How do you do traffic lighting?

Jan 27 2008

How do you do traffic lighting?

Published by Mr Mackenzie at 9:01 pm under Assessment for learning

I tried traffic lighting during one of the more conceptually difficult units of standard grade physics with my S3 class last year. The results were encouraging, not because they all considered themselves “green” but because the whole class engaged with the activity and I was able to do quite a lot with the responses I received.

I have two S3 classes this year and I thought that I would see how they thought they were progressing by repeating the activity. The first class I tried it with said they thought it was a waste of time. They thought I had my own opinion of their progress and whatever they thought about their own performance would not change my mind. The second class reacted differently to the idea. They were interested but privacy was a major issue for them. How could they express their true thoughts without revealing any potential shortcomings to their peers. They told me that one of the MFL teachers makes everyone close their eyes and she has pupils raising their hand when green, amber or red is read aloud. They don’t like this approach either.

Today, I decided to spend some time coming up with something different. I have signed up for a free basic account at SurveyMonkey and have prepared a series of 10 questions (the most you can have on the free account) for self assessment. As I don’t know their email addresses, I have had to use a partially-supported method involving a unique identifier at the end of the link to the survey (more about that here). I am going to try the web survey technique this week. I’ll share the results once I figure out what they mean.

2 responses so far

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2 Responses to “How do you do traffic lighting?”

# Maryon 28 Jan 2008 at 12:12 am

This makes very interesting reading because to me this is a perfect example of where a VLE (like my baby Moodle!) can come into its own. We have a module called Choice where we can give students a question (did you understand the causes of World War 2?) and choices of answers – yes, perfectly, yes but would like more help, nope haven’t got a clue …or whatever… and students select their choice after a particular task and we, as teacher get to see in table form who’s made which selection -like the red, amber green I suppose, but with the advantage over Hands up in Class that it is done anonymously (to each other) but visible to the teacher who then knows who needs the extra help.
# Mr Mackenzieon 30 Jan 2008 at 12:59 am

Mary,

Thanks for your comment. That’s me got comments from Mrs Moodle and Ewan McIntosh now! You’re making Moodle sound like the sort of thing I would like to use in my classroom if I could only

1) persuade the school to install it
or (more likely)
2) pluck up the courage to install it myself (I think it can be installed from Fantastico on the web host I use for my classroom blog)

I’ve subscribed to you on iTunes btw
Sinclair.