By Larry Graykin.
My son Alec, a junior at Concord (NH) High School, shared a fascinating tidbit with me recently. His school has shifted to a new way of grading. Homework’s value in this new system? 0%.
That’s not to say that the school has abolished homework. On the contrary; he has as much or more assigned as ever…it just doesn’t count — at all. His teachers insist the homework is very important, for the practice is crucial for understanding, but no credit of any kind is earned by doing the work.
In his classes now, he says, he has formative and summative assessments. The formative assessments have the same (non-)value as homework. 100% of his grade is his performance on the summative assessments given in class–which are usually tests.
This is where the latest grading reform wants to place us: We must define specific elements of knowledge as essential, and assign grades based on demonstration of mastery of those elements. Grades will be a direct reflection of the comparative success of the student in assimilating and demonstrating; after all, say the advocates, isn’t that what it’s all about?
If the goal in education is arriving at a predefined set of specific destinations, then yes, that is what it’s all about. But what a dismal goal!
Education should be about the journey, not the destination. As important as any given content might be, individual facts and skills pale in comparison to the development of lifelong learners.
I’d like Alec to learn some facts and skills in his classes, but my deeper hope is that he learns the value of work, the patterns required for success in learning, and the joy of claiming new understanding. And I’d like him to have a series of rich, fascinating educational experiences that he will remember with fondness for years to come.
In my class, effort has value. Effort deserves acknowledgement and reward. When my students try, I want to give them positive feedback to let them know that their patterns of behavior are on the right track. If a child works hard and then doesn’t pass the exam at the end, and I assess exclusively on the result of that exam, I dismiss the value of the experience that child had along the way. And if I’m doing my job right, that experience was more important and more valuable than anything I could include on a test.
The policy that Concord High has adopted is new, and so its effects have not yet been seen, but I can predict: Alec will do fine. He’ll do the homework in spite of its importance having been dismissed, he’ll engage in the experiences he needs, and he’ll test out adequately on the summative assessments.
But his less academically minded peers will suffer. Working from a different mindset, many will reject the unrewarded effort that homework now requires. Their experience will be diminished, and they will not learn the material. They will do poorly on the exams, and receive lower grades. The low grades will be demotivational. This will start a negative cycle; these students will disconnect from learning.
Even worse will be the effect on the students who take careful notes, who put full effort into the homework, who study diligently, and who then–because they, through no fault of their own, are wired differently–either can’t retrieve the needed info at test time or find that it just didn’t stay with them. They, in spite of genuine, well-intentioned effort, will be told they have failed. These are children who have never failed before; they will be crushed, demoralized.
This summative-heavy grading system is a reform destined for the scrap heap. Let’s put it there now, before it disenfranchises a generation of students. Then, let’s cast our eyes toward a constructing a grading system that values the educational experience–the journey–and not just the destination.
What do you think the ideal grading system would look like? How best can we report back to students and parents the progress being made?
Larry Graykin, M.Ed., is a teacher at Barrington (NH) Middle School. His ELA classroom game overlay, “The Kingdom of Diddorol,” [www.diddorol.com] has received national attention. He is the primary editor of the Common Core Criticisms wiki [commoncorecriticisms.wikispaces.com], and is co-founder and chair or the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization NH Center for Integrated Curriculum [nhcic.org]. Follow him on Twitter: @L_Graykin
kkdomangue
I am wondering if the problem is that the summative assessments are what we commonly refer to as “standardized”, with no allowance for differentiated products/grading. Are there teacher-created rubrics for the summative assessments?
Mike Jones
I can relate to giving less emphasis to a homework grade but not 0%. Also, I don’t know what kind of assessments are being talked about. Pencil/pen and paper tests? Projects? Presentations? Essays/reports? As long as the summative assessments include a variety of different “products” and not simply standardized or standardized-like tests, I can agree that the majority of one’s grade be based on them.
howardat58
“This is where the latest grading reform wants to place us: We must define specific elements of knowledge as essential, and assign grades based on demonstration of mastery of those elements. Grades will be a direct reflection of the comparative success of the student in assimilating and demonstrating;”
Tests do not have to be tests of application or understanding of specific elements of knowledge. It is quite possible to have questions requiring observation, trial and error activities, inspired guesswork etc. This is the case in math as well as other areas. I have little hope that computer based testing will ever reach this state.
Of course, the kid with poor factual recall will be at a disadvantage in many test types. (this is one reason I ended up doing math, as it required the least memory of unrelated facts).
The big question is “What is the value of a single grade”. For parent communication and progression some higher dimensional thing is necessary anyway.
