It’s time for a new conversation about grading. If teachers, administrators, and researchers have learned anything from the controversies about grading, it is that evidence is not sufficient to sway public opinion on this emotional issue. Some of the most thoughtful scholars on this subject (Brookhart, 2003; Guskey, 2015; Hattie & Yates, 2014; Marzano, 2010; O’Connor, 2011; to name a few) provide a mountain of evidence, synthesized as follows.
• Feedback can be one of the most powerful influences on student achievement, provided it is fair, accurate, specific, and timely.
• Grading and test scores are the types of feedback that parents and policymakers most notice.
• Feedback that most influences student achievement is neither grades nor test scores but rather the minute-to-minute communication from teachers, peers, and students themselves.
• Toxic grading practices, such as the use of a 0 on a one hundred–point scale or the average to calculate final grades, have a demonstrably negative impact on the academic and behavioral performance of students.
• Effective grading practices—the subject of this book—provide a path to improved student results in engagement, attendance, behavior, and performance.
Taking these aspects into account, the second edition of Elements of Grading contains a significant amount of new content, including chapters on what the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) mean for grading practices and the impact of technology on grading systems. Thanks to the suggestions of many readers of the first edition, I have adopted the acronym FAST for the essential elements of grading—fair, accurate, specific, and timely.
If the benefits of effective grading practices and the negative consequences of toxic grading practices are so obvious, why is another book on the subject necessary? It’s necessary because evidence is not sufficient when emotions and personal histories govern debates. Educators, parents, students, and administrators must have a conversation about the grading conversation. Parents and teachers who are firmly attached to grading practices of the 20th century are not co-conspirators against the best interests of students. Their personal experiences with grading systems from their own school days and scorn for dozens of failed education initiatives influence their views, all of which claim to be based on research and evidence.
When we approach these parents and teachers with changes in grading policies that represent a dramatic shift in both teacher practices and measures for student success, they are less apt to say, “Thank you” and more likely to say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen somebody suggest that we give students a break, and all it leads to is a breakdown in discipline and work ethic. All the talk about ‘fewer failures’ sounds suspiciously like ‘everybody gets a trophy.’ And from what I’ve seen, it’s not working for students in my school or anywhere else.” It is at this point that frustrated administrators demand buy-in, frustrated teachers take their dissent from the faculty meeting to the parking lot, and frustrated parents start marching to the next school board meeting. If we are to have a constructive conversation about grading practices, then a good start is to back off from the student points of view that dominate this debate and do something I have rarely seen: assume goodwill.
This book may not persuade the cynics, but my hope is that it engages the skeptics. If you are using this as part of a book study with faculty and parents, consider inviting participants to express their doubts and fears and share their personal experiences with reforms that failed. For the advocates of reform, my advice is to be less strident in claiming, “This will work!” and say instead, “Here is a hypothesis about the effects of improved grading policies—could we test that hypothesis, and see if it works with our students?”
As always, I welcome a continuing dialogue with readers, including those who disagree with the ideas presented in these pages.
Introduction
STARTING THE CONVERSATION
Whether you are a teacher or an administrator, parent or student, or policymaker or academic researcher, there are four essential questions to answer on the subject of grading. As previously emphasized, the elements of grading should be FAST—fair, accurate, specific, and timely.
• How can we make grading systems fair? What we describe as proficient performance truly must be a function of performance and not gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.
• How can we make grading systems accurate? What we ascribe to students must be a matter of judgment as well as the consequence of evidence and reason.
• How can we make grading systems specific? Telling a student he or she is “average” or a “C” does little to help students, parents, and teachers collaborate for improved learning. Students must receive detailed information about their performance so they can use the feedback to improve.
• How can we make grading systems timely? Even if grades are fair, accurate, and specific, students cannot use feedback to improve performance unless the grades are provided in a timely manner.
In this book, we consider grading practices that meet all of these criteria and discuss practical ways for teachers to save time while providing effective feedback for students.
Fairness, accuracy, specificity, and timeliness—these elements are at the heart of any grading discussion. This book not only considers how to answer these four questions but also how to conduct constructive discussions about grading policies. Perfection is impossible in grading, and therefore, our quest is not for an ultimate answer. The goal is not perfect fairness but a system less subject to bias, both unintentional and deliberate; not perfect accuracy but a more accurate system; not absolute specificity but a system that provides feedback to help students know what they must do to improve. Finally, while it’s not essential for feedback to always be immediate, the prevailing practice in which grades are delivered to students far too late for them to respond is unproductive. Many teachers work very hard to give students detailed feedback, but when that feedback is provided several weeks after student performance or, worst of all, after the semester has ended, then teachers have wasted their time.
As a teacher, I hope that the ways in which I give feedback are better forty years after I taught my first class than it was after thirty, but experience has taught me that the only certainty is that I will fall short of perfection. Therefore, I do not offer a simple recipe that readers can adopt with the confidence of certain success. Instead, these pages offer information regarding:
• A collegial process for discussing some of the most contentious issues in grading
• A communicative process for bringing all stakeholders—parents, board members, the media, students, union leaders, and policymakers—into the discussion
The importance of good communication about grading policies cannot be overstated. It is not sufficient to be right—that is, to have research, logic, and moral certainty on our side of an argument. If our ultimate goal is to make grading systems more effective (improve their fairness, accuracy, specificity, and timeliness), then we must be right on the merits of an argument and successful in reasoning with people who have different points of view.
Understanding Why Grading Is So Important
For teachers and school administrators, the feedback on student performance that perhaps gains the most attention is the annual exam. In Australia, the United Kingdom, and China, national tests are the coin of the realm, the assessments that mark students, teachers, schools, and entire education systems as successes or failures. In Canada, provincial examination scores assess students, schools, administrators, and teachers. Similarly, in the United States, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 requires that each state tests students annually, although the nature and timing of those tests are decisions left to the states (Steinhauer & Rich, 2015).
Despite the political emphasis on annual tests, however, students and parents have a distinctly different focus than school personnel. Their attention is on classroom grades, report cards, and honor rolls. The question parents ask most often is not “What was your score