How to Grade or How Not to Grade
by Judy Jones

Over my many years of teaching, I have often asked these questions: What is the purpose of assessment? What am I hoping to accomplish by giving grades? Are my grading practices fair? Is grading or assessing different in science than in other classes?

My students always seem to be worrying about grades, and parental reactions to grades. They often decide whether they will do an assignment based on whether I will “grade” it. They have become little point-mongers! (I wonder if we have been assessing students forever? Were little Neanderthal children being evaluated on their ability to hunt? Or the quality of their carcass-skinning? Or on their berry-gathering skills?)

Of course, we have always used grades to evaluate achievement in our classes and to give grades (summative assessments). We have sorted and sifted and ranked students according to the grades that they earn on our assignments. And now we are working like crazy to get kids ready for the Big Test--the test at the end of the year that makes such a big difference in how schools, teachers, and students are judged. In North Carolina we have EOC (End of Course) tests in almost all of our early high school subjects (English, math, history and science). We even have a computer skills test. These tests are mainly focused on evaluating progress in content areas. They allow us to rank students and judge teachers. (Much has been written about the nature and value of high stakes testing – but that is for another time.)

I still struggle with how to fairly assess my students, but over the years I have learned some things that help guide my decisions.

I have become very interested in formative assessment. This is the type of assessment that is ongoing, more interactive, and sometimes more informal. It is even, at times, unplanned. We are evaluating how well our students understand something when we ask questions or just look around the room to see if their body language indicates understanding. We circulate to different groups and listen to their conversations. And we respond with questions that guide them to correct understandings or we explain concepts to them in new ways. Sometimes, we even change our lessons when these informal assessments convince us that students are not learning. We almost do this unconsciously, not really realizing that we are doing formative assessment.

What is different for me now is that I am really thinking about the power of formative assessment. I have heard some talks about it and have read some literature and I have become convinced that this is one of the most important strategies that we have to help our students learn better. Formative assessment is designed to improve learning while the learning is going on--rather than to test for understanding when the opportunity to improve has passed.

Research has shown that formative assessment absolutely requires feedback. So if you collect assignments, it is vital to provide helpful feedback and return the assignment and the feedback quickly. The best feedback is given as the learning is happening. The focus of the feedback should be on the understanding of the task and not on the grade. Bickering over grades (or points) is a useless learning strategy. I will often say to a student, “Sure I will give you that point you want, but let’s sit down and make sure you understand the concept.” My willingness to take the grade out of the equation has the effect of creating a very open learner.

So what are some useful formative assessment techniques? Here’s a list, but feel free to send me others that you find useful. Remember, I am still a learner!

Questioning – whole class and small groups
Here is where the teacher has an opportunity to find out how well a student or students understand a procedure or concept and to make immediate adjustments in teaching to improve learning. By circulating among groups, teachers can have extremely valuable discussions with students in small settings. I find that this is one of my most useful formative assessment techniques.

Classroom Discussions 
If a teacher listens carefully to the contributions in a classroom discussion, and also is aware of who is contributing to the discussion, she can learn a great deal about how much students understand.

Summarizing
I often have my students write a quick summary paragraph at the end of a lesson. The summary might be in response to a question such as “What have you learned about photosynthesis today?”  I collect these and then provide written feedback and return them the next day.

Concept Mapping
This is an excellent small group strategy. As I circulate around and listen to discussions, I can uncover many misconceptions and teach concepts to very small groups of students. By careful probing questions, I can often lead students to a better understanding of the concepts.

Student Self-Assessment
Sometimes I have my students actually do a self-assessment on how well they have learned during a particular day or for a specific unit. These can be very powerful. I can then discuss with them how they could become better learners and what I might do to help that process. Ultimately, my goal for them as adults is that they learn through self-evaluation and self-correction.

Study Guides
Study guides for chapter readings, for videos, or for presentations can be very useful if they are evaluated quickly and if good, helpful feedback is given.

Authentic Projects 
A very effective way to help students become good learners is to have them present what they have learned to the class or create a project that they present to the class either as individuals or in groups. They need to work very hard on understanding in order to explain what they have learned to the rest of the class. Although these are often used as summative assessments, if you give students a chance to turn in “rough drafts” you can let that be a formative assessment.

Frequent, Short Tests
These can be very useful, if they don’t have a huge impact on a student’s grade but are rather designed to help the teacher discover how well a student has learned so far so that further instruction can be given to help improve the learning.

Quarter Tests
Our biology group uses quarter tests both as formative and summative assessments. After our students take a quarter test, we look at the results and we discuss with each other how well students have done on each question. We talk about how we have taught each unit and we make changes based on results. We also go back and reteach some of the concepts in order to better prepare our students for the “big one” at the end of the year.

Here are some other things that I have learned about assessment:

• Using a wide range of formative assessments is important. Students learn in many different ways and have multiple ways of thinking and different assessments can highlight the varied strengths in my students.
• I need to make time for myself to reflect on what my students appear to have learned and I need to think about how I could redesign my instruction to help make it more effective. I need to think about each activity asking myself if it does a good job teaching what I want taught.
• Dialogue is very important! I need to actually talk to each of my students about their learning, not just count on paper feedback.
• Research has shown that effective formative assessment raises the achievement of poorly performing students more that that of others, BUT raises the achievement of everyone overall. So formative assessment goes a long way towards “closing the gap.”
• If I grade papers without explaining to students how they can improve, it will be very ineffective at improving learning.
• Research suggests that students who do poorly on tests can actually do very well in the more realistic environment of formative assessments. This further suggests that the rather high stakes environment of testing is artificial and perhaps not even very valid.
• Trying to separate my role in formative assessment and my role in summative assessment is not easy. By bringing to consciousness the importance of formative assessment, I can improve as an effective teacher.

We all want to be effective teachers. Formative assessment is a research driven method for improving our students’ learning by reflecting on how we teach and making changes based on our understanding of our students. I have provided three links below if you would like to read more on this important topic.

http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kbla9810.htm
Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam

http://www.d.umn.edu/~bmunson/Courses/Educ5560/readings/BellSciEd01-85-536.pdf
Beverley Bell, Bronwen Cowie

http://www.ericdigests.org/2003-3/concept.htm
Carol Boston