Standards-based grading — has Johnny mastered the subject matter — is replacing the behavior-based grading — does Johnny do homework and write legibly? — at some schools, reports the New York Times. Teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minnesota realized their grades didn’t reflect learning for all students.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
“Over time, we began to realize that many teachers had been grading kids for compliance — not for mastering the course material,” (Principal Katie) Berglund said. “A portion of our A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best.”
The middle school now bases grades on subject mastery; no longer will donating a box of Kleenex to the class win extra credit points. The high school has switched for ninth graders.
When parents of students at Ellis Middle School look over their children’s report cards, they will find a so-called “knowledge grade,” which will be calculated by averaging the scores on end-of-unit tests. (Those tests can be retaken any time during the semester so long as a student has completed all homework; remedial classes that re-teach skills will be offered all year.) Homework is now considered practice for tests. Assignments that are half done, handed in late or missing all together will be noted, but will not hurt a student’s grade. Nor will showing up late for class, forgetting to bring your pencil, failing to raise your hand before shouting out an answer or forgetting to bring in a permission slip for the class trip — infractions that had previously caused Ellis students’ grades to suffer.
(In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship. )
Some parents object to grading policies that downplay homework completion, saying students won’t develop strong work habits.
-->Filed Under: Education Tagged With: behavior, grades, homework, standards, standards-based grading
Ceolaf says: November 29, 2010 at 6:41 amThis is not new. I’ve been writing about this since the mid 1980s, as did Ted Sizer (see Horace’s Compromise, 1985). Denis Pope wrote about this in the late 1990s, in Doing School.
I’m sure others have hit this, too. Heck, just ask any bored smart kids.
Crimson Wife says: November 29, 2010 at 8:07 amReminds me of my middle brother. He always aced tests (one year he scored the highest of any kid in any grade in the entire district on the state test) but barely graduated high school because he refused to do any assignment he considered “busywork”. And for all the concerns about “work habits”, he’s done well in his chosen career field.
Cal says: November 29, 2010 at 9:45 amI give test scores 75% of the grade, classwork 15%, and homework 10%–but in practice, classwork and homework can only tilt your grade up (no more than half a grade), not down.
In English and history, I designated some projects as “perfomance” and some as “status”, with performance being weighted the same as tests (40%). But if you missed a performance assignment, I browbeat you until you turned it in–none of this “one grade down if a day late, an F if two days late”. But that was with a joint curriculum–I doubt I’d have many status assignments in a class of my own.
Of course, the teacher can just make the tests easier.
I believe all teachers should do this, but the homework issue is a big hot button. What I’d rather do is take grading entirely out of the teacher’s hands and have state-wide tests–but the tests would have to have a great deal more granularity to make sure that we’re capturing the low end ability students.
mazenko says: November 29, 2010 at 2:27 pmA lack of any true understanding of how to assess and the value of assessment is the greatest weakness in education programs around the country. Teachers graduate and take over classes and start assigning grades without adequate knowledge on the nature and applicability of assessments. You have to put that on school administrators, too, who just hire them and cut them loose.
Mike43 says: November 29, 2010 at 2:51 pmI do psycho-educational evaluations for a large school district. In grad school, we were taught that teacher grades were the least likely to reflect anything other than behavior.
We test for reading, math and writing levels. Can’t trust the teacher grades, at any level.
Anthony says: November 29, 2010 at 3:44 pmI managed to skate through high school doing almost no homework, except what I could complete while the teacher was lecturing, or otherwise not preventing me from doing it. I would always ace tests, and so I would get between As and Cs, depending how heavily the grade weighted tests versus homework.
Then I got to college. Some things still came easily to me, but having not had much practice writing 5-page papers, I wasn’t always so good at putting together a paper which demonstrated my knowledge of the subject matter. Almost too late, I realized that in some subjects, I would need to actually do the homework to learn the material – that listening to the lectures wasn’t enough. Even where the homework counted for trivial amounts of the grade, I nearly failed out of classes where I didn’t do the homework because I hadn’t learned the material well enough to test well on it.
In life after school, what matters isn’t what you know, but what you do. What you know is an element of what you do, but it’s not the only element. Grading should take into account completed work as well as knowledge.
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