| THE
BATTLE OVER REPORT CARDS
Thomas R. Guskey
27 March 2003
This is the biggest, ugliest issue in education today. The
standards’ issue has pretty much been resolved. This
has brought us to assessment, and we’ve made a lot of
progress. We’re trying to revise the Michigan state
assessment system to meet NCLB. Once assessment systems were
settled we turned to accountability. Now we’re turning
to grading and reporting. What we’re doing with standards
doesn’t match what we’ve done in grading and reporting.
This is one place where our knowledge base and our translation
into practice are greater than any other area.
Guskey has always been fascinated by the area of grades.
Consider students whose performance are consistent. There
are others who performed better at the end, and others who
were failing at the end. There were some who did well on tests
and didn’t do homework.
We have standards but we also have inclusion. Do you hold
them accountable to the same standards? What about G/T students?
What about cooperative learning groups? How should students
be graded when they’re in a cooperative learning group?
He put together the 1996 ASCD Yearbook: Communicating Student
Learning. We’ve known a lot for a long time and haven’t
used it.
We know there’s subjectivity in grading. It’s
his opinion that the gap in what we know and do is the greatest
in this area. After the ASCD Yearbook, Guskey interviewed
teachers about grading. He found it isn’t taught. Teachers
reflect back on what was done to them most recently (college
and university professors) and they do that to students. Most
teachers haven’t thought a lot about grading. They haven’t
investigated this.
He talked to parents who use lots of strategies to get information
about their children. When surveys are administered to teachers,
students and parents, all are consistent in their responses
but the three groups don’t agree. Parents and students
agree more than teachers. How often should report cards be
given? 90% of the parents will say every six weeks; 90% of
the teachers will say every nine weeks. Parents want more
information and on a more regular basis.
Today we’ll talk about a system of reporting. You shouldn’t
have a report card committee but a grading-reporting committee:
open house meetings, parent-teacher conferences, student-led
conferences, e-mail, homework hotlines, newsletters, etc.
This resulted in a book Developing Grading-Reporting Systems.
They interviewed parents. He found we have a language parents
don’t understand. It doesn’t serve them well.
There are certain words we use in education all the time that
parents don’t understand. One of these words is “emerging.”
Parents have no idea what this means. If “emerging”
means “beginning,” why don’t we use “beginning.”
Another word we use is “developmental.” Parents
don’t understand this. They equate developmental with
remedial.
In standards-based report cards, teachers think they’ve
provided the parents with more information and parents looked
at it and asked, “How’s my child doing? What grade
would this be? How’s my child doing with respect to
everyone else in class?” New book: How’s My Kid
Doing?
Essential Questions
1. What are you doing currently in Grading and Reporting?
2. What are your greatest concerns?
3. What would you like to accomplish today?
How can we communicate effectively with students and parents?
Do students and parents understand what grades mean? Are teachers
being objective when reporting grades? What does a grading
and reporting system look like? Is it reasonable to expect
teachers to be able to do this? How can we standardize grading
practices in teachers so that whatever grade we use means
the same from teacher to teacher (comparability)?
Grades do more to hurt kids than help. Developing Grading
and Reporting Systems contains all the research. He does not
engage in battles of opinion. He only enters into arguments
where he has some knowledge of the issues. When he enters
into arguments, he enters to win.
Purposes of Grading
1. Communicate the achievement status of students to their
parents and others.
2. Provide information for student self-evaluation.
3. Select, identify or group students for certain educational
programs.
4. Provide incentives for students to learn.
5. Document students’ performance to evaluate the effectiveness
of instructional programs.
6. Provide evidence of students’ lack of effort or inappropriate
responsibility.
All these could be considered legitimate purposes. See #7
on page 2. We don’t agree on answers to purposes of
grades and other reporting systems. We don’t agree on
purpose so we try to come up with something like a report
card that serves them all and it doesn’t serve any of
these well. You must decide your purpose first! Print the
purpose on the top of the report card! Once you agree on the
purpose, you can proceed. If you want to have multiple purposes
served, you need different reporting devices. Each device
needs a clearly stated purpose. If you have multiple purposes,
you need a reporting system.
If the purpose is to communicate to parents about students’
learning, you need parents to understand. Parents must be
on the committee.
