An
Uphill Battle Implementing Grading Reforms in High Schools
In this American
Educational Research Journal article, Brad Olsen (University of
California/Santa Cruz) and Rebecca Buchanan (University of Maine/Orono) say
that grading began when North American students were first grouped by age in
the mid-1800s. Today, student grades serve a variety of purposes:
-
An
objective measure of a student’s academic achievement or mastery;
-
A
teacher’s subjective estimation of the quality of a student’s work;
-
A
teacher’s appraisal of a student’s effort, ability, or willingness to follow directions;
-
A way of
comparing students with one another;
-
A tool
to inspire;
-
A tool
to control;
-
A source
of power for teachers;
-
A way to
handle student disrespect;
-
An area
in which teachers required to use a scripted curriculum still have some
autonomy.
“Grading is, depending
on whom you ask or what day you ask it, all these things,” say Olsen and
Buchanan, “and, yet, it cannot do all this work simultaneously.” They lament
the lack of systematic, consistent practices in schools – and the unfortunate
consequences this can produce for students.
The authors report on their work with teachers in two New
York high schools implementing new grading practices. The reforms:
-
Giving a
clear description of what students need to do to get a specific grade;
-
Including
only evidence of achievement in students’ grades;
-
Not penalizing
late work by reducing grades;
-
Not
giving points for extra work;
-
Not
punishing copying or cheating with lower grades;
-
Not
including group scores in students’ grades;
-
Using a
four-or-five point scale in place of 100 points;
-
Not
giving zeroes for missed work;
-
Not
giving points for homework, pretests, and classroom activities that don’t show
achievement;
-
Not
assigning grades based on comparisons with other students;
-
Not
using information from formative assessments or practice to determine grades;
-
Including
students in the grading process.
Most of these changes
were new to teachers who volunteered to take part, and implementation was
uneven. Olsen and Buchanan report that “productive teacher change” did occur in
both schools, with teachers developing new views and practices about grading.
But change “was not straightforward [and] it was recursive, partial, tentative,
and contingent on schoolwide support.” The authors have the following
recommendations for schools promoting grading reform:
• First, they believe it’s important to offer teachers
“some kind of mock setting or low-stakes practice with grading fixes before
they implement them in classroom settings.” Otherwise inevitable glitches can
have negative consequences for vulnerable students.
• Second, teachers should be given some flexibility
implementing reforms. “It is better for a stick to bend than break,” say Olsen
and Buchanan, noting that most of the teachers would have pulled out of the pilot
if implementation had been all-or-nothing. “Incremental learning,
seed-planting, and raising provocative questions seem to have worked better
than imposing a rigid system on teachers to accept or reject in toto,” they
say.
• Third, one year of professional development and support
was not enough to overcome teachers’ prior beliefs and practices. Contacted a
year later, some of the teachers had abandoned or scaled back many of the
reform practices. Why? Student resistance, the fact that implementing the new
ideas took additional teacher time, lack of support from school administrators,
and teachers not being fully convinced of the need for change.
• Fourth, there must be whole-school support for changes
like these to take hold. “We recommend that schools wishing to reform their
grading approaches find ways to incentivize all
teachers to participate,” say Olsen and Buchanan, “offer substantial
release-time for this difficult work, and make it part of an extended
commitment to whole-school improvement.”
• Finally, the authors believe grading reform must be
front and center in schools, districts, and teacher training programs. This is
the only way schools will “finally retire inaccurate, inequitable, antiquated
paradigms of student assessment.”
“An
Investigation of Teachers Encouraged to Reform Grading Practices in Secondary
Schools” by Brad Olsen and Rebecca Buchanan in American Educational Research Journal, October 2019 (Vol. 56, #5,
pp. 2004-2039), available for AERA members or for purchase at
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