Learning Together
Timing and Accuracy
In recent years, teachers and administrators have been analyzing their current grading policies focusing on an essential question: are our grading practices equitable? They question whether the common grading practices focus more on the behaviors of students or on the standards that we focus our learning on. When Joe Feldman wrote about this idea in 2019, some schools, departments, and individual teachers saw this as an opportunity to more accurately and equitably present their grades. The elementary schools and several teachers at River City High School in Washington Unified School District in West Sacramento took this as an opportunity to have grades be more reflective of students’ academic performance. My resident teacher was one of those teachers who jumped on board.
Since the first day of my observations, she has explained to me some of the ins and outs of her grading system, how she has incorporated Joe Feldman’s ideas, and how she has adapted some to fit her class. She and her colleagues continue to work with the Grading for Equity team through professional development workshops to better understand how we can make our grading system more equitable. Keeping in mind that in my classroom we have already implemented a number of Feldman’s suggestions, I have decided to analyze the data around how to make my current grading system more equitable and provide students with a final grade that is more reflective of their learning. Currently, our formative standards skills practice is worth 1% of the gradebook while the standards-based assessments are 99%. River City High School has a 4x4 block schedule which means we fit a whole year's worth of learning into twenty weeks. The table to the right displays my three focus students' midterm and end of term grades:
While I started reviewing their grades over a month, I realized the students' grades dropped between their midterm grade and their final grade and I wanted to understand why that was. I wanted to start by breaking down the writing portfolios since they were a significant part of students' first term grades and midterm.
I allowed students to resubmit their paragraphs incorporating my feedback to earn a higher grade but, for their midterm essay, I provided feedback and edits the three days before it was due and did not allow resubmissions. After calculating out the first three writing prompts I realized that Lily and Andrew performed at their average or better in their midterm essay. Selena did drop but some external factors could have contributed to that dip in her score. I did tell her to take an additional time to submit and she did to make sure her paper was up to the standards she wanted.
Additionally analyzed data from their vocabulary tests and other standards-based assessments we assigned in class. The vocabulary tests were twenty words total and we weighed those scores so they would not be as high as the writing portfolios.
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After analyzing these other two sections of our standards graded work, I realized that our vocabulary and writing assessments seem to correctly reflect our students' knowledge but it is in this miscellaneous section that there could be some discrepancies. The miscellaneous section, seen above, could be reexamined to display student knowledge. Often, these assessments are created to provide students with a variety of ways to show their understanding, but I feel we could include more summative assessments to provide students a better understanding of where their learning is concerning achieving the standard.
My next step during the second half of this term is to find a way to mathematically show students’ most recent level of understanding. As Feldman says in chapter 8, “we see the primary disadvantage of using the mean: It is susceptible to ‘outliers’... that skew the result” (95). While Feldman recommends using median and mode as better calculations for grades, he reminds us that these are still mathematical calculations, “without regard to when those scores happened” (95). How will weighing a student's most recent score accurately reflect their learning? Does this include allowing for additional retakes or resubmissions of assignments that are standards graded? While all teachers should use their judgment in grading, what will if a student’s performance decreases over time. These are the questions that I am going to look at moving forward in this term.
