(Vol. 1, No. 2 - Spring 1997)
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New ways of testing and grading can
"help students learn and teachers teach"
"The idea of using better student assessments has kept pulling at me
because I have always been at odds with traditional grading. How do I grade
a paper? How do I objectively look at papers and say how good they are and
explain a grade to students in concrete terms they relate to?" -- Karen
Maine, a Cubberly Middle School teacher
By Barnett Berry
Barnett Berry is a senior consultant for the National Commission
on Teaching and America's Future. John Norton also contributed to this story.
What did your kid get on his report card? How many A's? How many B's? Any
bad grades?
I'll bet you know. But do you really know what those grades mean?
Of course, when your child earns an A you know she is at the top of her
class. But how much of the grade was based on knowledge and skills, and
how much on effort? How does she compare to other kids who took the same
course but with a different teacher? How does she compare with students
in another school -- or another district or state?
Most importantly, what does your kid really know compared to a high standard?
If your child got an A in science, can she (or her teacher) tick off the
knowledge and skills she mastered to earn that grade?
I asked these same questions when Joseph, my 9th grade son, brought home
a "92" on a research paper on "mitochondria." Mr. Smith,
Joseph's science teacher, didn't tell him much about the purpose of his
work; he just told him to use references and cite them in research-paper
style.
Having an educator for a dad isn't always fun, but I must say Joseph did
a nice job. He used the Internet to gather a wide range of information on
his topic and put together a good paper. But Joseph had no idea why he was,
as he put it, "given a 92." And neither did his parents.
Mr. Smith not only failed to describe the standards he expected Joseph to
meet, he offered no critique or feedback on his performance. Not a mark
on his paper -- except the red-inked 92 and the encouragement familiar to
many students and parents: "Good work."
Good work compared to what? How would Joseph know how to earn a "100"
next time? And how did the score -- and the assignment itself -- connect
to what Joseph was expected to know and be able to do as a 9th grade science
student? Joseph could only shrug his shoulders. He didn't have a clue. And
chances are Mr. Smith didn't either.
Suppose Joseph had received a "72" on his paper? I doubt he would
have gotten any more feedback from Mr. Smith. Perhaps a different message
-- something like, "Try to do better next time." How, Mr. Smith?
"We can write a '6' ourselves"
In a portable classroom at the far end of the playground at Cubberly School,
English teacher Lorrie LaCroix has just finished reading a story to her
7th graders. It's the tale of a magic acorn, written by one of last year's
students, and LaCroix and her kids are about to break it open and look inside.
"O.K., think about our writing rubric,"
LaCroix reminds them, referring to the detailed guide her students use to
tell them what a good piece of writing should include. "Let's look
at the sentence structure. Does the author use a variety of sentence structures,
or are most of the sentences about the same length?"
They're about the same length, they agree. "What about the level of
vocabulary?" Pretty simple. "Metaphors and similes?" A few.
"Interesting characters?" The talking acorn is kind of interesting,
some students say.
Using their story rubric, LaCroix's young writers quickly decide the magic
acorn story is not a "6 - superior achievement" or a "5 -
very good achievement." But they agree the story meets most of the
conditions of a "4 - satisfactory achievement." It's somewhat
interesting, the setting is adequate but needs to be more established, the
narrative contains a basic introduction, body and conclusion.
"Let's give it a '4' then," LaCroix says. "I don't think
we were mesmerized by this story. I think we were ready for it to end."
Now LaCroix directs her 7th graders to take out the stories they've been
working on. They exchange papers twice, reading and rating each other's
work using the story rubric. "Remember, I'm going to be grading you
on your assessment as well as your writing," she says.
She encourages readers to share comments with authors, who will use the
critiques to work on their papers again at home tonight. "If we can
use the rubric and grade someone else's paper, then we can write a '6' ourselves,"
LaCroix tells her students. "Everyone in here is capable of that."
Next door, LaCroix's teaching partner Karen Maine is helping her mathematics
class finish up a project on graphing and data analysis. One wall of her
classroom is covered with student work. Each paper includes a final grade
and a heavily annotated rubric, where the student and a parent or other
adult have analyzed the work, graded it based on the rubric, and included
comments like "Could of had more solutions to the problem." Some
assignments include information about how the work links to the district's
mathematics standards for middle school.
There's no mystery about the grades that students in LaCroix and Maine's
classes are earning. "Quality" is well defined. Through rubrics
and similar guides, standards and expectations are laid out for students
(and parents) to see. When a student wants to talk about a particular grade,
Maine and LaCroix rely on the assessment guides to focus the discussion.
