Confusing half-truths:
- Summative assessment counts towards your grades, but formative doesn’t
- You change your teaching based on formative assessment but not summative
- Summative assessments are formal but formative assessments are informal
There’s a confusion that causes stress when grades are involved. Grades are supposed to:
- Tell students where they stand in the class.
For me, and I think ideally for most of us, “where they stand in the class” is as close as possible to “how much of the subject they understand, and to what degree.” So, “they understand a lot and can really extend their knowledge to new areas” is encoded to an “A,” while “they’re getting it!” is encoded to a “C.”
Hopefully they’re not at a D, which means something like “I guess he has been in class. Most days.”
Great! The summative and formative (non)dichotomy is not causing any pain yet – here’s a summary of your knowledge, let’s respond to it. Boom. Active SBGers out there are thinking, “yeah, and since I’ve got it broken down into specific areas it’s way easier to get to that response part.”
Grades are sometimes also supposed to:
- Show how well your student stays on task
- Show how well your student can manage assignments or big projects
- other performance- but not understanding-based stuff
We make them mean those things by counting participation for 10% or homework completion for 20%. And it’s not unreasonable. We feel like it’s our job to a) teach math and b) raise responsible kids, and we have to cram a full report on both of those objectives into a single letter. There’s also c) get them all high scores on the Tests and sometimes d) keep them safe or e) provide a different view than they get at home and f) prepare them for the unknowable challenges of the 21st century-entury-entury.
When students are thinking, “does this count?” they aren’t thinking about any of your objectives. When parents are looking at a GPA (a smashing of all of these already overloaded encodings into a single number, if you can believe it!), they aren’t understanding if a) their kid knows math, OR b) their kid is behaving in class and doing his work.
And, ultimately, I think this is why we sometimes grab on to “formative assessment” as a way to get around the horrible restrictions and meaninglessness of most grades. We say, “it’s ok, it doesn’t count, class,” and if we’re lucky our students can relax enough to just enjoy learning something. ”This is just formative assessment – we’re just exploring to see what works,” as if there’s any other way of learning.
This is why active SBG is so great. It lets us give grades that mean something – “hi John, here are your grades,” and John can understand them and react to them and now you’re communicating with John about his learning. Don’t be fooled – these can still be grades that you record, that “count” – but you’re still helping John learn. My favorite part of teaching was being with the kids in class, because that’s where the learning actually happens. Grades are just administrative bullshit compared to that – unless they are also part of the learning process.
I think of active SBG as reclaiming grades as feedback, and de-emphasizing the evil baggage that can lead our students away from learning. For me, the difference between formative and summative isn’t very important. Instead, we’ve got to focus on the distinction between meaningful and meaningless.
Julia
November 16, 2010 at 1:00 pm
I am by no means an expert, but it strikes me that the very first point you make about grades “Tell students where they stand in the class” is the core of the problems. Because if learning becomes about standing on different levels then learning is not for the sake of learning. It also puts the emphasis on the student, rather than on the learning.
I don’t have any answers as to how to avoid these problems. I suppose SBG is a better solution in this regard than many more conventional forms of assessment. But while I agree with you that ultimately the distinction between formative and summative is quite indistinct, I don’t think that it’s as simple as SBG.
Riley Lark
November 16, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Oof, you’re right. What I mean (what I want to mean) is that grades “tell students what they’ve shown that they know.”
I think grades should communicate what students have shown that they know, which can be almost synonymous with “where they stand.” But then, “where they stand” can also mean “what is their rank” or “how much does the teacher like them.”
The reason I like SBG is that standards-based grades are modeled after what the students know more explicitly than other grading systems, which might incorporate measurements of other things like participation or time management skills.
Hopefully, we’re steering grades to more accurately represent learning.
Julia
November 16, 2010 at 2:41 pm
While I went to high school in New York and Pennsylvania and have experience of this “let’s grade the attendance and homework” style of grading, it seems completely absurd to me now. In Sweden, it’s been illegal to grade anything but understanding and skill for many years so some of the discussions I see on these blogs sound strange in my ears. But I try to keep the context in mind when I read about SBG.
That was off topic; what I want to say is that SBG may give us a nice opportunity to figure out what exactly students need to hear as feedback. I think good feedback is specific, and SBG nails that, but it also should be constructive in terms of students self-perception and attitude to learning. I don’t think SBG nails those aspects, but maybe it could. I wonder if there is any research on SBG in relation to student beliefs about, and motivation for, learnng.
