Assessment Gives Students Opportunities for Reflection and Feedback
Asking students to interact reflectively with assessments as often as possible creates a learning environment that fosters continual growth. In evidence-based grading, assessment is a reflective interaction with one’s own current state of learning. This essentially means that assessments are events that ask students to assess their own learning regarding who they are now and who they are becoming in relation to an expectation: the proficiency-based learning target.
For this to happen, students must have the opportunity to distinguish between the targeted proficiency level and their ongoing, developing performance. Evidence-based grading is based primarily on quality proficiency-based assessment practices: “the process of creating, supporting, and monitoring student reflection and thought patterns to achieve an intended state of competency” (Gobble et al., 2016, p. 15).
As evidence-based teachers, we want students to prepare for and summarize their learning reflectively. We want them to be mindful and observant of their progress. In contrast to traditional assessment, evidence-based assessments ask students to be aware of how they are producing the evidence of their learning rather than what they produce.
Gobble et al. (2016) refer to this concept as proficiency-based reflection—examining one’s current state of competency and considering potential next steps to further understanding. These opportunities involve several critical facts.
• Assessments are reflective events.
• Students must be aware of their proficiency level.
• Students must accept feedback.
Assessments Are Reflective Events
If an assessment promotes reflection, efficacy, and self-questioning, then it is more personalized and meaningful for the learner. When teachers approach assessment from the reflection angle, it can guide their instruction and simultaneously provide students with growth feedback tied to clear proficiency-based targets (Chappuis, 2009; Gobble et al., 2016).
Students Must Be Aware of Their Proficiency Level
Proficiency-based reflection helps students become aware of questions that emerge from their interaction with the proficiency-based target. In order for students to answer these questions, we must help them develop proficiency awareness—a personal interpretation of their gradation of competency (Gobble et al., 2016). By being attentive to the state of competency, students not only become more active in their learning but also begin to trust their own self-assessments.
Students Must Accept Feedback
When teachers create assessments that help students reflect and develop proficiency awareness, students more easily understand the relationship between the feedback they receive and their learning. Students will understand that their own learning and development are directly tied to feedback’s frequency and quality. And when this happens, students more easily accept even critical feedback.
Teachers should create the following conditions in their classrooms to help students accept and react to feedback (Gobble et al., 2016).
• A learning culture that asks students to make connections, not just produce correct answers
• Events that promote an active search for meaning
• A culture focused on growth and development, not fixed ability
• Thinking activities that require collaboration and deliberation
When teachers and students are mindful of the reflection process, they engage in ongoing dialogue about student learning and begin to develop behaviors that promote and encourage improvement.
Teachers Determine Grades With a Calibrated Interpretation of Student Evidence
When examining the evidence of a student’s work, the teacher decides whether he or she has achieved an expectation. No matter the algorithm or formula, determining proficiency is never as precise as simply reviewing the evidence against expectations. By shifting the grade determination away from mathematical formulas, some teachers continue to think that grading becomes more subjective and less valid. However, evidence-based grading should reduce subjectivity. In an evidence-based model, teachers collaboratively:
• Vet learning targets and gradations of learning
• Create formative assessments
• Review student work to calibrate interpretations
When we make calibrated and common decisions about student evidence to interpret their proficiency, we provide a fair and accurate learning environment superior to one with arbitrary cutoffs or thresholds.
Unlike standards-based grading, which tends to focus on the quantity of standards achieved, evidence-based grading focuses on the student’s evidence of proficiency. In essence, the teacher focuses on the growth within a student’s body of work to determine the student’s performance. The teacher uses formative assessments to evaluate each student’s growth and final grade.
In Elements of Grading: A Guide to Effective Practice, Douglas Reeves (2016a) states, “What we ascribe to students must be a matter of judgment as well as the consequence of evidence and reason” (p. 1). Traditional arguments force logical consequence and reason out of the grading conversation and replace them with arguments about accumulating points or other external rewards. Standards-based grading attempts to bring the discussion back to evidence, but it tends to fall short because it relies on the quantity of standards achieved—often appearing more like an achievement checklist than a discussion about learning development.
Evidence-based grading promotes dialogue between teachers and students about how students demonstrate learning and how they actually prove what they know, what they understand, and what they can do. This level of discussion encourages a fundamentally different instructional framework for teaching and learning. In this instructional framework, we must engage students in how they talk about learning, how they demonstrate learning, and how they produce evidence that demonstrates learning. This differs from traditional grading discussions that revolve around points earned, letter grades, or percent averages. Those types of discussions are not about the learning; they are about grades.
In evidence-based grading, the student and teacher discuss the skills achieved and evidence skills were developed. When teacher teams calibrate their expectations, create common assessments to capture evidence of those expectations, and distinguish whether the evidence shows patterns that meet those expectations, we have a process that is more precise than a mathematical formula because we’re talking about learning and communicating about growth and gaps.
Schools might struggle in their effort to make changes to grading practices if they continue to focus on standards, topical units, task-based curriculum, rote and short-term memory learning, and mathematical averages. Their conversations can be far more successful with evidence-based grading, which centers on a proficiency-based curriculum, reflective interaction with students, and collaborative and communal discussions about evidence. It is important that the discussions about learning and the evidence of learning remain the focus—be very careful not to fall back into old habits and old arguments about point gathering or worse, grade grubbing.
Five Phases of Implementing Evidence-Based Grading
Schools should not do the work of changing grading practices from the top down. The best chance for making lasting and significant changes in grading practices is through thoughtful and challenging professional development and the creative insights of teachers who are experts in their discipline. Change does not come easily through a sit-and-get, stand-alone professional