They can pull out "anchor papers" written by other students that
clearly demonstrate what an "A" or "B" paper includes.
Unlike Joseph's teacher Mr. Smith, LaCroix and Maine are well on their way
to establishing a high-quality program of classroom assessment. They're
among a small but growing group of Long Beach educators who believe that
by changing the way teachers traditionally test and grade students, they
can raise achievement and help students reach high standards.
If the new thinking about assessment catches on and spreads quickly enough,
LBUSD has a chance to meet meet the challenging goal it's set for itself
- getting at least 75 percent of middle schoolers up to standard by century's
end. But old habits are often hard to change, and the methods teachers use
to test and grade today have been around for a long, long time.
Grading the grading system
"We were shocked at the variation among the schools," said Hill
Middle School social studies teacher Ann Robertson after she and her social
studies colleagues from across the district got together to examine each
other's grading practices. "It was a real eye-opener."
These kinds of conversations are causing many Long Beach teachers (and administrators)
to sit up and take notice. They are revealing, for example, that while some
schools allow students to "pass" with a 50-point average, others
require a "60" or higher. An "A" at one school might
be a " B" at another.
And the differences abound not only from school to school, but from classroom
to classroom. Some teachers add up all the points accumulated on tests,
homework, projects, and even class participation. Some teachers count only
certain major assignments. Some teachers grade "on a curve" that
rewards effort on the part of students they believe need extra encouragement.
Although teachers in different classrooms and schools may teach similar
content (for example, all 7th grade students study Islam), the tests they
use to measure what students have learned may be very different. And different
teachers may grant different grades for similar performance.
To make matters more complicated, many teachers' lessons may not be closely
tied to the district's new content standards. The kinds of assignments and
tests they give may have more to do with what is in the textbook than whether
a student is meeting a particular standard.
Bancroft Middle School teacher Harriett Boyer began to see the contradictions
in the traditional grading system when she selected assessment as the topic
for her master's thesis in education.
"For years we've been doing our grading all wrong," she says.
"No wonder our kids get frustrated. They're getting a lot of mixed
messages about what we expect of them."
"This is where teachers really need help," Boyer says. "We
need to think about how we assess similar lessons in a similar way. And
we need a lot more help in thinking about how we design our assessments
on the front end of our curriculum planning, using the standards to make
sure we're teaching what we should be teaching."
Most teachers, Boyer says, aren't doing that right now. "I have a hard
time doing it myself," she says. "I'm a creative teacher, and
I enjoy putting it together as I go along. But if we don't plan ahead and
let our students know exactly where we're going and what we expect, then
they will continue to be frustrated."
Boyer also points to one of the "dirty little secrets" of current
classroom grading which frustrates many teachers as they think about holding
students to high standards. "We see a lot of grades based on effort,
not accomplishment. It's hard to be tough about standards when a student
says to you, 'But I tried so hard.' But we've got to help teachers get pass
this, because we all deal with the repercussions when we judge students
mostly on effort."
The problem of irregular grading across classrooms and schools will become
much more apparent as LBUSD's new "multiple-F" policy goes into
effect this June. Under that policy, any 8th student who has two F's will
not be allowed to enter high school but must enroll in an alternative school
where they will spend a year "catching up."
The district estimates that as many as 700 students may be affected by this
new standard. Parents and educators are certain to ask the question: "How
reliable are the grades used to place children in the special program? Are
the standards these children are being held to consistent from class to
class and school to school?"
"Up until now," one district administrator admits, "this
issue of grades being equal was buried and didn't get discussed. Those days
are probably over."
Dr. Lynn Winters, LBUSD's associate superintendent for research, is glad
to see those days end. She believes that before the district can live up
to its commitment to use academic standards as the driving force for school
improvement, a lot more talk -- and action -- around the issue of classroom
assessment must take place.
A better system of student assessment
When LBUSD began its move toward standards-based reform two years ago, district
leaders soon realized that the existing testing and assessment system would
have to be retooled and expanded to provide more detailed and reliable information
about student performance.
To help meet that goal, the district hired Winters, a testing expert with
national credentials and previous school district experience. Over the last
18 months, Winters has worked with the district's research and curriculum
staffs to develop a new approach to assessment that will combine the district's
existing testing program with a new emphasis on upgrading the quality and
consistency of the assessment teachers carry out daily in the classroom.
