Assessment & Grading Part 2

As was mentioned in my previous post, there are three underpinning issues we must consider before addressing the specifics of how to determine grades. They are fairness, motivation, as well as objectivity and professional development.

In education, we have tended to think of fairness as uniformity. All students have been required to do the same assessment in the same amount of time, and their grades have been calculated in the same way from the same number of assessments. But students are different in many various ways. So treating them the same can actually be unfair. Fairness is much more about equity of opportunity than it is about uniformity. For example, some students need to wear glasses and for equity of opportunity they wear their glasses when they need them. For fairness, we do not say, "You are doing a test today, but you cannot wear your glasses because everyone is not wearing glasses." I believe that all students should be given an equal opportunity to demonstrate what they know and can do as part of the assessment process. Adaptations should be available for all students when they are necessary for demonstrating their individual knowledge and skills, provided those adaptations do not jeopardize the integrity of the content of the assessment.

Grades are often extrinsic motivators, meaning that their power to influence student behavior derives from outside the student. Many teachers, parents, and other adults have used grades as extrinsic motivators. "If you get an A on this test, you will have no homework" or "If you get all A's on your report card, I will buy you a new Gameboy game." There are at least two problems with this approach. First, extrinsic motivators increase students' focus on the reward or punishment rather than on the desire for lifelong learning. Second, they give rise to the need to continuously increase the amount of the reward or punishment to elicit the desired behavior. I believe that the primary reward for learning should be intrinsic - the positive feelings that result from success. Success at learning is the single most important factor in increasing intrinsic motivation. However, it is important to recognize that success is relative--it is seeing oneself make significant and meaningful improvements.

The only aspects of learning that can be assessed objectively are such elements as the correctness of factual content like spelling and arithmetic. Assessments by their very nature are subjective. We need to acknowledge this fact. The question is not whether an assessment is subjective, but whether it is defensible and credible. We need to have assessments and grades that are accurate and consistent. One method for doing this is shared understanding of performance standards. Another is a unified approach to determining grades. In my next post, I will describe our grading policy and how it is designed to achieve this objective.