During the research process, several articles described the difficulty of getting teachers to be upfront about their grading policies. It seemed to be a personal, subjective and sensitive topic. However, researchers found that teachers were more willing to explain their grading techniques and philosophy if they felt confident their school system had articulated a plan with guidelines for them to follow, therefore making the process less subjective (Howley, Kusimo & Parrott, 1999). In addition to examining the overall grading protocol, looking at how individual assessments are approached by the teacher within the classroom has a large impact on how the students attempt the assessment (Brookhart & DeVogel, 1999). A teacher may have an overall fair grading policy when combining assessment scores, however if how they are grading each assessment is not consistent, then the overall validity is irrelevant.
Every student deserves a high-quality education that prepares them for college and beyond. Teachers’ grades can affect students not only academically, but emotionally and socially (Brookhart & DeVogel, 1999). Grades are used for recommendation and placements which can vastly determine a student’s path beyond K-12 education. If a student is told in the form of grades throughout their life that they are an “A” or “B” student, when in reality these scores are earned from attendance and homework completion, not actual retained knowledge, then this student may not be able to identify they have areas of weakness (Quinn, 2013). This could greatly affect a student in the future because they do not know their complete learning profile. Comparatively, if a student consistently earns “Ds” due to poor behavior and participation, yet aces the unit ...
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...to authentically assess their work and truly focus on grading what students learn, not all the extraneous elements that can be include in a grade such as effort, participation, attendance and behavior. An honest reflection of student learning can still look very different pending if a teacher is using more traditional or progressive grading practices. Traditional practices use a 0-100 point scale and average end of year grades, including zeros, between many categories including all assessments, effort, homework and even behavior (Hanover Research, 2013). Progressive grading practices include using only product instead of process, eliminating effort components and disallowing zeros in the gradebook. This proposal aims to determine if using more progressive grading practices show a more authentic representation of students learning and achievement.
Literature Review
In “How Grading Reform Changed Our School,” author Jeffrey A. Erickson discusses about how it is common in high schools to pass each student by their accumulated average of the entire class period. He described many examples to display the way of grading in high schools such as in behaviors, lessons, and tasks. He talks about the changes that were made and were in effect to achieve a grading average that reflects the student 's’ abilities and knowledge .
Current educational policy and practice asserts that increased standardized student testing is the key to improving student learning and is the most appropriate means for holding individual schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Instead, it has become a tool solely for summarizing what students have learned and for ranking students and schools. The problem is standardized tests cannot provide the information about student achievement that teachers and students need day-to-day. Classroom assessment can provide this kind of information.
Since the U.S. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind program, standardized testing has become the norm for American schools. Under this system, each child attending a school is required to take a standardized test at specific grade points to assess their level of comprehension. Parents, scholars and all stakeholders involved take part in constant discussions over its effectiveness in evaluating students’ comprehension, teachers’ competency and the effects of the test on the education system. Though these tests were put in place to create equality, experts note that they have created more inequality in the classroom. In efforts to explore this issue further, this essay reviews two articles on standardized testing. This essay reviews the sentiments of the authors and their insight into standardized examination. The articles provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that standardized tests are not effective at measuring a teacher’s competency because they do not take into account the school environment and its effect on the students.
A third and the most obvious way that educators characterize the needs and abilities of their students is with grades. Whether your in first grade and get U's or S's, or your in highschool and get A's, B's, C's, D's, or F's teachers are always judging students ability levels. Anoth...
In other words, two teachers may give the same assignment two completely different grades based on their own grading style. This puts an incredible amount of stress on a student because they need to complete assignments that will satisfy their current teacher, whose expectations and grading style could be very similar or very different from the student’s previous teacher. Alfie Kohn believes that the influence grades have on a student’s life doesn’t help this situation, and may even make it worse by providing students with a false sense of security about their knowledge. In her article “From Degrading to De-grading”, she states that scores on tests can be largely based on how the test was written and what skills were tested (Kohn 240). Therefore, it is up to teachers to identify what topics students must master in order to be proficient and score well on standardized tests. But when the class is not structured with a consideration for the material used on such tests, students enter the test blind to the skills that they will be expected to know and use. Anyone can memorize a list of facts off a study guide and score well on a multiple choice test the next day, but skills such as analyzing literature and interpreting a handful of graphs containing data from a scientific experiment are skills that require time and hours of instruction to master.