If the purpose is to communicate to students, they need to
understand what you’re talking about. Students must
be on the committee.
Grading Elements
Major exams or compositions homework completion
Class quizzes homework quality
Reports or projects class participation
Student portfolios work habits and neatness
Exhibits of students’ works effort put forth
Laboratory projects class attendance
Students’ notebooks or journals punctuality of assignments
Classroom observations class behavior or attitude
Oral presentations progress made
Not only do we disagree on purpose, we disagree on what counts.
This differs from teacher to teacher. If grading is designed
to be a communication device, we have a long way to go.
General Conclusions from the Research on Grading
Most of the change is taking place from the “bottom”
up. High school is the last to consider changing.
1. Grading and reporting are NOT essential to the instructional
process.
a. Teachers can teach without grades.
b. Students can and do learn without grades.
Students pay attention to what we do and say; thus, we must
pay attention to all these things.
Checking IS essential!
• Checking is Diagnostic; teacher is an Advocate.
• Grading is Evaluative; Teacher is a Judge.
The principal must be both an advocate and evaluator of teachers.
We seldom look at the role we put teachers in, especially
at the elementary level. Not everything has to count for the
grade. Does it count? Absolutely yes! Is it part of the grade?
It doesn’t have to be. As long as we see grading and
checking as the same, we’ll never be able to make progress.
2. No one method of grading and reporting serves ALL purposes
well.
This is why we must go back and deal with the core issues
of purpose. This must be considered first. In architecture,
form follows function. In education, method follows purpose!
Solution: Multiple purposes require a multi-faceted, comprehensive
reporting system!
Four most common grading systems:
Letter grades
Advantages: Disadvantages:
Brief description of adequacy Require the abstration of lots
of info
Generally understood Cut-offs are arbitrary
Easily misinterpreted
In some districts elementary teachers are forbidden to use
letter grades. Most elementary students in Kentucky are identified
by the 4 rubric scores: novice, apprentice, proficient, distinguished.
Parents translate these to letter grades. This has accomplished
nothing.
What about pluses and minuses? It’s simple. Do you
want a 5-category or a 12-category system? You can consider
percentages (101 categories), etc. As the number goes up,
the subjectivity goes up. Once you move beyond 5-6, human
beings can’t distinguish between or make finer refinements.
There are drastic differences between elementary and secondary
teachers. Elementary teachers talk about their role conflict.
Secondary teachers gather a vast array of information and
it’s all arbitrary although they don’t think so.
There are a lot more cut offs but they are no less arbitrary.
Checklists of Skills (Standards Based)
Advantages: Disadvantages:
Clear description of achievement Often too complicated for
parents to
Useful for diagnosis and prescription understand
Seldom communicate the
appropriateness of progress
Some grade based on what we would expect at this time of
year. We must help parents understand what we would expect
at this time of year vs how the child compares to everyone
else.
Steps in Developing Standards-Based Grading
1. Identify the major learning goals or standards that students
will be expected to achieve at each grade level or in each
course of study.
2. Establish performance indicators for the learning goals
or standards.
3. Determine graduated levels of quality (benchmarks) for
assessing each goal or standard.
4. Develop reporting forms that communicate teachers’
judgments of students’ learning progress and culminating
achievement in relation to the learning goals or standards.
We should limit each grade to 5-6 standards. We should then
identify the benchmarks for the standards. “Always,”
“Usually,” “Sometimes,” and “Never”
are inadequate and parents don’t want to hear these
terms. We may need different report cards for each level.
This is a long and arduous process but it’s worthwhile,
especially if we engage parents in it. Parents need to understand
the report card and make sense of it. They get confused by
things like “acquisition.”
Narratives
Advantages: Disadvantages:
Clear description of progress and Extremely time-consuming
for
Achievement teachers to develop
Useful for diagnosis and prescription May not communicate
appropriateness
Of progress
Comments often become standardized
Parents are suspicious of the computerized program that does
the same comments from different teachers. They really resent
the number that corresponds to a comment. Get rid of this
immediately! However, narratives are really time-consuming
for teachers.
Grades with Comments Are Better than Grades Alone!
Grade Standard Comment
A Excellent! Keep it up.
B Good work. Keep at it.