(See "Why Test Scores Can't Be the Only
Score".)
In a December memo to Long Beach educators,
Winters emphasized that "one test cannot serve all testing purposes."
LBUSD will continue to use the ITAS "norm-referenced" tests to
provide the community with national comparisons of student achievement.
That's a necessary part of public accountability, she said. But tests like
ITAS were not designed to provide "diagnostic" information about
individual students.
Local educators can learn more about student strengths and weaknesses from
the CAS2, a performance test used by LBUSD that requires students to use
what they've learned to solve problems. But the CAS2 also has its limitations.
The districtwide test is time-consuming and expensive to grade, and only
a few samples of student work can be collected.
Classroom-based tests, Winters wrote, are the best way to find out what
students know and can do - and the best way for teachers to improve their
own teaching. Classroom tests may never satisfy public accountability demands,
she said, but "well-designed classroom assignments and assessments
with standard scoring criteria, tied to district standards, are more powerful
tools for improving student achievement than norm-referenced or district-level
performance tests."
Winters and other school district leaders like Chris Dominguez, assistant
superintendent for instruction, are quick to admit that the majority of
LBUSD teachers are not doing the kind of "well-designed" assessments
Winters imagines.
"We're at the very beginning of tying classroom assessments and grading
to district standards," Dominguez says. Teachers are experimenting
with "generic" rubrics -- for example, the kind that help guide
students to write a better paper or do a good oral presentation -- but only
a small number of teachers are regularly designing rubrics and other kinds
of classroom assessment with specific projects and the district's standards
in mind.
But the district isn't waiting for teachers to change on their own. The
district is encouraging schools to use more of their professional development
funds to help teachers learn how to build better assessments and analyze
student work more critically. And the district's own curriculum support
staff is spending more time working with teachers on these issues.
At the beginning of the 1996-97 school year, the district invited a leading
national expert on standards and classroom assessment to work with LBUSD
middle school teachers for three days.
While the training was a difficult experience for some teachers, who felt
the consultant was rude and overly critical of their efforts to date, Dominguez
says the training "was an 'Aha!' experience" for many as they
realized "that they truly weren't teaching to standards. And that was
painful."
Dominguez believes the consultant forced teachers to ask hard questions
about their assignments -- about whether they were "just nice"
or whether they addressed the district's academic standards and told students
what was expected of them all along the way.
"I think they came to the realization that there is a place for making
the expectations of an assignment very clear," she says. "More
teachers understand that classroom assessment is not just a test at the
end of the unit but a process that lets the students and the teacher know
how well you're moving to where you want to go."
Lining up tests and standards
Deep talk about testing and assessment can be mind-numbingly confusing to
most lay people -- and to many principals and teachers. But it needs to
be said that the Long Beach schools are looking closely at all the tests
they use and asking "what kind of information can we gather from our
test results about our progress on academic standards?"
Winters, her research staff, and the district's curriculum experts have
picked apart the ITAS and CAS2 tests in an effort to link them to the 32
broad content standards the district has developed for math, social studies,
science, and language arts. The links are imperfect, and the district will
need to include other assessments performed in the classroom to get enough
information to make definitive statements about students' progress toward
standards.
Although the district's content standards do a pretty good job of describing
in general what students should know and be able to do, teachers need more
specificity. The district is now developing what is called (somewhat confusingly)
"performance standards," or guidelines that tell educators and
parents more detail about how well students have to be able to perform to
meet any particular standard. The district is setting performance standards
in math and language this year and science and social studies next year.
Over time, by using both district-level and classroom tests, LBUSD intends
to build a new assessment system that will give teachers and schools a fairly
detailed picture of student progress on most, if not all, of the district's
academic standards.
Lynn Winters says the task "will take several years." That could
be an optimistic estimate. Much of the effort's success depends on how effective
the schools and district are in convincing teachers of the need to change
their assessment practices and showing them how to do so.
"Teachers have to be able, in every instance," she says, "to
answer questions like: Why am I testing this? Why am I asking these questions?
How does this assessment tie into what I'm teaching and the standards?"
Ultimately, better classroom testing depends on better teaching and a thorough
understanding of the subject matter being taught.
"Unless the teacher has a deep understanding of what's being assessed,"
Winters says, "we can't rely on the results of classroom assessment
to tell us what we need to know about student achievement."
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"Why Test Scores Can't Be the Only Score"
Just what is a rubric?
Read a December 1996 memo describing some of
LBUSD's assessment plans