and retry. However, with these content-based assessments, the process of reviewing, remediating and retrying is happening concurrently with new learning. The student has had challenges comprehending Unit 1. They now must relearn concepts in Unit 1 while being introduced to new concepts in Unit 2. This splits their attention, which we know from cognitive load theory is detrimental to learning. On top of that, they are now taking the time they need to practice the information from Unit 2 to relearn Unit 1. This cycle continues and students are perpetually behind. While these policies are intended to level the playing field, they unintentionally do the opposite by placing an inordinate burden on this group of students. They are now doing double or triple the work to, in many cases, receive half the grade. In the process, they are either getting demoralized or finding ways to game the system. So how can we turn these good intentions into a more productive model?

The Difference Between Redos and Reassessment.

The whole premise of a redo is to provide students an additional opportunity at the same or a similar summative assessment in order to show improvement in their knowledge base and raise their score. Once again, I am not arguing with the intent. Throughout my investigation of grade reform, one of the areas of focus was understanding why students were getting questions wrong. If we could identify where the disconnect was, we could provide a scaffold that would address those issues within our learning progressions. The biggest challenge we had was trying to figure out if students couldn’t display skills because they didn’t have the foundational understandings to do so, or if they couldn’t display conceptual understanding at a high level because they lacked the requisite skills. It became clear to us that we had to assess foundational knowledge and academic practices separately. For each unit, we take a formative checkpoint on this foundational knowledge at the end of every week, during class time. We use the information we get from these checkpoints to guide discussions. We help fill gaps in understanding and discuss approaches that may improve study habits. The whole point of this is to ensure that students have the foundational knowledge needed to engage with the course. We then looked at the practices (for us the NGSS science practices) they should be developing throughout the course. These practices spiral through the curriculum, appearing in every unit we study. Because of this, we made the decision to eliminate redos and focus on reassessment. Students only get one opportunity to take each assessment, limiting the split attention. After each assessment, students are provided descriptive feedback on where they are in the learning progression and their next steps to progress to the next developmental level. We move into the next unit with individualized goals in place and continue to hone these skills. The practices appear on numerous assessments throughout the year, so each time we assess that practice, it replaces the previous assessment. This allows students to continually look forward, as opposed to looking back. Like redos, it also eliminates the lasting negative impact of a bad day or delayed progress, but it does not place the unnecessary burden of additional hoops for our striving learners to jump through. They are now free to take academic risks, grow and ultimately succeed.