C Perhaps try to do still better?
D Let’s bring this up.
F Let’s raise this grade!
This works. It dates from 1950—E. B. Page. The first
unit is the most powerful unit taught in the entire school
year. Make the quiz or test a successful experience and this
will carry through throughout the year. Show students in your
classes a place where you can succeed. Teachers give a quiz
the first or second week of class.
Three piles of student work:
First pile = grades only
Second pile = grades and comments
Third pile = how to improve/comments and suggestions
Second quiz:
First pile = same grade
Second pile = grades went up
Third pile = grades went up even more.
We expect students to do well. Comments show that as a teacher,
I’m on your side. Let’s raise this grade. Very
small things can make a difference.
Guskey collected the first quiz then compared it with the
final grade. There was an 80% match. Should it be that way?
Should you know in the second week that it’s going to
be that predictable?
Solution:
1. Determine the primary purpose of each grading and reporting
tool.
2. Select or develop the most appropriate method for each
tool.
3. Develop a multi-faceted, comprehensive reporting system!
Stiggins says students use early assessments to determine
who they are as a learner. The student self-assesses how worthwhile
it will be to work hard in this class. If we make the first
quiz hard, students won’t necessarily buckle down but
will give up.
#3. Grading and Reporting Will ALWAYS Involve Some Degree
of Subjectivity!
It will also be subjective. Certain things influence subjectivity.
In General, Reporting is More Subjective:
The more detailed the reporting method
The more analytic the reporting process.
The more “effort” is considered
The more “behavior” influences judgments.
However, more detailed and analytic reports are better learning
tools!
Challenge: To balance reporting needs with instructional
purposes.
#4. Mathematic precision does NOT yield fairer or more objective
grading!
This falsehood is being propagated by computerized grading
programs. Suppose we have 5 grades and we consider them of
equal weight. Method #1 is to average. Method #2 is called
the median, the middle grade in the group. The advantage is
it’s positional and not calculated; it isn’t influenced
by extreme scores. #3 allows the lowest score to be deleted
so the four are averaged.
See the handout, “Grading Formulae: What Grade Do Students
Deserve?” We want to use different systems for each
student. Some of our practices are detrimental.
Questionable Practices:
Averaging to obtain a course grade
Giving zeroes for work missed or work turned in late
Taking credit away from students for infractions
In the martial arts your level of performance is displayed
by the color of the belt you wear. You started with white;
now you’re black; I guess you deserve a gray belt. This
has a powerful impact on motivation. If you blow it at the
start, you can’t overcome it. This has a devastating
effect on kids. When students suffer a traumatic event, they
may not be able to function for awhile. If we average, we
do them a disservice.
Why do we give zeroes? To punish kids for lack of effort
or inappropriate responsibility. The consequence doesn’t
have to be reflected in the grade. If it’s incomplete
or not done, you get an I. They have a specific date and day
when students must stay after school to complete the work.
They continue to come until the work is done. This costs money
so you need the Board to approve this.
Extreme scores have more influence on the final result than
any other score.
What is a grade supposed to represent? If it’s an accurate
representation of what students have learned, and the student
did no homework but got As on the test, will you count homework?
Homework in his classes now is 5% of the grade. It’s
an add-on to the test. This lets students add to their grade
rather than the teacher taking away. They don’t know
what the score is going to be until the end.
The true purpose of today isn’t what we accomplish
today; it’s in what happens afterwards. What are you
going to do with this in your schools and districts when you
go home? What are the next issues that need to be confronted?
What steps will you take?
If we don’t average, what are we going to do? Alternatives
to Averaging Inconsistent Evidence on Student Learning:
Give priority to the most recent evidence. If you have learned
the topic by the final and it’s a superior grade to
the mid-term, throw out the mid-term. Make the material cumulative
on the final exam.
Give priority to the most comprehensive evidence. Everything
we teach isn’t equally important. Give priority to what’s
more important.
Give priority to evidence related to the most important learning
goals or standards.
Difficulties you’ll likely inquire:
Test anxieties can influence the grade. The grade should be
an accurate reflection of what the student has learned. Can
you defend the grade as an accurate reflection of what the
student has learned? Doing the same thing for every child
isn’t defensible. You need to clarify your purpose and
what you want the grade to represent.
