Inquiry Project Initial Planning

My Inquiry Project is going to be based on how we give final grades. I want to look at our forms of assessment, both formative and summative, how we use them, what we assess for, and how we, at the end, convert all of that into a final grade. I especially want to focus on how we work with inquiry based learning which focuses on individual discovery and expression of learning and 'rank' them against each other into a linear, hierarchical percentage-scale grade. I am personally very passionate about allowing students to show their learning in any and many ways, but I'm not exactly sure how then to take that flexibility and match it with the report-card style grading that many schools and districts still require. I foresee this being something I will grapple with in my practice as a teacher, so I want to start exploring it now.

Log line: Teaching and assessing for inquiry, progress, and understanding and how we assess for a grades-obsessed community.

1. Define your question (your topic should be fairly specific)	Search Topic: Final grades: what form do they come in, how are they regulated, and how can we reconcile them with inquiry based learning and varied assessment?
2. Analyse your topic into concepts Usually, 2 or 3 concepts give the best results	Concept A	Concept B	Concept C
	Assessing inquiry, progress, and learning over correct answers and reproduction	Grading convention and school/parent regulations and expectations of final grades	Converting flexible assessment into other forms
3. Choose Database(s) Look in the article indexes list under the subject guide for your discipline to find the most relevant databases	Database Choices: ●        ERIC (EBSCO) ●        Education Source ●        CBCA Complete ●        Academic Search Complete ●        International ERIC ●        PsycInfo ●        Ed/ITLib ●        Communication and Mass Media Complete ●        Web of Science ●        ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
4. Key Journals/Authors Pay attention to journal titles which keep reappearing during your search	Journals/Authors: