"A grade should not be compensation, but communication.” – R. Wormeli
RESEARCH
Historically, grades have been used as evidence in teacher evaluations, they have been used as incentives for students to learn, and grades have given students information for self-evaluation. They are evidence for the effectiveness of school programs and they allow teachers to communicate information to parents about their student’s achievement and performance in school.
Frequently, grades reflect every aspect of a students’ school day. Their grade includes their participation and attendance, homework, test scores, neatness, and extra credit. The problem with this is that students are graded on following directions as much as they are graded on how well they are meeting content standards, and therefore these grades mean nothing about the students’ learning (Varlas, 2013). Students are assigned a letter grade based on all of these different factors, and this makes it difficult to tell how much the student has actually learned. Grades have also been used as punishment. Teachers will hand out zeroes for not handing in an assignment on time or for missing a test day, and this does not accurately reflect the students’ learning, rather, it punishes the students’ academic grade for a non-academic behavior (Varlas, 2013). A student may have learned the content, but turned in an assignment late, resulting in a zero. This zero does not give the students a chance to show what they know. Homework has also been graded frequently in the past. Homework is typically seen as practice, and when homework is being added into a students’ final grade, then the students who learn it the first time are being rewarded while the students who do not understand the material the first time are being punished by this grade (Varlas, 2013). Today, many school policies are changing to allow for the practice of skills without being penalized.
Feedback is a crucial element of a grading system. Students need to know how they are doing, why, and what they can do to be better. The best feedback, is feedback that provides students with information about their learning and actions that they can take to reach their goal (Fisher & Frey, 2009). A grade without feedback is meaningless to students. Feedback can be positive and constructive. Letting students know what they have done well is beneficial because then they can repeat those behaviors. It is also important to tell students what they can work on and how they can improve it because students love to know how they can get a better grade. Feedback is different from grading because grading is a representation of student learning while feedback is an explanation of it (Fisher & Frey, 2009). Grades without feedback are not useful for students that are looking to improve their skills.
BELIEFS
I Will...
Assign homework as practice for my students
Give incompletes for assignments that do not represent a students learning
Use a 4 point grading scale
I Will Not...
Use homework as part of a students grade. They should be able to practice without penalty
Use zeros as they do not reflect what a student has learned