Scoring & Grading Practices
Introduction*
Assigning students grades is an important component of teaching, and many school districts issue progress reports, interim reports, or midterm grades as well as final semester grades. Traditionally, these reports were printed on paper and sent home with students or mailed to students’ homes. Increasingly, school districts are using web-based grade management systems that allow parents to access their child’s grades on each assessment and the progress reports and final grades.
Grading can be frustrating for teachers as there are many factors to consider. In addition, report cards typically summarize in brief format a variety of assessments and so cannot provide much information about students’ strengths and weaknesses. This means that report cards focus more on assessment of learning than assessment for learning. Several decisions must be made when assigning students’ grades, and schools often have detailed policies that teachers must follow. In this chapter, we consider major questions associated with grading.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to
- Define the purpose of grading;
- Identify classroom-level grading practices that align with purpose;
- Implement researched-based grading & reporting practices;
- Analyze the effectiveness of traditional grading practices to report student learning fully.
Purpose of Grading
Beginning with an understanding of purpose is key to developing effective grading practices. Susan Brookhart has written a lot about grading practices and encourages educators to focus first on determining what they believe about the purpose of grading. In “Starting the Conversation about Grading” (2011), Brookhart asserted:
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that getting sidetracked with details of scaling (letters, percentages, or rubrics? Zeros or not? No Ds or Fs?) or policies (What should we do with late or missing work? How can we report behavior? What will we do about academic honors and awards?) before you tackle the question of what a grade means in the first place will lead to trouble. Logic, my own experience, and the research and practice of others (Cox & Olsen, 2009; Guskey & Bailey, 2010; McMunn, Schenck, & McColskey, 2003) all scream that this is the case.
Grading scales and reporting policies can be discussed productively once you agree on the main purpose of grades. For example, if a school decides that academic grades should reflect achievement only, then teachers need to handle missed work in some other way than assigning an F or a zero. Once a school staff gets to this point, there are plenty of resources they can use to work out the details (see Brookhart, 2011; O’Connor, 2009). The important thing is to examine beliefs and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of grades first. Without a clear sense of what grading reform is trying to accomplish, not much will happen.
According to Brookhart, it is essential that educators first answer t