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The Case For High Expectations And High Performance Standards
Fordham Institute
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2/4/20
“The analysis yielded six major findings. Among them: Students of all racial/ethnic groups learn more from teachers with high grading standards, and these standards tend to be higher in schools serving more advantaged students. Moreover, the impact of rigorous grading practices can improve student performance in subsequent math classes up to two years later.”
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When You Are Grading, Keep A List Of Common Errors
Middle Web
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12/3/19
“Sometimes it takes a long time and lot of painful grading in order to figure out the mistakes. You have to be open to your own errors in the assignment. When you see kids all making the same kind of mistake, you need to notice that maybe it’s how you phrased the question, or the emphasis you gave to a certain point in class, or your lack of emphasis on another crucial point.”
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Grades And Comments: What Actually Helps Learning?
Kappan
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10/28/19
“Page concluded that grades can have a beneficial effect on student learning only when accompanied by standard or individualized comments from the teacher. Studies conducted in later years confirmed these results.”
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“A Record Number Of Colleges Stop Requiring The SAT And ACT”
Hechinger Report
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10/9/19
“Every 10 days, on average, another university makes these tests optional for admission. Forty-one schools have jettisoned this requirement in the last year, the largest number ever.”
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“Retakes Vs. Test Corrections Vs. Neither”
Henri’s Math Ed Blog
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8/28/19
“Different opinions reflect different values, different attitudes towards assessment, and different understandings of how learning happens. I’ll take a stab at unpacking this, and (as is my wont) I will not be shy about sharing my opinions along the way. I will present this as a discussion with imaginary colleagues, whose contributions are in bold type. “
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No Tests. No Grades. Idaho School Pioneers Deep Character-Based Transcript
The 74 Million
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7/15/19
“In place of a straightforward transcript listing letter grades and a grade point average, admissions officers received the growth transcript, which provides rich information on student progress in four broad areas: Mindset, knowledge, creativity and skills. Under each of those four categories, eight subcategories provide a granular look at students’ progress over their three years at One Stone in a bar chart format. That’s 32 data points to analyze and evaluate.”
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A Deep, Searching Exploration Of The Justice And Merit Of Testing
New York Times
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6/12/19
“As a country we have moved past the idea that the basics of a decent life should be hoarded by an aristocracy, a hereditary class with a monopoly on wealth, power and property. Allocating resources on the basis of merit is arguably a better system, or at least, less unjust. Still, it is far from perfect… If we think about cognitive ability testing as a form of lottery, in which the winners are those who possess a certain inherent capacity for processing and analyzing information, without reference to morally salient criteria like goodness, mercy, kindness or courage, we are embarking on a new kind of impoverishment.”
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An "Adversity Score”? The SAT Seeks To Recognize Student Challenges
New York Times
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5/17/19
“The decision to give students who take the SAT test a numerical rating that reflects the challenges they have overcome in life is the most telling sign yet that universities across the country are searching for ways to diversify their classes without considering race or ethnicity… In the initial data the College Board has collected on some schools that have tried out the new tool, it found that disadvantaged students who did not attend high schools known to be regular feeders to college were more likely to be admitted.”
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Adam Grant Argues Against Getting Straight A’s
New York Times
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12/8/18
“The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.”
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Is The Standardized Test A Flop?
Forbes
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9/20/18
“After almost two decades of its use, we've raised an entire generation of students around the notion of test-based accountability, and yet the fruits of that seem.... well, elusive. Where are the waves of students now arriving on college campuses super-prepared?”
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8 Washington, DC Private High Schools Drop AP Courses
Inside Higher Ed
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6/19/18
“In a joint statement, they said that they were responding to "the diminished utility of AP courses and the desirability of developing our own advanced courses that more effectively address our students’ needs and interests. Collectively, we believe a curriculum oriented toward collaborative, experiential, and interdisciplinary learning will not only better prepare our students for college and their professional futures, but also result in more engaging programs for both students and faculty. We expect this approach will appeal to students’ innate curiosity, increase their motivation, and fuel their love of learning.”
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Graduation Outcomes: A Research Synthesis To Help You Set Your Own
Transcend Education
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5/31/18
“Whether you are designing a completely new learning model or updating your approach as part of ongoing efforts to learn and improve, identifying the outcomes that learners will achieve as a result of their time with you [is a] critical step.”
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Why Metrics (For Students, Employees) Aren’t Effective Assessments
Aeon
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4/24/18
"The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And experimentation includes the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure. At the same time, rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes a sense of common purpose, as well as the social relationships that motivate co-operation and effectiveness. Instead, such rewards promote competition.”