In today’s society we feel the need to be graded in order to learn. The topic of the grading system has sparked three essays, by three different authors, about the pros and cons of the grading system. First, Jerry Farber, professor at University of California at San Diego, wrote A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System (333). Next is Steven Vogel, professor at Denison University, who wrote Grades and Money (337). The last two authors in this compilation are Stephen Goode and Timothy W. Maier. They both are journalists for Insight on the News. While each of these authors have their own point of view on the grading system, all three essays talk about how being graded affects learning.
She reviews the history of summative assessment in the United States starting in the late 1800s. She explains that there are two basic forms of summative assessment 1) “Teacher judgment in the form of grading classroom summative assessments and assigning report card grades” and 2) “External testing for scientific, program, and institutional evaluation purposes”. She reviews the history of teacher judgment and explains that there is a lack validity and reliability of these judgements which is why the use of standardized testing has been preferred in the United
As a mother of three students and me being a student, it is evident that our current grading system is no longer efficient. The grading system that once might have worked is no longer an effective means of measure in the 21st Century. For us to overlook the thoughts of a new improved way of grading or evaluating students, only restrains our ability to put into place something more current and something more efficient. Something that could perhaps empower our students to perform at greater levels, or something that could perhaps embolden our students to want to learn. Relying on the traditional way of grading, can actually be more harmful than helpful when it comes to empowering our students and calculating or measuring their growth.
Shepard, L. & Hannaway, J. & Baker, E. (2009). Standards, Assessments, and Accountability: Education Policy White Paper. National Academy of Education. Retrieved on March 18, 2012 from: http://www.naeducation.org/Standards_Assessments_Accountability_White_Paper.pdf
In the regular grading scale, grades do vary widely because of these four factors: a teacher's conception of achievement, a teacher's sense of equity and rigor a student's effort. The student's knowledge is based on the graded assignments that the student has completed. Getting rid of these standardized testings removes the insecurities that student's have due to low score and many more factors. Abolishing this test can lead to recognition of our grading differences and create a common conception of achievement on our own based on what we need to work on
Standardized testing piles an immense amount of pressure onto all parties involved. A report compiled by Joan L. Herman and Shari Golan entitled Effects of Standardized Testing on Teachers and Learning– Another Look explains the main causes of pressure from standardized testing. School districts use the scores to evaluate teachers and hold teachers accountable for the scores. Insufficient performance could endanger the teacher’s job and poten...
Retention is the process of keeping students at the grade they fail. However, according to Donald R. Moore, the executive director of Designs for Change, a Chicago non-profit group that strives to improve schools, “It’s a politically popular initiative, but it harms kids in the long term.” (Gewertz, 1, 13 2002) talking about repeating the same grade. Holding students back a grade without changing the instructional strategies is ineffective. Much evidence suggests that the achievement of retained stud...
Teachers have always used grades to measure the amount a student has learned. This practice is becoming ineffective. Many students have a wide range of grades, which show that grades may not show what a student really knows. Therefore, the standard grading system should be replaced. Some reasons why grades should be replaced are bad grades can hinder a child’s performance, grades define who a student is in the classroom, and grades are not an effective way to see if students have learned the material. The current grading system should be upgraded and every school should incorporate the plus/minus system in their method of grading.
By nature, most students are brought up in an academic environment motivated to get A’s and B’s on their report cards. Those grades sometimes don’t thoroughly report how much a student has learned or gained knowledge in each topic. Some instructors throw in factors totally unrelated to learning, when the main objective of academic institutions is to learn. In order to clearly demonstrate how much a student has learned in the classroom, schools should change their current grading system and teach students how to learn.
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...