|
What should Report Card grades tell us
about students?
|
What factors are usually included in
Report Card grades?
|
- What a
student knows and is able to do.
- Where
students are in their personal development towards the standards set
forth by the district and/or state.
- A
separate score for behaviors and work ethics.
|
- Attitude
- Behavior
- Effort
- Attendance
- Turning
in homework and/or completing homework
- Feelings
about individual students.
|
When a parent asks me to explain why
their student got any grade on a report card, my grade book speaks for itself.
My assessments are very clearly aligned to rubrics, and I have clear data to
document the information that I assess. I am also fortunate to have been
involved in a curriculum coordinating committee that has implemented the move
to standards based grading in my district. Behavior, late work and attitude
only reflect in a students grade if that is one of the standards that are
being addressed. Our social and work habit skills are graded separately from
the actual knowledge of the subject. Robert Marzano defines these
non-achievement factors in three categories.
- Effort
- Participation
- Work
completion
- Behavior
- Attendance
(Marzano,
2000)
Report card grades are often determined
in a very subjective manner. My belief is that moving to a standards based reporting
system is far superior to the traditional grading methods that schools have
used in the past. Standards based grading allows for individual differences in
student achievement and assesses what a student knows and is able to do. It
also provides timely feedback while allowing students the opportunity to take
charge of their own learning.
Determining what a B looks like must be
done in a fair and consistent manner. Teacher 1 might grade dramatically
differently than Teacher 2. We have explored these differences throughout this
course. Reliable assessments will continually produce reliable scores. A
dependable or reliable assessment will reflect that stable level of achievement
no matter how many times we measure it. (Stiggins, 2005)
Each assignment that is given in my
class, whether a performance exam, observational assessments, or group
participation assessment, are aligned to a standard. Each standard or piece of
a standard is clearly defined in a rubric. The rubric states what is expected
and exactly how to grade what is observed. Regardless of whether I do the
grading or my colleague does the grading, there is no grey area about the
actual score on the assessment.
Letter grades, in my opinion, are too
arbitrary to provide any real data about student progress. Under the
conventional report card system, however, the parents expect to see the letter
grade. When a student achieves a 2.33 through a 3.00 in my class, that result
will be converted to a B based on the following conversion chart:
|
Content
Standards
|
Rubric Scale
|
Numeric
Grade
|
Grade
|
|
E
E
M
M
M
M
PM
PM
PM
DNM
DNM
N
|
4.00
3.67
3.33
3.00
2.67
2.33
2.00
1.67
1 33
1.00
0.00
0.00
|
98 -100
95 -97
92-94
89-91
86-88
83-85
79-82
75 -78
70 -74
65-69
1-64
0
|
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
C-
F
F
|
The
following terminology results in a more complete picture of what a student
knows and is able to do.
Exceeds
Standards - 4
Meets
Standards - 3
Partially
Meets Standards - 2
Does
Not Meet Standards - 1
Shows
No Evidence - NE
Providing real world terminology, rather
than random letter grades, gives much more ownership to students and their
parents. It is no longer the teacher giving the grade, but rather, the
student earning the grade. Stiggins (2005) puts it very succinctly when he
says:
Any students who leave school still needing to rely on
their teachers to tell them they have done well have not yet learned to hit the
target, because they cannot see the quality of their own performance. We must
turn our achievement expectations and performance standards over to our
students, to make them independent of us. Only then can we assure ourselves
that we have helped our students become the lifelong learners they will need to
be in the new millennium. (pg. 357)
Our
goal should be to prove to our students and their parents what we, as
educators, know and are able to do. Providing clear feedback with data to back
up our observations is proof of our competence at education. I cannot think of
a better standard to meet than that.
References
Marzano, Robert J. (2005). Transforming
classroom grading. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Stiggins, Richard J (2005). Student-involved assessment for
learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc..
