not that they have developed these learning objectives, but rather that the objectives have been integrated into courses and are used to promote both student engagement and motivation at a level that most schools have not yet reached.
Henry County and Rochester teachers, for example, do not organize the assessment systems for their courses around grading categories such as tests, quizzes, homework, classwork, and participation. The learning objectives themselves are the grading categories. It follows, then, that when a teacher gives a formative or summative assessment, he or she is able to link the assessment directly to the learning objective. Students follow their progression through the various learning objectives for each of their courses. At the high school level, when students reach the end of the course, they earn credit only if they have mastered each of the learning outcomes. If they have not, a plan is put in place to help them recover those outcomes. At Rochester’s Spaulding High School, competency recovery can take a variety of forms depending on what the student needs. Plans could include the completion of online courses or modules within courses that address specific competencies, the completion of a specific teacher-assigned performance task for a specific competency, or other similar demonstrations of learning. Once the student has demonstrated mastery of the course outcomes, he or she is awarded credit for the overall course.
The Henry County and Rochester models place student learning and mastery of learning objectives as the ultimate goal for all students. Both schools increase student engagement and motivation because at all times in the learning process, students know exactly what it is they need to know and be able to do to be successful. They take away the guessing games that many students play in traditional school models. In these traditional models, grades are simply a game of earning points. If a passing grade is a numerical score of 70, students simply have to complete enough work to earn the points necessary to reach the passing threshold. Oftentimes when students struggle in a traditional model, the feedback they receive is connected more to their behavior toward learning than to the actual learning itself. Teachers tell students to try harder, stay after school for help, raise their hands more during class, and do more homework. In contrast, if a student is struggling at a Henry County or Rochester school, he or she can tell the teacher exactly what skills or learning outcomes he or she needs help with, and teachers see when students are struggling with certain skills or learning outcomes, rather than finding out when a student doesn’t do well on a summative assessment. The teacher works with the student to develop academic plans to improve his or her learning in those areas.
Assessment Is Meaningful and a Positive Learning Experience for Students
Not all assessments are created equally. If you talk to any student at any grade level in a traditional school, he or she is likely to tell you that his or her teacher approaches assessment in a way that is very different from other teachers. To effectively implement a competency-based learning model, you have to change this mindset and standardize the assessment process. The Center for Collaborative Education (CCE; http://cce.org) in Boston laid much of the foundation for this in its Quality Performance Assessment (QPA) framework (see figure 1.1). CCE (2012) defines a performance assessment as “multistep assignments with clear criteria, expectations, and processes that measure how well a student transfers knowledge and applies complex skills to create or refine an original product” (p. vi). Performance assessments can be formative or summative.
Source: CCE, 2012. Used with permission.
Figure 1.1: Center for Collaborative Education QPA framework.
The QPA framework places student learning at the center of the cycle. Teachers focus on standards-aligned quality instruction and assessment practices, providing students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery. Working collaboratively, teachers use quality task design strategies to develop an appropriate set of prompts and a common understanding of content and cognitive complexity for each grade level. Finally, using quality data analysis, teacher teams examine both teacher and student assessment data to ensure that assessments are reliable, valid, free of bias, and provide sufficient evidence of learning.
CCE Executive Director Dan French (CCE, 2012) writes, “Embedding high-quality performance assessments throughout the core academic curriculum will result in an increased use of curriculum aligned to the CCSS, robust assessment data, and enhanced student learning” (p. iv). The QPA framework focuses teachers on developing formative and summative performance assessments and using those assessment results to inform instruction and greater revisions of curriculum, which ultimately lead to high-stakes decisions related to graduation and promotion. In this book, we explore several effective strategies collaborative teams can use to implement a quality performance assessment system in their school. The work often starts, however, with schools and districts developing a vision for assessment and a common understanding of how assessment will inform instruction and ultimately impact student learning.
Educators cannot think about assessment without also looking at grading and how grading practices support or don’t support a school’s vision for assessment. In the following sections, we outline some key considerations for effective competency-based learning grading practices in the following sections. We expand on this topic in chapter 4 (page 69).
Grade to Communicate Student Learning
The purpose of grading should be to communicate student achievement. Grades should not be about what students earn; rather, grades should be about what students learn. Unfortunately, this is not the case in most traditional classrooms. Traditional grading practices are flawed, at best. One of the hardest hurdles to overcome for any school or community that wants to adopt a competency-based learning model is reaching consensus on the grading practices that each teacher must practice in each course. Students must see consistent practices from classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher, and those practices must support the competency-based learning model.
Use Both Formative and Summative Assessment
The grading system must separate and acknowledge the role of both formative and summative assessment. A formative assessment is an assessment for learning—a snapshot that captures or a dipstick that measures student progress through the learning process (Stiggins, 2005). It explains to what extent a student is learning a concept, skill, or knowledge set. Teachers use formative assessments to monitor the learning process and obtain feedback on their instruction. Formative assessments also provide students with feedback to help them improve their learning. A summative assessment is a comprehensive measure of a student’s ability to demonstrate the concepts, skills, and knowledge embedded within a course competency (Stiggins, 2005). An assessment of learning occurs at the end of an instructional unit with a teacher who evaluates the level and degree of a student’s learning by comparing his or her work to a rubric-defined standard or benchmark.
Stop Averaging Grades
The grading system must no longer include the practice of averaging averages to get more averages. Mathematics teachers know that you can never get reliable data when using averages to produce more averages; yet traditional schools average grades all the time. Teachers average category grades (tests, quizzes, homework, and so on) to get a quarter average. They average quarter averages to get a course-grade average. This makes no sense. A better approach would be to compute a final course grade as a single term over the entire length of a course (a grade that opens on the first day of class and closes on the last). The best grading systems
