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We give grades because we've always given grades and society expects
grades. Not to give grades goes against what people view the institution
of school to be all about. Grades are a way to determine success or failure
of kids.
Grades are also another way to sort kids as in "you know my Johnny
is a straight 'A' student." From as far back as the turn of the century,
researchers determined that grades given by teachers were neither valid
nor reliable since what constitutes an "A" in one classroom or
school does not constitute an "A" in another.This became one of
the reasons that standardized testing became so popular.
As a general rule, teachers give less breaks to gifted and talented kids.
If they don't have the work ethic that is determined to be appropriate their
grades won't get bumped up, but the LD kid who works his fanny off does
get the better grade. So are grades about work ethics or about content or
about effort or about what?
Even report cards that have lots of room for additional comments don't always
do the job. How do you judge effort? How do you judge quality?
I use rubrics on a regular basis, but then
I have to decide that a "Wow" becomes an "A" or whatever.
I'm not trying to sound negative. I guess that I just don't spend a lot
of time worrying about grades. I'm more interested is assessing what kids
know so that I can make the types of instructional decisions that will be
beneficial to my students and that will allow them to learn as much as they
can.
I want my students to be self-reflective. If I ask them what they know and
what they don't know and what we need to work on, I'd venture to say that
about 2/3 or more of them can tell me because we've worked on this. When
someone relies on grades to determine what a student knows, they're on shaky
ground. An "F" might mean that a student ticked off the teacher,
that they refused to do homework, or that they didn't understand the material.
I know that grades won't go away because it would upset the system too much
but for the sake of the kids and the teachers, I wish that they would.
-- A middle school math teacher
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READ A STORY about the relationship between
grades and classroom assessments. The story begins with this quotation:
"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, 7th grade math, Cubberly Middle School, Long Beach, CA.