Leigh Sturgess-Lace
I’ve actually been using this type of grading in my classes for about 5 years. I started using it because the system where everything is worth “points” seemed to penalize the students who struggled most–if they couldn’t get the homework done for whatever reason, they were graded lower, even if they understood the info. We have a fairly high number of students who are homeless or very close, so absences are an issue for them–under the points system, there was very little hope for them to recover a grade after they’d missed several days. For other students, if it took them several practices to catch on and those practices (whatever the practice looked like–homework, classwork, review quiz, first draft, whatever) were low, again, they were penalized even if by the end of the unit they were complete geniuses at the ideas. At the same time, it also seemed to serve as a disincentive for some kids–if the “points” (or percentage or whatever) was low, they didn’t figure it was worth doing. All the way around, it didn’t seem like the “points” system was working well for anyone. So, I changed to formative and summative where formatives are what we do as we’re learning new ideas or skills and summatives come at the end of the unit so that I have a grade to slap on the report card to prove for all of posterity that my students have actually learned something.
Overall, I love this way of grading. Obviously, it only works if you have a way of giving the kids feedback very quickly on how they did on a certain skill or with a piece of information or the whole formative piece breaks down pretty quickly. (and, yeah, I teach in a public middle school with about 150 students per day, so I do understand how hard it is to give feedback to students–you have to develop a system that will work for your subject area) I will often start with the rubric for the final project so the kids know where we’re headed and as we work through the unit, we’ll look back at the rubric so they know where everything fits in. When we do tests (which yeah, we do them because they will be seeing them later in life so we may as well practice), we start with an “Example Version” and analyze the questions–what will you need to know for the different sections? How does it make sense to attack the scenarios? What is the best way to organize the “factiods” we’re learning so they’ll be accessible when you take the test? Then we take practice quizzes so the kids get to, well, practice. And again, they get feedback on what they did well and what they need to work on.
Doing grades this way seems to have shifted the class from the grade-grubbing, points-counting one to one where the kids have a better idea of the big picture of what we’re doing in class. They know that if they mess up on somethng early on, it’s not a biggy as long as we figure out what they didn’t understand or what they did wrong and figure out how to fix it. They also (mostly) come to understand that if they don’t do the hard work of figuring out what they don’t understand, that will carry forward and make the final project harder to do.
When I first started, the students understood and got comfortable with the grading system pretty quickly. A few parents expressed concerns with their student not being motivated unless they had a “grade” which I addressed by suggesting we just watch and see how it plays out and if it’s a holy disaster for that student, I’d come up with a way to make up some points and slap it on every assignment (I’ve never had to). A number of my colleagues flipped out thinking that “without grades to hold them accountable the students will run wild and learn nothing”. And that never happened, either. A number of my students have commented in their end of the year survey that they feel like they can “really learn” because they don’t have to worry as much about doing stuff wrong and “hurting their grade”. Others have said that the class feels more fair since they know up front what they’re going to be learning and where they’re headed.
I know this doesn’t address the whole “teaching to standards takes away the journey and discovery” aspect, but I don’t think it does. I teach middle school science and our standards are pretty clear, but they aren’t so scripted that we’re locked into any one way of addressing the topics. So we can do a lot of projects that will teach the concepts but still give students a lot of freedom to explore the ideas.
I can understand how this type of grading could go badly wrong. I’d also hate to see it go school-wide unless everyone was really clear on how this is different than just assigning the same work, handing it back and plopping a big test at the end of the unit–the constant feedback and teaching the kids to analyze their own work is critical for this grading system to work.
Mike Jones
What about the kids who also live in difficult circumstances who work hard, finish all assignments and maybe just don’t do well on tests and showing their mastery? Should they be penalized? Your system seems to suggest so.
Linda Myrick
I’m not a fan of grades at all. But, if we must grade, I’d rather grade on some sort of standard that we’ve agreed upon. I don’t grade homework. Kids should do it—it’s practice and should reinforce what’s been taught/learned. This writer has a certain take on SBG that’s not necessarily the way it needs to play out. The “standards” in my gradebook are reading fluency, comprehension, math computation, problem solving, math reasoning, etc. Each of those standards is assessed many times in the course of a trimester—on tests, anecdotally, orally, presentations, projects, etc. I know my kids and I can determine their levels of “mastery.” It does not need to be all about summative tests, but their demonstrations of knowledge and skills. All in all, if we must give grades, I am seeing that SBG is actually better than a system that was full of gimmicks and gaming for “credits.” If grades are supposed to communicate levels of accomplishment and understanding, SBG seems like progress to me.