Matt Townsley
November 17, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Here’s an ongoing discussion topic. Assuming grades are used as feedback (which I don’t disagree at all), how long should a teacher wait until he/she assigns a “grade.” In other words, should the first practice opportunity be “graded” – after all, the grade is just feedback?
My take: allow multiple non-graded feedback opportunities before entering in a grade. Why? even if “grades are feedback” they’re not as good as written/oral comments. My experience tells me that when comments AND a number are included, the number takes precedence in the student’s mind.
So, even in an active SBG scheme, how many un-graded practice opportunities make sense?
Riley Lark
November 17, 2010 at 2:58 pm
It makes sense to me to allow a grade to be overwritten, but not to withhold grades entirely. If I know that a certain piece of work would earn a 3, it doesn’t make sense to me not to communicate that.
I hear you saying that students might ignore the comment for the number, but I think it might be worth it if the student is learning what the number means.
Matt Townsley
November 17, 2010 at 7:13 pm
“If I know that a certain piece of work would earn a 3, it doesn’t make sense to me not to communicate that.”
Can’t you communicate this without the number? In other words, if a student practices a concept the first time, do you assign a “3″ immediately and enter it in the grade book OR do you tell the student (orally or in writing) “Hey, you are starting to understand this idea, but I think you need to consider ________ before fully grasping it. For next time, think about _______” without mentioning the number? I think the latter approach is more effective. Then do it again. and again. Finally, after a few times of non-numbered feedback, assign a number. After that number has been assigned, continue to allow it to be overwritten. I see this as a subtle shift from the “assign-a-number-early” mentality in some folks’ implementation of SBG.
Does that make sense?
Riley Lark
November 18, 2010 at 7:52 am
But that’s deliberately obfuscating your grading system!
I think I could get behind writing a comment that said “Hey, you are starting to understand this idea, but I think you need to consider ________ before fully grasping it. For next time, think about _______. This would have earned a 3″ instead of writing a 3 in your gradebook, to emphasize that the assessment will not be part of your final judgement. I DO believe in finding ways of relieving pressure from assessments (at the beginning of a course).
I don’t think I would leave out the number just so a student reads the rest of the comment more carefully.
Also, since comments are so hard to collate, wouldn’t you effectively lose the information in those comments by the end of the course? Don’t you think the student, looking back, will only see the grades that counted as numbers and forget all about the comment-only feedback? In my ActiveGrade software (for example :p) all those previous scores would appear to the student, not really affecting the final grade, but as a red/yellow/green rainbow – with the teacher’s comments attached to each part of the rainbow. Without the numbers, you lose the rainbow part – the quick sense of how much proficiency the student showed – but I don’t see what you gain.
And finally, I was always struggling to test each standard three times – it sounds like you gave six or seven. My view on this could stem from the simple fact that I wasn’t assessing as frequently.
Am I responding to what you’re saying, or am I missing your point?
Matt Townsley
November 19, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Whether assessing three or six times, I believe the number should be withheld as long as possible. What is there to gain? Susan Brookhart’s book, How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, has lots to say on this topic.
“Good feedback gives students information they need so they can understand where they are in their learning and what to do next – the cognitive factor. Once they feel they understand what to do and why, most students develop a feeling that they have control over their own learning – the motivational factor” (p. 2).
From my perspective the numbers leave out the “what to do next” part of her suggestion. Numbers do a great job of telling students where they’re at in relation to understanding the standard, but it does not go far enough. Several authors have written about formative feedback from the students’ perspective that answers three questions.
Where am I going? (Clear learning targets)
How am I doing? (number, narrative, etc. describing current state of understanding)
Where to next? (feed forward leading the student to next steps)
Any of this make sense?
Riley Lark
November 19, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Yes, it totally makes sense to answer the questions “Where am I going?” and “Where to next?” I think you can do that while using numeric grades – you need a comment TOO, not a comment INSTEAD.
It’s most clear to me when I consider withholding the number “as long as possible” – until the report card. It wouldn’t make sense to give the student only comment-based feedback and then, finally, say, “and you get an 85.” Well, it does make sense – that kid may have been more focused on the learning than on the points this whole time – but it’s not fair to surprise her with a number that means a great deal to others.
I see withholding the number until halfway through the semester as just a different place on the scale. I’d rather give the number at the beginning of the semester, ASAP, and provide the more important parts of feedback that Brookhart recommends. I don’t believe it’s impossible to communicate with kids once there’s a number to focus on.