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A few thoughts on grading
March 21, 2004Grades are due tomorrow.
There are a number of students whose numerical average doesn't reflect their total lack of effort (they're passing by a healthy margin) and a number of students who're really struggling, yet still failing.
What to do?In Among Schoolchildren, by Tracy Kidder, the author details his 9 months with elementary school teacher Christine Zajac, after which she burns out and quits. Mrs. Zajac is a gifted educator, but one firmly planted in the student-centered education mode.
When it comes time to turn in grades for her children, Mrs. Zajac takes a sick day. Every single time.
She doesn't do this to shirk her responsibilities, she does this because she's actually sick! Her body and mind are completely drained of energy, provoked by the mere thought of having to assign grades to her students. She frets about this dilemma, internalizing it until she's raw, until finally she can't even report to school and must take a day to recuperate.
How can a few little letters on a report card represent Johnny or Suzie as human beings?
It doesn't have to be that way.
Here's our approach. At the beginning of the term, identify to students exactly what they'll need to do and perform to earn a certain grade. If you've got weighted categories--such as 50% for tests and projects, 25% for homework and classwork, and 25% for quizzes--tell the students what these weights are. Then, on each assignment, test, quiz, or whatever, be sure the students know exactly how they scored.
Here's the really tough part: At the end of the term, assign the children grades based upon their numerical average. In other words, give the kid the grade he or she earned.
If you're a non-teacher or a "traditional" teacher, you're probably shaking your head, saying "isn't that completely obvious?"
Meanwhile our child-centered teacher readers are saying, "No, you can't do it that way!"
The argument is simple. Traditional educators know that children should be graded on performance, pure and simple. A student either has the knowledge and skills to earn a passing grade, or doesn't, with higher levels of performance earning higher grades.
Progressive, or "child-centered" educators think this is cruel and heartless. "How dare a teacher just mechanically punch numbers into a calculator and come up with a cold numerical average, and then say that this is what a child is worth? It is up to the teacher," they say, "to take into account a myriad of factors in determining a child's grade, including things like effort, attendance, and even factors like socioeconomic status and home life."
Traditional educators have an easy reply to this complaint by the progressives: Grades are not (and never have been) a measure of a child's worth! If Johnny's report card has a D in Mathematics, that doesn't mean Johnny the human being is worth a D, it simply means that Johnny's performance in the knowledge and skills of Mathematics is worth a D!
Traditional and Progressive educators can debate back and forth on this issue, but there is real danger in taking the wrong path. That hazard is: what happens when the child leaves your classroom?
Let's say you grade a child on "effort" or you take into account the fact that he's got a really tough homelife. (For example, one of our girls has a three-year-old baby, and is pregnant again. She's all of sixteen.) Does this mean the student should pass your course?
- What happens in next year's class, when there's an expectation of mastery of certain knowledge and skills?
- What happens when that student takes a standardized test, which will most certainly not take into account all the human factors that you valued in assigning that child a grade?
- What happens in college, when the student attending State U. enrolls in a freshman lecture course, with 250 other students?
Let's take another look at the three bullets above.
- Passing kids on who shouldn't be passed on is called social promotion. There are two side-effects here. For starters, the next year's teacher's work is made doubly difficult because twice as much material must be taught. Even worse, in a system where social promotion is the norm, students quickly learn that there's no expectation to put forth any effort, since they know they'll be promoted anyway. (Either way, the kid's screwed.)
- The argument that "standardized tests don't measure what's really important" is often used to slam standardized tests. These critics have it exactly backwards, as our friend Kimberly Swygert often writes, if the tests measure knowledge and skills, shouldn't teachers get to work teaching knowledge and skills?
- We feel very strongly about not setting children up for failure. And in college, we know that there isn't even one percent of the hand-holding that goes on in K-12 schools. Therefore, to best prepare for college, why not hold students accountable for their mastery of the knowledge and skills of your particular subject? If a high school senior passes trigonometry (or pre-calc) with flying colors, that student is most likely ready for freshman calculus, even if it is taught lecture-style.
"Progressive, or "child-centered" educators think this is cruel and heartless. "How dare a teacher just mechanically punch numbers into a calculator and come up with a cold numerical average, and then say that this is what a child is worth? It is up to the teacher," they say, "to take into account a myriad of factors in determining a child's grade, including things like effort, attendance, and even factors like socioeconomic status and home life.""
Where did you find that child-centerd educators think that this is cruel and heartless? I am a child-centered educator, and it has to do with how I deliver the material, not how I grade students. This diatribe does not make sense to me. How you can make such sweeping genrealizations is just beyond me!
I agree that elementary students should be graded on their performance, but please take the child-centered nonsense out of this discussion! When you begin to label teachers as child-centered or traditional (whose tradition?) you lose your point.
Janet, thank you for your comment. Personally, I find the labels "child-centered" and "teacher-centered" to be simplistic if you actually think about the meaning of each phrase. But the categories do exist, so I use them as such.
However, I'd argue that a lot of teachers who call themselves "child centered" actually match the description of teacher-centered.
If you are an effective, rigorous teacher, you may have a lot more in common with "teacher-centered" folks than you imagined!
chett March 21, 2004 08:11 PMI had a pricnipal a few years back who used "child centered" as a third rail buzzword, like affirmative action or diversity.
If you agreed with her "hand-holding," "spare the rod" views then you were child centered. If you disagreed then you were a pariah.
I once pointed out to her that all teachers are "child centered" or else we would not be doing this job. I feel it is "child centered" to get them used to taking responsibility for their actions as early as possible.
Bob Diethrich March 22, 2004 12:16 PMTeachers will always have wrenching difficulties
assessing what grade represents a students per-
formance until school districts,parents, and tea-
chers alike buy into the concept of a set K-12
curriculum. Without a set K-12 curriculum there
won't be an honest and true grading/evaluation
system.
The way I see it is as follows:
Bob has just completed Alg.1 in teacher x's class
and received an A.
Sharon the same in teacher Y's class and received
a B.
Jeff the same in teacher Z's class and received
a C.
In a system w/o a set k-12 curriculum and the co-
herent, fair and honest evaluation sytem that must follow, no teacher or anyone else for that
matter really knows how the the stundents compare
to each other. Without it there is no way to know
what grade Jeff would have received in Y's class and what grade Sharon in X' class and so forth.
Not only is the situation ver stressful for teachers but moreover, it is extremely unfair to
the students.
This situation becomes more profound when the disparities between districts are considered.
Children not only need to know,but want to know how they match up to one another. In my opinion,
it's only the adults who trully don't want this
information.
You are absolutely right that it does not help a child to give them a grade they do not deserve.
As someone who gives kids the grades they earned, I still agonize over grading. I hold MYSELF to the ideal that my students will ALL know the material and have performed at a high level in my class - which of course is an ideal, not reality. Grading time is a time of reflecting on my own performance, as well as the children's, and considering whether I performed to MY highest ability as a teacher. Perhaps because it's an impossible ideal, I find grading period depressing - and yet, when it is over, I am always recharged to do more for the kids in the next term.
ms. frizzle,
Thank you for your perspective. I wish I had teachers like you when I was a young'un. :-)
Deeply caring, plus unflinchingly honest, (plus someone who clearly knows her stuff!)--what a great combination in a role model for our young people.
chett March 22, 2004 08:14 PMTracy Kidder - the liberal's liberal. (Sorry, but I lived nearby him, for many years. His book HOUSE featured a pretentious lawyer that I also didn't care for, either.)
izzy March 25, 2004 02:08 PM