Effective grading practices has been a contentious issue for decades. Educators and parents have debated different methods for determining students’ grades and interpreting what those grades actually mean. This month’s issue of Educational Leadership focuses on this issue from the perspective of over a dozen researchers, academics and thought leaders in education.
One article I found particularly interesting is Thomas Guskey’ Five Obstacles to Grading Reform. He identifies them as follows;
1.Grades should provide the basis for differentiating students. The problem with this obstacle is as follows, “Is the teacher’s job just to select talent or develop it?” Obviously we want to develop capacity in children to learn.
2.Grade distributions should resemble a normal bell-shaped curve. A bell curve describes the occurrence of randomly occurring events. Obviously, our view of schools is that they should intervene in a child’s education and expect to see increased results.
3.Grades should be based on students’ standing among classmates. The problem with this assumption is that is tells us nothing about how students are achieving in regard to what we want them to be able to do. An “A” in a low achieving class may be similar to a “C” in a high achieving class.
4.Poor grades prompt students to try harder. Most often research indicates that low grades prompt students to withdraw from learning.
5.Students should receive one grade for each subject or course. Everyday teachers try to combine aspects such as achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort into a single letter grade. Obviously this will produce a very crude and often poor representation of a student’s learning.
So….what to do? Standards based assessment techniques focus on pre-established criteria that accurately represent a student’s ability in a prescribed learning outcome.
Below is an audio link to a conversation on this. – Jim Cambridge
