Moving Forward With Success Criteria

Kristen's combined Grade 5/6 has been working on graphing.  They have been looking at graphs and creating graphs on a variety of topics.  Kristen found that her students were struggling when physically creating a graph.  They are able to read a graph, and make assumptions and interpretations about the graph, but don't always pick the most appropriate graph for the data set they are working with.

To help them overcome this difficulty she created success criteria with all of the things she is looking for in a good graph.  On her success criteria you can see how she covers some of the "basics" of graphing (e.g., my graph has a title and labels) but also covers some of the application / communication aspects of graphing (e.g., I can explain why the graph I chose is the most appropriate, My scale is appropriate for the data I'm using because....)

Here is her success criteria for the unit:

It now makes things so much more clearer for the students, because they know what is expected in their work, and it also gives Kristen an anchor to draw some of her descriptive feedback from (e.g., The graph that you chose to represent the data works well as it makes the comparison between the two choices very clear.  How could you have used a different title to match your survey question a little bit better?)  Both of these things (the success criteria and the descriptive feedback) are going to really have a positive impact on student achievement.