December
2008
What They Know and Can Do3
As a high school teacher in the midst of the reform movement in NC, I have found myself in a unique position. My principal has been working extensively with our staff on authentic assessment. He has said to us repeatedly, “A student’s grade should not be an average of his past mistakes, but rather a reflection of what he knows and can do.” It seems those words have taken hold and I’m finding myself in a difficult situation.
This semester, I have thrown out my institutionally-ingrained way of grading students. I no longer employ “penalty-based” grading, where students lose points for every error, then have those errors averaged to determine their overall grades. Instead, I gave each task throughout the semester a point value and have been keeping track of the total points earned throughout the semester. Now, as the end of the semester looms, students are beginning to see what I’ve been trying to explain to them since August. I have allowed them to resubmit any work that didn’t earn maximum points. Some are now grateful for the opportunity to go back and make sure they understood the material, while others are scrambling to fill in gaps here at the end. Their final course portfolio, comprised of the graded items from the semester along with some items of their own choosing, will make up 50% of their overall grade. The other half will come from their scores on the state end-of-course test. The test will show what they know and the portfolio, with its class activities and individual and group projects, will show what they can do with their understanding of Geometry. I am convinced that the students’ grades are a more accurate representation now of what they know of the subject than they would have been if I had merely graded homework and averaged tests the same way I was graded in school.
So what’s my problem? I have a son that is in the 3rd grade. This is the first year that he gets numerical grades rather than just satisfactory/unsatisfactory type grades. He brought home his progress report for the middle of the 2nd grading period yesterday and it hit me. My son’s grade is an average of his past mistakes. He bombed a spelling test at the beginning of the grading period. His teacher even wrote on the progress report that it was due to careless mistakes. This indicated to me that she knows he can spell the words, he just didn’t take the time to do it properly on that test. If he knows the material, should his grade not reflect that? I’m afraid now that my newly-found understanding of authentic assessment may soon make me a very unpopular parent with his teacher and, quite possibly, with the principal, too. I am much more concerned with the education of my child, though, than with being popular with the elementary school staff.
I am arming myself with research on assessing student performance and planning a conference with his teacher soon. This should be interesting. I’ll blog about the results of the conference soon.
