Making clear linkages between standards, assessment, grading, and
reporting that are concisely reported work for the betterment of ALL students.
Grading and reporting are foundational elements in nearly every
educational system. Grading represents teachers’ evaluations — formative or
summative — of students’ performance. Reporting is how the results of those
evaluations are communicated to students, parents, or others. Because of their
fundamental nature, educators must ensure that grading and reporting always
meet the criteria for validity and reliability. And because of their primary
communication purpose, educators must also ensure that grading and reporting
are meaningful, accurate, and fair.
Why grading is important and what it tells…..
The first step in sound classroom assessment practices associated with
grading is to ensure that grades are meaningful. In determining students’
grades, teachers typically merge scores from major exams, compositions,
quizzes, projects, and reports, along with evidence from homework, punctuality
in turning in assignments, class participation, work habits, and effort.
Computerized grading programs help teachers apply different weights to each of
these categories that then are combined in idiosyncratic ways. The result often
is a grade that is impossible to interpret accurately or meaningfully. To make
grades more meaningful, we need to address both the purpose of grades and the
format used to report them.
Purpose and criteria
The purpose of grading is to describe how well students have achieved
the learning objectives or goals established for a class or course of study.
Grades should reflect students’ performance on specific learning criteria.
Establishing clearly articulated criteria for grades makes the grading process
more fair and equitable. Unfortunately, different teachers often use widely
varying criteria in determining students’ grades, and students often aren’t
well-informed about those criteria.
Recognizing that merging diverse sources of evidence distorts the
meaning of any grade, educators in many parts of the world assign multiple
grades. This idea provides the foundation for standards-based approaches to
grading. In particular, educators distinguish among the product, process, and
progress learning criteria.
Product criteria are favoured by educators who believe grading’s primary
purpose is communicating summative evaluations of students’ achievement and
performance. They focus on what students know and are able to do at a
particular point in time. Teachers who use product criteria typically base
grades exclusively on final examination scores, final products (e.g., reports,
projects, or exhibits), overall assessments, and other culminating
demonstrations of learning.
Process criteria are emphasized by educators who believe product
criteria don’t provide a complete picture of student learning. From this
perspective, grades should reflect not only the conclusive results but also how
students got there. Teachers who consider responsibility, effort, or work
habits when assigning grades use process criteria. The same happens when
teachers count classroom quizzes, formative assessments, homework, punctuality
of assignments, class participation, or attendance.
Progress criteria are used by educators who believe the most important
aspect of grading is how much students gain from their learning experiences.
Other names for progress criteria include learning gain, improvement scoring,
value-added learning, and educational growth. Teachers who use progress
criteria look at students’ improvement over a period of time, rather than just
where they are at a given moment. Scoring criteria may be highly individualized
among students. For example, grades might be based on the number of skills or
standards in a learning continuum that students mastered and on the adequacy of
that level of progress for each student. Most of the research evidence on
progress criteria comes from studies of individualized instruction and special
education programs.
After establishing explicit indicators of product, process, and progress
learning, teachers then assign separate grades to each indicator. In this way,
they keep grades for responsibility, learning skills, effort, work habits, or
learning progress distinct from grades that represent students’ level of
achievement or performance. The intent is to provide a more accurate and
comprehensive picture of what students accomplish in school.
Typically, the “achievement grade” is expressed as a letter grade or
percentage that represents the teacher’s best judgment of the student’s level
of performance relative to the explicit learning objectives for the class or
course. Computations of grade point averages (GPA) and class ranks are
exclusively based on these achievement or product grades. For non-academic
factors such as homework, class participation, effort, and learning progress,
teachers typically record numerical marks (e.g., 4 = consistently,
3 = usually, 2 = sometimes, and 1 = rarely).
The development of rubrics helps make this process explicit for students and
parents. For example, in the case of homework, teachers may use categories such
as: 4 = all completed and turned in on time; 3 = only one
or two missing or incomplete; 2 = three to five missing or
incomplete; 1 = more than five missing or incomplete. The key
is to ensure that students understand the various performance levels so they
know exactly what the mark signifies and what must be done to improve the mark.
Teachers who report multiple grades for these different criteria don’t
have to worry about how to weight or combine the grading evidence. This avoids
difficult arguments about the appropriateness of various weighting strategies.
Reporting multiple grades also increases the validity, the reliability, and the
fairness of the grading process. Furthermore, to the degree that classroom
assessments of student learning are aligned with student learning outcomes
addressed in large-scale state assessments, the relationship between product or
achievement grades and the accountability assessment results will be much
stronger.