Grading requires thoughtful and informed professional judgment!
You must be able to defend those judgments. Mathematical precision
doesn’t make it defensible.
Court cases regarding grades:
How we grade students who are special education students.
How we determine valedictorians.
A special education was graded on the progress made on her
IEP goals. She’s been on the honor roll. The mother
wants her to graduate with honors because she’s been
on the honor roll every marking period she’s been in
school. They weren’t going to give her a diploma. The
court sided with the mother. The girl graduated with honors,
and the school district immediately changed their policy:
graduating with distinction. This is an area that can get
you into a lot of trouble.
#5 Grades have some value as rewards, but NO value as punishments.
Alfie Kohn has a book on this, and he’s wrong. Two researchers
found that it works if it isn’t overdone. There’s
substantial and clear evidence that grades serve no value
as punishments. Grades won’t motivate them to try harder
in the future. The student concludes, This topic is irrelevant.
I will find other ways to be successful—and they may
do this by being disruptive.
Message: Do not use grades as weapons! They don’t serve
this purpose well. Some districts have abandoned failing grades,
but students still have to know there are consequences to
their choices. Students are given an incomplete. If we accept
failing work, we accept failure. If it isn’t done well,
it isn’t complete. You’re here after school in
a special session to remedy this failing grade—after
school, on Saturday, during summer. The responsibility is
put back on the student.
#6 Grading and reporting should ALWAYS be done in reference
to Learning Criteria, never “on the curve.” Grading
on the curve is detrimental to students and it’s detrimental
to the relationship between teacher and student. We won’t
help others be successful if we’re being graded on the
curve. Who came up with the rule that there can only be one
valedictorian? Colleges and universities don’t have
valedictorians; they graduate students summa cum laude, magna
cum laude, cum laude. Children and their parents start planning
in middle school how to be valedictorian. It has nothing to
do with excellence; it has to do with competition. Our job
is not to select talent; our job is to develop talent. Let’s
identify excellence, but let’s define what excellence
means. This increases the level of achievement in school.
It doesn’t have to be one person. Everyone can strive
to get there. This means you have to identify the criteria.
Grading Criteria:
1. Product criteria – don’t worry about how they
got there; consider what they could show at the end. What
about PE? Athletes can do it better than anyone. Suppose one
doesn’t try because they can do it already; they’re
also a behavior problem. A second student works hard and makes
progress.
2. Process criteria – if you count punctuality, homework,
class attendance, these are process criteria.
3. Progress criteria – how far they’ve come. This
is called value-added grading. How do you identify what’s
appropriate progress for each individual?
Most teachers use a combination of these three. No combination
is clearly best. If all three are combined in a single grade,
it’s impossible to know how it’s calculated. Canadian
educators address this problem a little differently. They
report these separately. Canada gives a band of grades per
class: achievement, effort, homework, punctuality and attendance,
etc. They gather the same information we do but they don’t
combine it at the end. They report it separately. Teachers
love it. It helps explain the grades. Parents like it because
it gives a profile of the child. Employers like it because
they can see what the student is like. They still have class
rank and GPA but they use the achievement grade for this.
Special educators are critical of the Canadian system. To
inflate grades doesn’t do the child a favor. They believe
in being honest. Is there a rubric for scoring effort? How
do you score homework? How do you know it’s the student’s
work? The Battle over Homework – Corwin Press. Having
students read a chapter before it’s discussed is pretty
much useless. If, prior to reading, the teacher does pre-teaching
and offers students a cognitive map (the teacher identifies
specific things they should be looking for in the reading),
it’s more effective. Homework must be checked and be
returned in a timely fashion. Take the first 10 minutes to
go over homework. This gives them valuable feedback. Kids
don’t do homework because of factors they can’t
control—childcare, no quiet place, etc., or the initial
instruction was so poor they don’t understand how to
do the homework.
#7 – Grade Distributions reflect both:
Students’ level of performance
The quality of the teaching.
The quality of the teaching has a lot to do with the distribution
of grades. This is especially important in the issue of grade
inflation. The problem with grade inflation is that there
are lots of high grades that don’t mean anything. We
should define the criteria for the grades. Standards aren’t
the issue. Set the standards, communicate them to students,
then work so that students meet them. If you say over half
the students in your class failed, you’re a poor teacher.
