Assessment In The New Age of Education

As many schools have done, the school I work at has recently adopted the following protocol for reporting marks:

• K-3 are given anecdotal comments only
• 4-9 are letter grades only
• 10-12 are letter grades and percentages

The biggest change comes in the 8 and 9 grade levels where percentages were historically a part of our reporting marks. The change came for various reasons, but the staff are divided on the subject. Many argued that we are being less specific and thus sharing less information with parents about how their child is doing: why give "less" information than is needed? Would it not be better to give more? Does a percentage not, in fact, make our reporting more specific than other schools? Is this not something that would make our school better, perhaps, than other schools?

I personally wondered about this as well. I do understand some of the pedagogical concepts behind the move. I too agree that, at times, looking at assignments and assigning a number to either an assignment or a term on the whole can actually be, dare I say, inaccurate. For example, is an essay really worth exactly 73%? Does that mean that 27 words were incorrect in some fashion? Is it not easier and perhaps clearer to grade as the provincial exams do for papers and mark with a rubric for what constitutes an "A" or "B" paper? True, there is some subjective marking of any essay (what each teacher might consider clear thoughts or good transitions will change from teacher to teacher), but is this any worse than assigning a number? As well, looking across a marking spreadsheet and seeing a jumble of numbers could mathematically tie a teacher's hand with respect to giving useful feedback or insight on how to improve. For example, mathematically, imagine a student does three assignments and gets the following marks: 90, 90, and 88. However, he then gets a  73 on the fourth one, he could be assigned a "B" (85%) as a final mark. However, 3 of the 4 assignments were "A" work. In my opinion, this shows how we as teachers can succumb to the hard line of numerical assessment strategies. In fact, why don't we take this one step further as the Summerland school district has done and go so far as to get rid of letter grades altogether for grades 4-9. As Darcy Mullins, a teacher in that school district, writes the following in his blog:

"Letter grades force students to focus on the product as opposed to the process.  It is the process where the learning occurs.  It is during the learning where students can get the feedback they need to grow.  Using letter grades sends the message that once something is complete the learning is done.  Not using letter grades, but instead using descriptive feedback sends the message that learning is continuous." (http://darcymullin.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/rethinking-letter-grades/)

My personal experiences with our transition to only letter grades for the middle grades have been positive so far. First, during our most recent parent-teacher interviews, no parent asked about the change, or asked specifically about their percentages. As well, I decided to mark two assignments specifically with only letter grades (these being reports and an experiment paper). What I found was that I had to be very "front heavy" with the assignment: in other words, I had to really think about and write down what constituted an "A" work for that assignment, and what changes from that work would make that assignment a "B", and so on, and make sure that the students knew what I was looking for. My rubric, therefore, was quite large. However, once I had the rubric completed, looking at the assignments and marking them accordingly was much easier and faster on a whole.

One book on the topic that has been recommended to me (and consequently is mentioned in Darcy Mullin's blog) is Tom Schimmer's book Ten Things That Matter From Assessment to Grading.

I do feel that our job as teachers is to assess and grade as accurately as we can. However, I also feel that the assessment and grading should be part of the learning. Why stop students from learning more because they have reached a number when they should instead be taught to strive to be lifelong learners?