Active grading means:
- Emphasizing the learning that grades represent, and trying to avoid holding grades as the final product of education.
- Allowing students to react to their grades. Grades are the beginning of a conversation, not the end.
- Helping students to understand their grades by organizing them into topics (vanilla SBG).
- Actively keeping students informed by assessing their skills often and giving them feedback as soon as possible.
I think a lot of us like the ideas of active grading because we care more about helping our students learn than about
- their transcript or
- comparing them with each other.
We give feedback as a way of helping students learn.
But we also want to give feedback in the form of numbers. Numbers have all these great properties that meaningful feedback doesn’t have – you can average numbers but not comments, and you can compare numbers “objectively” but not comments. It’s faster to read numbers than comments, and I can scan a transcript with a GPA to decide whether to let someone into my college much faster than I can read 30 pages of writing.
So, we condense our knowledge about students’ learning down to numbers (or, more extremely, a single number!).
Once we record a grade as a number, we’ve lost information. I gave Mike an 85% last year in calculus, but that doesn’t tell you that he just couldn’t get his head around the idea of a differential equation. You gave Sandeep a 75% because he aced every test but never handed in a piece of homework and skipped every other class.
But now I’m a college, Mike has a 3.5 GPA, Sandeep has a 2.5 GPA. I can clearly see from these marks that Mike is a better student – by twenty-five percent of the scale. Maybe Sandeep has some extracurriculars or something, but he’s got some major catching up to do!
When we do this we’re acting like recording grades as numbers adds information to them! We can’t sort comments in order of academic achievement (automatically), but it’s no sweat sorting GPAs – even from different teachers in different schools, each with his or her own idea about what the grade levels even mean! This is inappropriate. The numbers are not orderable.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of months, as I build ActiveGrade. How do we use numbers to represent grades where it’s appropriate – to get the power of the best-fit line, or the correlation – without giving those numbers too much power, like the power to rank (which is nonsense with different definitions) or average (a 0% F averaged with a 100% A is: a 50% F. Talk about effed up!). I think I’ve hit upon a few great ideas – more on that soon. What do you do?
gasstationwithoutpumps
November 8, 2010 at 10:07 am
I record grades as letters A+,A,A-, … not as numbers. I make summative grades at the end of the course by a combination of averaging and eyeballing for trends and missing data. (Missing an assignment at the beginning of the quarter is less serious than missing one at the end, for example.) I don’t try to reduce this to a formula, though I would have to if I had 50 students or 200 students instead of 20 students in a class.
David
November 18, 2010 at 9:32 pm
I don’t really understand how averaging a kids grades helps you understand what the kid can do. If you leave the grades unaveraged and recognize they reflect the individual skills of the student, doesn’t that seem more appropriate?
I read this recently, and honestly I can’t find it but I’ll share the analogy.
Imagine these are 3 kids. They are being graded on their skills in a parachute packing course and their grades for the semester are in order. Note that I could try and make sure they had all the same average by fiddling with the actual numbers a bit.
Student 1: 90, 80, 60, 50, 40
Student 2: 90, 40, 100, 50, 90
Student 3: 20, 50, 70, 90, 100
Which kid do you want packing your parachute?
Cale Birk (@birklearns)
November 18, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Averaging is nonsensical, isn’t it! The concept of mastery learning makes much more sense. When a student has demonstrated a proficiency of an outcome, they should be called proficient. If we think that an outcome is important enough to master, then students should master it. If we feel an outcome is only important enough for a student to achieve an arbitrary level of competence that we call 50%, I am hypothesizing that perhaps that outcome is something less than essential.
I wonder about using things like word clouds to begin to give us a sense of anecdotal comments about a student’s performance. Perhaps we should be looking at some common phrases such as “accomplished”, “proficient” at one end and “beginning” or “not yet developed” at the other to describe student work, and then plug them into a word cloud to see what phrases come to the front most often to describe their performance. I would bet that a word cloud such as this would be far more descriptive than a 64%.
Just one person’s thoughts.
Michael Wagener
November 18, 2010 at 9:54 pm
I perhaps have a different perspective, as I teach in New Zealand and we have the NCEA system here. This system has a set of “standards” that students are assessed by, and for each they can get a grade of Not Achieved, Achieved, Merit or Excellence.
At the end of the year the students get a certificate that has the standards they attempted and the grade they obtained. This provides a lot of rich information for about the student, but is a bit of a nightmare for the universities.
As a result they have come up with a points system that turns a certain number of standards into a tidy grade. I actually quite like this compromise as it is based on what a student can do not on what they can’t do.
I think that this is the essence of a good assessment/grading system: does it tell us what a student can do? A nice tidy number is good for ranking, but not much else.