Grading can seem to be a fairly straightforward matter. Make an assignment, grade it according to the key or rubric, enter it into the gradebook or student information system. The truth is, though, effective assessment and grading are not that simple. What assignment should be graded? How much work on a topic should students do before taking a grade? How many points is the grade worth or what grade-weight category does it belong in? How accurately do the grades over a grading period reflect student work and achievement? The answers to these questions aren’t always obvious and suggest an uncomfortable truth. Assessment, including grading, can be imprecise. Rather than an absolute, it is a measurement that is best interpreted and understood by the professional judgment of a teacher.
The name for the practice of assessment in the Core Teaching Framework is “Assessing with Purpose”. The icon is a sextant because that is a tool for determining precise location. When the teacher assesses, the purpose is not just to find some work to grade. The purpose is to determine where students are in relation to learning goals, inform students, parents, and administrators of student progress, and determine how best to get them to those goals. There can be imperfections in this process that the teacher must work through.
Sometimes the imperfection is in the assessment itself. I once noticed that several students got a question wrong on a quiz. The topic was solving two-step equations and at first glance, there didn’t seem anything wrong with the question. I realized, then, that the question had the variable on the other side of the equation (10=3x+4 instead of 3x+4=10) which doesn’t really change the problem, but the practice the students had done had not adequately emphasized this. Feeling that this was not fair, I retaught, adjusted my instruction and the practice for the future, and took the question out of the grading calculation. In my professional judgment, this was an easy fix for an imperfect situation.
Even when individual assessments are on point, the summary grade in the gradebook can present a distorted picture of student performance. Math homework can be an important part of the learning process, but it can cause stress for students which doesn’t help them learn. There are also logistical challenges in collecting, grading, and returning the work to students quickly enough to make the feedback timely and effective. I first tried to address this by making homework a process grade. Students that did it (or at least appeared to have done it) received full credit.
Over time, though, I realized that the process grade was not helping them or me understand what they had learned and what they still needed to work on. We were all learning that on quizzes, a more summative assessment. This sometimes led to sudden drops in grades and fair questions about why that had happened from parents and administrators. I changed the process grade to a more objective assessment which I could quickly collect, grade, and return efficiently. It helped everyone to better know how the students were actually doing and made the grade book a better reflection of student learning. This did not happen all at once. It took a few years to create this process and develop the materials to make it work. This is one of the reasons that experienced teachers matter.
Assessment, then, is not just documenting learning, it is a key part of the learning process itself. The second Core Belief is that teaching is the process of creating opportunities for learning. Preparing for and doing assessments are a powerful way of learning. Exams, though, can make creating an accurate grade-book even more challenging as teachers try to fit in other assessments to what are usually packed calendars at the end of semesters.
That’s why I created an assessment called the Review Project. In it, students were asked to find 10 problems that challenged them and that they thought focusing on would be of benefit for their learning. This had the added benefit of engaging students in the evaluation of their own strengths and needs. For each of the problems they needed to: present and correctly solve the problem, identify their struggle in a few sentences, explain the key to solving that particular problem in a few sentences, then explain what they needed to do in general to solve that kind of problem. This project served many purposes. If done correctly, it could help students get ready for exams. I could justify putting it in as a summative grade because it included content from over a semester or year. It was also a way to recognize the value of consistent work. It was not a process grade, but if students did good work, they could earn a good grade.
Several times over the years, this project helped students get ready for exams while helping to ensure that grade-weight categories had an adequate number of grades. It ensured that all students had a chance to do and show their best in spite of the challenges and imperfections. Just as important, it gave them a reason to do their best. After all, it is what students do that matters most in their learning.