It’s report card time–so what can a student’s grades tell us?

With the end of the first term at our school, there is lots of focus right now on report cards—writing them and sharing them with students and parents.  ANCS does not use traditional A-F or numeric grades; instead we communicate students’ performance in terms of their progress towards academic standards of grade level skills and knowledge (for example, “meeting the standards”).  We also include a substantial amount of narrative comments to give greater context for a student’s “grade”.  For some students and parents, this type of report card takes some getting used to, and some may long for just getting a regular ol’ B+ or 87%.  Let me tell you why we don’t use that approach, what we do use as some common grading practices, and what the limits of grades are in telling us what students can do.

A few years back, several of our teachers read the book Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Assessing & Grading in the Differentiated Classroom by Rick Wormeli.  Wormeli writes that “when we use grades to motivate, punish, or sort students, we do three things: we dilute the grade’s accuracy, we dilute its usefulness, and we use grading to manipulate students…”.  Given the way they are traditionally used, A-F and numeric grading scales often lend themselves to being mis-used by teachers, students, and parents as tools for motivation (or punishment).  I’m not arguing for or against different ways of motivating students, but using grades to do so confuses what the purpose of grades should be: a indication of a student’s academic performance.  A teacher giving extra points as a motivator or a parent using a reward for a struggling student to make better grades reinforces the idea that grades are a matter more of effort than of learning and both practices limit a grade’s ability to tell us about the student’s academic skills and knowledge.  Another shortcoming of many letter and grading scales is that, with many different ways of calculating grades with these scales, there is wide variation in what those grades actually mean from one teacher to another.

By using a grading scale that is tied to standards of academic skills and knowledge at ANCS, we hope to avoid some of the pitfalls of traditional approaches to grading.  We report separately about how a student is doing in relation to the school’s Guiding Principles so that a student’s habits and effort do not get mixed up with showing what he knows and is able to do.  We aim to give students multiple opportunities each term to demonstrate their performance against academic standards so that there is a large enough sample size for determining where they are at and so that we can assess students’ recent performance as opposed to where they were when they first attempted a task.  When appropriate, we give opportunities for a student to revise or redo her work.  On this last point, we sometimes get pushback from parents that this practice doesn’t “prepare students for the real world” where they don’t get second chances.  Yet, as Rick Wormeli has said, is the goal “to let the student settle for work done poorly, ensuring that he or she doesn’t learn the content. Is this really the life lesson we want to teach? Is it really academically better for the student to remain ignorant?”  This practice is not acceptable. To be adequately prepared for college and career, students need to learn the content and skills that society identifies as important. Whether a student was initially irresponsible or responsible, moral or immoral, cognitively ready or not is irrelevant to the supreme goal: learning.”  Students will have plenty of time to learn the consequences of not doing work.  Our goal when we have them in school—especially K-8—is to develop skills and knowledge, even if it means giving them more than one chance to do so.

Grading and assessing students in this way certainly requires more work of teachers (it would be much easier to tabulate a bunch of points and have a single number spit out), but it forces us to talk about what meeting the standards in reading, writing, and other skills actually looks like and can lead to a more meaningful assessment of what students know and can do.  Of course, no single approach to grading and assessing can tell us everything we want to know about students, and assigning more and more students to teachers makes it less reasonable for teachers to have the frequent communication—be it through formal report cards or informal emails, phone calls, and conferences—with parents and students about how students are doing that can tell us much more than any one grade can.

A separate, but related note: for those of you interested in further exploring standards-based grading practices, here is a link to a series of webinars about such practices.