Using Grades as Effective Feedback

This week's article summary is Can Grades Be An Effective Form of Feedback.

A number of my recent summaries have focused on feedback: Is Any Feedback Effective, The Many Negatives of High-Stakes Standardized Testing, IQ Testing.

This week’s summary focuses on how to make classroom grading more effective through feedback. (Thanks to Jill for sharing the article with me!)

The article begins by detailing the many negatives of grading, in particular how demoralizing a bad grade can be for a student. We tend to think that a bad grade—like punishment for bad behavior—will act as motivation for more effort. Yet, most of us don’t respond positively to negative results.

Equally interesting to me is that the absence of grades in the classroom is also ineffective. I had one class in college in which we students chose our final grade. The professor’s intentions were to motivate us. I didn’t work very hard yet still gave myself an A. All I really learned from that class was the professor was naive to trust a bunch of 20 year olds.

The gist of the article is grades are effective when used principally as a feedback tool to students, including four components. 

First, a grade shouldn’t define the student. Following Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, teachers need to be careful that students don’t view a grade as the final word on them and their capacity for learning. Teachers need to help students see that any grade is an assessment of where a student is in the process of learning/mastering something.

Second—and similar to the previous component—is making sure students view grades as formative, not summative. Grades viewed as formative help students see what they have learned, what they still need to know, and next steps to get there. 

Third, classroom grading should be criterion-based, not norm-based. I had a few teachers when I was a student who graded on a curve, their rationale being that the curve took into account the level of difficult of the assignment/assessment. I don’t necessarily agree with all the negatives the article lists about norm-referencing in the classroom, yet I agree that basing grades on mastery of skills, concepts, and procedures is more beneficial for the learner. After all, the goal is to learn and master material, not compare oneself against the rest of the class.

Fourth, grades need to include teacher specific next steps so students can move closer to mastery.  

At our fall divisional parent meetings Sheree, Ira, Marsha, and Jill spoke about how education has evolved over the past twenty years in having grading/assessments move from the summative/normative to the formative. As I read this week’s article I was again proud of how Trinity is a leader in this area as we are in so many others.

 Joe

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Grades are portrayed as a villain by many in education today. Some researchers and authors contend grades stifle creativity, foster fear of failure, and weaken students’ interest. Others argue that grades diminish students’ emotional and behavioral engagement in learning. These claims have led some to believe that we could significantly improve students’ attitudes, their interest in learning, and the classroom learning environment simply by going “gradeless”.

But do grades deserve the supervillain label? Would eliminating grades suddenly increase students’ interest in learning and make our classrooms better places to learn? Not much evidence supports this. 

If we use grades the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons, they can be an effective form of feedback for students. To guarantee their proper use and avoid their misuse, however, we need to be sure that teachers develop and implement grading policies and practices that highlight grades’ usefulness as a form of feedback while reducing any potentially negative connotations. To function as effective feedback, grades must meet four necessary conditions. These conditions not only allow grades to serve important formative purposes, but also help remove the negative consequences of misuse.

Grades must be assigned to performance, not to students: Beginning at the earliest levels, teachers must help students and their families understand that grades do not reflect who you are as a learner, but where you are in your learning journey. Teachers further must stress that grades never describe students’ capabilities or learning potential. Rather, they provide an indication of how near or far students are from reaching specific goals. Too often, students see grades as a reflection of their innate talent, skill, or ability. Grades become personal labels that students use on themselves that can be difficult to change. When students and families see grades as a reflection of current performance only, they recognize that knowing where you are is essential for improvement. Informative judgments from teachers about the quality of students’ performance help students become more thoughtful judges of their own work. 

Grades must be criterion-based, not norm-based: Norm-based grades assess students’ relative standing among classmates. It’s sometimes known as “ego-involving” grading or “grading on the curve.” With norm-based grading, a C doesn’t mean you are at step three in a five-step process to mastery. Instead, it means your performance ranks you in the middle of the class and is “average” in comparison to your classmates. Norm-based grading has profoundly negative consequences. First, it communicates nothing about what students have learned or are able to do. Second, it makes learning highly competitive, because students must compete against one another for the few high grades the teacher will assign. Third, it discourages student collaboration, because helping others threatens students’ own chances for success. Criterion-based or task-involving grading describes how well students have met learning goals. Students’ grades are based on clearly defined performance expectations and have no relation to the performance of other students. Thus, criterion-based grades serve the communication purposes for which grades are intended. Because students compete against themselves to meet learning goals and not against each other, criterion-based grading encourages student collaboration. It also puts teachers and students on the same side, working together to master the goals.

Grades must be seen as temporary: Students’ level of performance is never permanent. As students study and practice, their understanding grows and their performance improves. To accurately describe how well students have learned, grades must reflect students’ current performance level. When students understand that grades are temporary, they recognize that assessments don’t mean the end of learning. Instead, assessment results describe where students are currently in their journey to mastery. Teachers must emphasize to their students that achieving less than mastery doesn’t mean you can’t make it, but only that you haven’t made it yet, and there’s more to do. This temporary quality of grades also calls into question the process of averaging, which combines evidence from the past with current evidence, yielding an inaccurate depiction of what students achieved. Instead, current performance should always replace past evidence to make sure grades are accurate and valid.

Grades must be accompanied by guidance for improvement: Students need guidance and direction on how to make better progress, reach the goals, and achieve success. This is true of all forms of feedback.

This aspect of feedback stems from the work of Benjamin Bloom. In his descriptions of mastery learning, Bloom explained how teachers could use well-designed formative assessments to offer students regular feedback on what they learned well and what improvements were needed. He referred to these as corrective activities. Corrective activities must be new and different from the original instruction. Reteaching concepts in the same way simply repeats a process that has already been shown not to work. Instead, correctives must offer instructional alternatives that present concepts and skills in new ways. He also recommended that students study only the concepts and skills on which they are having difficulty. In other words, the correctives are individualized, based on students’ unique learning needs.

Students need honest information from their teachers about the quality and adequacy of their performance in school. Parents and families need to know how their children are doing and whether they are meeting grade-level or course expectations. Although grades should never be the only information about learning that students and families receive, they can be a meaningful part of that information. When combined with guidance to students and families on how improvements can be made, grades become a valuable tool in helping students achieve learning success.