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Thoughts on Grading

Bruno is a skeptic on standards-based grading. He seems to think that “mastery of content” is too abstract for students to work toward and rightly cites evidence that motivation and changed behavior are tightly linked to a sense of efficacy, which in turn is tightly linked to feeling as though you know precisely what to do to get to a particular outcome.

But isn’t mastery of content essentially, “Do well on your assignments and tests”? And while a massive, standards-based report card may be hard for a parent to read, is it any more confusing than seeing awful results on standardized tests and a student who clearly doesn’t read on grade-level receive good grades because of participation, attendance, and behavior? As a parent, how do you know to intercede on your child’s behalf when you see a “B” which actually represents a C- on content knowledge and skills and an A+ for effort, behavior, and completion?

Ultimately, I am against including behavior, attendance, and effort as a part of the same grade as academics. I think there needs to be a clear place to present evidence of academic ability and growth independent of behavioral growth. Both are important, and while linked, are certainly not moving in lockstep for the typical child. Accurate information in both domains is far better than falsely presenting a singular, mixed-up “truth” about a child’s success in school.

For the same reason I am not a fan of school report cards with a single letter grade rating, I am not for just a single letter grade for students. Ultimately, they both represent poor combinations of data that obscure more than they reveal.

Developing report cards or “grading” systems, both for program evaluation and for students, always conjures one of the few concepts I recall from linear algebra. It seems to me that any good grading system should provide a basis, that is, a minimal set of linearly independent vectors which, via linear combination, can describe an entire vector space. Remove the jargon and you’re left with:

Measure the least amount of unrelated things possible that, taken together, describe all there is to know about what you are measuring.

A single grade that combines all the effort, behavior, attendance, and various unrelated academic standards I might get an overall description that says “round”. But by separating out the data at some other level, the picture might describe a golf ball and its dimples, a baseball and its stitches, or a soccer ball with its hexagon-pentagon pattern.

I think we need to find a way to let people know what kind of ball they have.

  • Patrick Laverty

    When I was in school, each teacher would give us three grades, a number from 1-4 for conduct, a letter grade for the “mastery of content” and a number from 1-4 for effort. So you might see something like:
    Algebra 1 B+ 2
    US History 1 A- 1
    Physical Education 1 C 4

    and so on. Is that the kind of thing you’re alluding to?

    • http://blog.jasonpbecker.com/ Jason Becker

      Could be. I received a grade between 0-100 for academics and a letter grade for effort and behavior. But I don’t think a monolithic academic grade necessarily makes sense either. Perhaps the balance is unit-level grades, perhaps it’s standard-clusters, maybe it’s some other organizational unit of academic knowledge. I am not sure. There are definitely levels that are clearer than the standard level that may be useful below a monolithic subject-level academic grade.

      What I am not for, generally, is combining disparate information for the same of combining it or separating out information so much it cannot be interpreted by non-experts. Grades are, if nothing else, a means of communication. So practitioners need to consider what is they wish to convey and what actions they want parents and students to take when they see those marks. Anything else and you’re straying too far.

  • http://twitter.com/MrPABruno Paul Bruno

    I’d say two things:

    1) I think that even if mastery is “do well on assignments and tests”, many kids will still lack the knowledge of how to attain the goal or the willpower to pursue it. At the margin, I think some kids are helped by encouraging them to complete more concrete, short-term activities that will lead to mastery.

    2) It’s not clear to me that standards-based grades help (much) parents intercede on their child’s behalf. Even putting aside that the criteria for mastery will vary on a teacher-by-teacher basis, very few people have any idea what “mastery” in a course consists of or how to help a kid achieve it. “Your kid demonstrated very little mastery of geometry” doesn’t provide much guidance for the parent of a student in geometry (who will presumably still want to know whether part of the problem might have been, e.g., lack of classwork completion).

    I will also say that my post probably erred in blurring together two separate issues: standards-based grading and grading/report card reform more generally.

    There’s a strain of “standards-based grading” advocates that I think of as taking the more ideological position that we really shouldn’t be giving students credit/grades/etc. for anything except mastery. On this account, mastery is really the only thing that matters. I think that’s kind of silly, personally.

    On the other hand what I think you’re advocating is something much more pragmatic: more useful and informative report cards. (e.g., with separate grades/marks for mastery, behavior, or whatever.) To the extent that that leaves room for “grading” things besides mastery, it might not really make sense to think of it as “standards-based grading” at all. It’s just report card reform. I haven’t seen any proposals for such reform that really bowl me over with their superiority to the status quo, but I at least see (and agree with) the underlying rationale.

    • http://blog.jasonpbecker.com/ Jason Becker

      I think your point on “report card” reform is very insightful. The truth is, there are lots of valuable ways that teachers keep track of how students are doing, some of which are quite inaccessible to non-experts. Grades are really about finding an ideal vehicle to communicate student performance to students and parents.

      The baseline problem that must be addressed is there is very little agreement on what constitutes performance and what are the responsibilities of students and parents when they view a report card. These answers are likely different in practically each district. A successful grading system should be judged against a clear, principled answer to those statements.
      There are significant and important instructional reasons for teachers to collect and analyze standards-based data, but that doesn’t mean a recreation of that information will best suit the purpose of grades.

      Thanks for taking the time to come over to my blog and continue the conversation!

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