Yours Truly, Grade
The past few months have been busy with Ed.D. course work; as a result, I have not managed to spend time with this blog. I hope that during the break between semesters, I'll have time to clean up and consolidate some of this semester's learning and write it up in a few posts. Assessment and grading constitute one area that I've been pondering. Scoring assessments, assigning grades and reporting grades on report cards have always been hated tasks in my life as a teacher. I know I'm not alone in that. My dislike stems in part from my discomfort with the whole process of judging student learning and assigning categories (numbers, letters, words, codes, etc.) to it. It often feels quite arbitrary, fraught with bias and inconsistency, and just downright "icky." As a teaser of sorts for a future post, below is a quick "paper" that I've just completed regarding assessment and grades for one of my classes.
The nature of this "paper" requires a little explanation. Using the RAFTS acronym, the instructor tasked us with the following: Assume the ROLE of "a grade," writing to an AUDIENCE of a student, in the FORMAT of a letter, on the TOPIC of grading problems, guided by the STRONG-VERB of "persuade." In other words, we were to write a letter to a student, from the perspective of a grade, explaining to the student the problems with grades, while trying to persuade the student of the value of grades, if understood and used appropriately. Initially I found this task a little juvenile, but, in the end, I had a fun with it and found it an interesting way to begin to unpack the problems with and possibilities of grades.
For ease of reading in this context, I've simplified the citations throughout, but note that I'm drawing exclusively from chapter 6 of Tomlinson and Moon's book, Assessment and student success in a differentiated classroom, published by the Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2013.
Date: December 1, 2021
Re: Clarification of my identity and my relationship to you
Dear Student,
My name is “Grade.” You know me from that report card you received yesterday. I was sitting there glaring at you from the box next to the line for your History class. I fear that my presence there was a disappointment to you; in fact, I fear that my presence in your school life has been a source of frustration for many years. I wanted to write to you directly to clarify a few things. I want you to know who I am and what I truly stand for. I also want to express to you my frustration at being often misused by teachers, including teachers that you’ve had throughout your school life. I’m not what you think I am; I’m not that thing that causes you anxiety and keeps you awake at night. I’m not that thing that triggers a grounding from your parents, who take away your video game console each time a report card comes out. Rather, if I was better understood for who I really am, I could be meaningful to you, and I could even support your learning (p. 128).
I think it’s best to start by recognizing why you have such a negative impression of me. It’s not your fault; it’s because I’m very misunderstood by many teachers, who employ me for purposes that I don’t support. Too often teachers utilize me to compare you to your classmates and to rank you along a spectrum of best to worst amongst your peers (p. 123). At other points, I’m administered by teachers as a sort of carrot or stick, as a means to either reward your behavior or punish you for not falling in line. I must categorically reject these misuses; this is not at all what I stand for. In addition to these overt misrepresentations of who I am, I’m often misunderstood for less nefarious reasons. My identity is clouded due to the ambiguity of teacher intentions when they display me on top of that paper, or in that box on your report card. Teachers try to use a singular me -- one single Grade -- to represent a whole host of different components of your classroom experience. Imagine! Teachers expect me to stand there and communicate, all at the same time, your academic performance in the class, as well as your effort and behavior, how dutifully you complete homework and meet deadlines, while also reflecting the progress you’ve made. Some people have called this “grade fog” (p. 132); it’s when I become so obscured that I completely lose my identity and ability to communicate anything meaningful to you or to your parents.
It’s important to note that many teachers do recognize correctly that I’m best used to “help parents and students know where a student currently stands in terms of academic achievement” (p. 122), but they fail in their intentions because they don’t start the unit of learning with clear learning goals. Rather than a clear set of objectives at the outset for what the teacher expects students to know, understanding and be able to do as a result of the unit of learning, too many teachers think in terms of content coverage, and sort of meander through covering material over the course of a week or two or three, and then try to attach me to some measure of what was covered. As authors Tomlinson and Moon once wrote, “Lacking that clarity before a unit ever begins, curriculum becomes a collection of amorphous information, lessons go off course, and assessments turn into a guessing game” (p. 128). It’s no wonder you sometimes have no idea what to expect on a test, and it’s understandable why you’re sometimes surprised to see what form I take on the top of that test when it’s returned to you.
So who am I really and what do I truly stand for? Well, I hope you haven’t decided that I’m completely useless and I hope you haven’t concluded that I should be discarded or ignored completely. I believe I do have a place in your school life, and I could even become a helpful partner in your learning. What would it take for me to be able to assume that rightful place in your education? First and foremost, I need to be attached to quality assessments that are aligned to clear learning goals. To develop a quality assessment, your teachers need to create assessments with high levels of reliability and validity, while working to eliminate, as much as possible, assessment error and teacher bias (p. 123). Reliability refers to “consistency or stability of results” (p. 124), while validity has to do with ensuring that the assessment measures what the teacher intended to measure. As for assessment error, that refers to the gap between a student’s result on the assessment versus their actual knowledge, understanding and skill, while teacher bias arises because teachers are human, and, if unchecked, humans are terribly partial in their judgments of other humans (p. 125).
But even when associated with quality assessments, there are practices that can distort what I represent. To avoid this, your teachers should, first, only assign me to represent your level of performance vis-a-vie the learning goals. I should never be used to compare or rank you with your classmates. Second, I must be used only to describe your academic performance, isolated from the many other important aspects of classroom learning, such as your work habits, or your progress. Third, practices like assigning “zeros” to missed or late assignments, or such as averaging all assessments to find the mean, should be eliminated. These practices, though they give the impression of algorithmic precision and scientific objectivity, actually disguise my inherently subjective nature. As Grant Wiggins (1998) has said, “A letter grade on a report card appears definitive and objective, but it actually covers up an array of judgments, ambiguities, and questions that need to be aired and debated” (quoted on p. 133). Finally, my relationship to your academic performance should be transparent and visible to you. In fact, the teacher should open the process up and invite you and I to better get to know each other, so that you can come to understand what I truly stand for, and how I can guide you progressively towards your learning goals.
In short, I feel that I need to apologize for the trauma that I have caused you over the years, but I must also insist that causing pain is not actually in my nature; rather, the damage has been caused by my misuse -- and even abuse -- by teachers. I hope that going forward, in partnership with your teachers, I can assume my rightful place in your learning journey -- that is, to be meaningful, and to serve as a guide as you pursue learning goals at ever higher levels.
Yours “truly,”
- Grade
