not alone. Our students need a new, more effective grading system. We must rethink our traditional grading practices and build a new grading model that clarifies and communicates about student learning. When we take this step, we will engage in more effective conversations about teaching and learning, demonstrate evidence of learning for every student, drive innovative revisions to instructional practices, and gain more equitable consistency in our schools. Overall, we will build a clear working relationship among curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
This means hard work. This means getting specific about three things: (1) what we want students to know, understand, and do; (2) how we clearly state our performance expectations of students; and (3) why we must gather visible evidence of student learning so we can address the gaps in student achievement, build higher-quality instruction, and extend mastery over learning.
Past grading practices do not communicate specifically about learning. For this reason, educators struggle to engage in meaningful conversations that develop coherence around curriculum, instruction, and assessment. As a result, we often fumble over how to open crucial dialogue about what students know and what they do not know. Likewise, students sit through their classes unsure of expectations, and parents remain unclear about what their children need to do to succeed in school. Our work around evidence-based grading is focused on unifying the relationship among curriculum, instruction, and assessment so teachers and students can work together more explicitly on what student learning growth looks like.
Many of our best educators and researchers are working to improve discussions that confirm learning is taking place and all students are succeeding. These educators recognize the potential of grading practices to foster dialogue about teaching and learning and how that dialogue can help students progress in their learning. The following are a few headline statements that express the need to approach grading differently. In Ahead of the Curve, Ken O’Connor (2007a) says:
Grading as it has been done traditionally promotes a culture of point accumulation, not learning. It encourages competition rather than collaboration. It often focuses on activities instead of results. It makes all assessment summative because everything students do gets a score, and every score ends up in the grade book. In many schools, grades have achieved “cult-like status” (Olson, 1995) where the grade is more important than whether or not students have learned anything. (pp. 127–128)
Douglas Reeves (2008) shares:
The difference between failure and the honor roll often depends on the grading policies of the teacher. To reduce the failure rate, schools don’t need a new curriculum, a new principal, new teachers, or new technology. They just need a better grading system. (p. 85)
The overriding desire for change is clear. We believe that we must create and support grading practices that reflect how well our students demonstrate what we want them to know, understand, and do. More important, we need students to know how to discuss learning expectations with their teachers, how to reflect on growth, and how to reach greater levels of proficiency and mastery.
This call for change is easier said than done. Shifting away from traditional grading practices is no easy task. Traditional grading practices have been around a long time—generations have been herded through schools branding students with grades that say very little about what they learned. Moving away from these grading practices will take thoughtful conversations, reflective revisions, and hard work.
In our own district, we have spent the better part of four years moving away from a grading model that went virtually unchanged from our school’s opening in 1965. For nearly fifty years, we stuck with traditional grading practices that are most familiar to everyone in high schools and colleges—a model of counting points and percentages and putting a letter stamp on the student—A, B, C, D, or F.
For decades, we have agreed that these letters actually stand for something. We are here to question that long-standing agreement and share how we are working to clearly articulate what we expect students to know, understand, and do; how well we expect students to perform; and how we expect students to prove what they’ve learned with clear, explicit evidence.
Like most educators, we rarely questioned traditional practices despite what we know about growth in learning. These deeply embedded traditional practices continue to live in schools as they generalize descriptions of student performance and lump students into letter groups. “He’s an ‘A student’” and “She’s a ‘C student’” are comments that seem to have meaning in our schools, to our families, and in our judgments about what students know, understand, and do. These letter stamps operate like distinctions or labels. For better or worse, they denote each student’s capacity and predict potential for success.
The truth is no one can really state what these letters stand for from classroom to classroom, school to school, or state to state. An A from Mr. Smith’s classroom might be very different from an A in Ms. Garcia’s classroom. An A in Mr. Smith’s classroom might actually be a C in Ms. Garcia’s classroom. Not to mention how an A in ninth-grade English in New York City might represent learning that is vastly different from an A in ninth-grade English in rural Alabama.
As we move forward in our efforts to change grading practices, we try to revise these long-standing generalities about how we grade and report student learning and, instead, report what our students know, understand, and are able to do. Breaking out of traditional grading practices that perpetuate generalities requires intentional conversations about teaching and learning. These conversations require meaningful changes in how we unify and articulate curriculum, instruction, and assessment. More important, these conversations are changing how teachers and students approach the learning process.
While we continue to implement a more effective grading model, two adages ring true: No one size fits all and go slow to go fast. In other words, when building a change in our grading practices, we believe (1) our teaching teams must collaborate and decide how best to implement shifts toward more communicative grading practices and (2) what is best for teaching and learning takes time to process.
For these reasons, we are not in a rush to make these changes overnight. Instead, we would rather have teachers unpack the value of these shifts in ways that support productive conversations with students and teams about curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Upending ineffective traditional grading is our goal. To do it, we’ve chosen to work mindfully and intentionally with teachers to support this change, answering their questions and developing their insights about teaching and learning.
A New Language: Evidence-Based Grading
In our own work and in the work we’ve observed in other schools, implementing either traditional grading or what is called standards-based grading often stalls the changes we need to make. While standards-based grading models have good intentions, many lead teachers back to ineffective traditions or grading practices that do little to open up the conversations we need to have about teaching and learning.
We propose shifting toward grading practices that focus on the evidence that students produce. As we emphasize in the book Proficiency-Based Assessment (Gobble, Onuscheck, Reibel, & Twadell, 2016), we must change the language we use for grading. We should grade the evidence students create to demonstrate what they know, understand, and can do. This is important as we change our approach to grading practices that reflect school shifts in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
In this book, we assert that evidence of student learning must be the starting point of change. The evidence that students produce shows the relationship between their work and expected levels of proficiency. The conversations about teaching and learning then become much more dynamic and formative—every student gains clarity and perspective about how he or she can improve.
Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines evidence