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How To Not Give Grades, Complete With Alternate Assessments
Jesse Stommel
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3/11/18
“I haven't put grades on student work since I started teaching as instructor of record in 2001… none of the institutions where I've worked (including R1s, community colleges, liberal arts colleges) has entirely dictated how I had to approach assessment—at every single one there was sufficient wiggle room for experimentation.”
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"The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’”
New York Times
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2/23/18
"Consider that holy grail of learning outcomes, critical thinking… Teaching it is not a cheap or efficient process. It does not come from… emphasizing short, quantifiable, standardized assignments at the expense of meandering, creative and difficult investigation. Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It’s about giving students an opportunity that most of them will never have again in their lives: the chance for serious exploration of complicated intellectual problems, the gift of time in an institution where curiosity and discovery are the source of meaning.”
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HappyOrNot: Simple Feedback
New Yorker
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2/5/18
"Filling out surveys isn’t something you can always do, so it came to my mind that maybe there could be an easier way to give feedback, and to send the data directly to people who are interested in the results… We saw that, if you make it easy, people will give feedback every day, even if you don’t give them a prize for doing it.”
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“Ungrading”: Why We Shouldn’t Give Grades And What To Do Instead
Inside Higher Ed
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11/14/17
"I had read many accounts of individual faculty members… but in mid-August, I discovered Starr Sackstein’s book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, which gave me some cover in case students or administrators challenged this.”
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Here’s Why We Have Grades In The First Place [video]
YouTube/Origin of Everything
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11/1/17
"A high GPA reflects skills like being prompt, working really hard, following directions, and being well rounded, all important skills for high-level careers.”
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Thoughts On Feedback, And Getting Rid Of Grades
Medium
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4/8/17
"The first finding [is] regarding feedback. Butler examined 3 types of feedback: scores alone, comments alone, and scores with comments. Her study showed that scores alone made students either complacent or unmotivated depending on how well they did. Scores with comments were just as ineffective in that students focused entirely on the score and ignored the comments. Surprisingly, it was the students who received comments alone that demonstrated the most improvement. The second finding comes from John Hattie (2012) whose synthesis of 800 meta-studies showed that student self-assessment/self-grading topped the list of educational interventions with the highest effect size.”
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5 Great Articles On The Subject Of Grading
ASCD
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8/11/16
"Too often, grades are the period at the end of any conversation on learning. Turn these numbers and letters into meaningful measures of mastery by looking for ways to amplify formative feedback, treating failures as beneficial to learning, and giving students opportunities to revise their work. Read on for more ways to create a learning-centered approach to assessment.”
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Portfolios And Presentations Instead Of Tests
Hechinger Report
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7/27/16
"Do presentations, projects and portfolios give a better idea of what a student has learned than a class grade or a score on a standardized exam? And are they particularly valuable for students who have struggled in traditional high school classes? Many advocates believe that adopting such an approach to assessment for all students could spur teaching that aims to encourage thinking and reasoning, rather than just passing a test.”
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SAT and ACT Become Federal Standards Exams… Wait, What?
EdSurge
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2/8/16
"Already, the U.S. Department of Education has approved three states—Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire—to use the SAT as a high school assessment for federal accountability purposes… With the transition time and resources that ESSA provides, educators have an optimal moment to consider whether college prep tests can play the role of a national testing standard—or there should be a national testing standard at all. In fact, Tony Wagner brings it back to what the students, teachers, and districts want. “I think the whole area of testing is ripe for a radical redesign,” he says.
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EdWeek Releases Report “Understanding Formative Assessment”
Education Week
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11/9/15
"Formative assessment is one of the most widely used—but poorly understood—instructional techniques. This special report highlights common misconceptions about the approach and shows how formative assessment differs from other kinds of assessments, such as summative or benchmark tests.”
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7 Skills Worth Testing: Reinventing What And How We Assess
Boston Globe
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2/26/15
"The answer is not to abandon testing, but to measure the things we most value, and find good ways to do that… After all, in the past 50 years economists and psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle and dynamic as the mechanisms that explain when and why we give in to impulse, the forces that govern our moral choices, and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping.”
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“Meet The Single Point Rubric”
Cult of Pedagogy
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2/4/15
“The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics — with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels — offers a whole host of benefits.”
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Measurement vs. Love
New York Times
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1/16/15
"Our businesslike efforts to measure and improve quality are now blocking the altruism, indeed the love, that motivates people to enter the helping professions. While we’re figuring out how to get better, we need to tread more lightly in assessing the work of the professionals who practice in our most human and sacred fields.”
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Oopah. It Turns Out the SAT *Does* Predict College Success?
Slate
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4/14/14
“Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study... [researchers] found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year.”
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“The Case Against Grades”
Alfie Kohn
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11/1/11
“By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it.”