We must have the courage to confront those teachers.
There’s a committee at Harvard looking at grade compression.
At Duke the GPA of students has gone up over the past 20 years.
Duke wants to come up with a formula to equate grades to the
1980s. Their standards for admission are so much higher than
they were then. They’re also teaching their teachers
to teach better. If you have more talented students and they’re
being taught better, you should hope their grades go up! The
key to solving grade inflation is not to limit the number
of high grades, but to bring meaning to those grades.
#8 – Report cards are but one way of communicating
with parents.
Forms of reporting to parents include:
Report cards
Notes with report cards
Standardized assessment reports
Weekly/monthly progress reports
Phone calls
School open houses
Newsletters
Personal letters
Homework
Evaluated assignments or projects
Portfolios or exhibits
School web pages
Homework hotlines
Parent-teacher conferences
Student-led conferences
If the principal writes a note on a report card, it will
have tremendous impact on the student. Section 1 – what’s
going to be taught in class. Section 2 – what is going
to be expected of students. Section 3 – how you can
help at home.
Over 75% of parents fear phone calls from the school. We
get a phone call from school for one of two reasons: the child
is in trouble or the child is sick/hurt. Call the parents
when the student does something right. This will change the
school! The first phone call is the hardest. If the teacher
calls, the student also assumes something is wrong. Make 3
phone calls a week. Begin by saying something good. One teacher
called 3 parents every night. This affects classroom management,
on-time homework, etc. Carry a cell phone and call when the
child does something right. I just say Chrissy doing this;
we’re so proud of her. Would you like to talk to her???
This changed the culture of the school.
How parents regard open house meetings: they count open house
meetings as extremely important. This is one of the most important
devices they use to gain information about the school and
about the teacher. What they want to know about the school:
two things top parents lists—they want to know that
you are competent, well-prepared to do the things you do.
They don’t just competence by your degrees, but by what
you communicate to them and how you engage students. They
want to know that you care about their child as a principal.
Teachers communicate negatively by saying they didn’t
want this assignment and they’ll be learning along with
the class. This is going to be one of the best and most exciting
years your child has had!
At parent-teacher conference the teacher opens the grade
book, it sends the message that the teacher doesn’t
know the child. We have to prepare teachers for open house
meetings. They have to be prepared for these encounters.
In Harris Cooper’s work he looked at the influence
of homework on achievement. It’s more a question of
quality than quantity. The influence of the amount of homework
at the elementary level has NO relationship to the student’s
level of achievement. Design the homework to engage parents
in it so they know what’s going on.
Student-Led Conferences
Three main phases: student preparation, conference, evaluation.
Preparation—organizing student work, role-playing,
implementation, room arrangement (one family vs multiple-conferences),
scheduling. The role of the teacher, as well as student, changes.
Comments and suggestions will help you with future conferences.
The emphasis is on portfolio, not on grades.
#9 – High percentages are NOT the same as high standards!
It’s really wrong to lump percentages and standards
together for a grade. What’s an A? 95%? 92%? 90%?
Suppose I constructed an exam that used more open ended questions?
Standards vs Difficulty
Open-Ended, constructed response item (short answer or completion)
1. Who was the 17th President of the United States?
If I ask the question as a multiple-choice item, I can control
the difficulty. Every one of the questions gets at the same
standard. The teacher controls the difficulty of the assessment.
That’s why this decision is completely arbitrary. We
control so much of the challenge we present students. The
challenge is directly related to the quality of the teaching.
All of these things are related. That’s why they’re
arbitrary. Be explicit about the arbitrary decisions we make.
Consistency works better for kids. Think big but start small.
Bring precision and clarity to the decisions we make.
Guidelines for Better Practice
#1 – Begin with a clear statement of purpose:
Why grading and reporting are done?
For whom the information is intended?
What are the desired results?
#2 – Provide accurate and understandable descriptions
of student learning
Less an exercise in quantifying achievement
More a challenge in effective communication
#3 – Use Grading and reporting to enhance teaching
and learning
Facilitate communication between teachers, parents, and students
Ensure efforts to help students are harmonious
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