From the Teacher’s Lounge

October 31, 2021

An APS Teacher on Grading Equity

Grading is not what it once was. Back in the olden’ days you sat in class, listened to the teacher lecture, then went home and did the assigned homework. The homework was designed to help you understand the material, and your independent work was how you did the work of learning the material. Grades were based on how well you did the homework independently.

Things are changing, and the way grading is done reflects that practice. Arlington Public Schools is currently running a pilot group to look at Grading for Equity. The book guiding this pilot asks teachers to reflect on prior grading practices and then address how that can make grades inequitable. As with many things in education, there is some good in reflecting on grading practices, but there are also some areas where this practice could be detrimental to students’ skills in the long run.

First, the good about changing the grading practices in APS. Traditionally grades reflected what students were able to learn independently. The practice of grading homework gave advantages to students who had parents at home to help when the student struggled with learning material independently. Students who had responsibilities for their families often were unable to complete the homework, and then their grade would reflect the lack of completion of the work. The practice of grading homework also created disadvantages for students who have difficulty with concentration. Often, students identified with ADHD, would struggle to sit and complete homework. They had just spent seven hours doing extra mental work to concentrate and participate in classes. Homework required them to come home and continue restraining themselves so they could sit and finish worksheets. The last group often impacted by grading homework was the highly gifted kids. Often the highly gifted students could have done the work in a matter of minutes, but the work was not helping them learn anything new. For them to sit and complete the work was redundant, so many would not do the work. For these students there was not value in the work because it was information they had already acquired. Highly gifted students would exhibit the negative signs of giftedness, and they would not complete the work and then would spend the class time off task and taking other students off task with them.

Over the last decade teachers have started to change the practice of grading homework to address the variety of needs in the classrooms. By not grading homework, students who are going home to care for younger siblings or working a job to support their family are not being penalized. Many of these students can learn the material when it is presented in class in ways for them to access the learning. Students with ADHD are given opportunities to harness their energy and get the wiggles out without being penalized for not completing a worksheet. The highly gifted students are not penalized for not completing a worksheet they could have completed the first week of school. Grading homework gave an advantage to the students who have opportunities and abilities to only concentrate on school.

Another advantage to rethinking the grading policy is examining how to determine what a student already knows. When done correctly and well, standards based grading focuses on what a student knows, not how they complete the work. Students demonstrating the negative characteristics of giftedness would often turn in messy, disorganized, and lazy looking work. However, when looking at the work for content, they would have mastered the content. Standards-based grading also addresses that learning is a continuum. Not all students master the content at the same time. Standards based grading should be used to show where a student is at in the learning at a moment in time, with the goal being mastery of the content by the end of the unit or year. The skills of learning and work production should be developed simultaneously with the content, but grading should reflect the content students are mastering.

One negative of grading for equity is the elimination of all homework. Homework should be used to develop skills the students can use in careers and life. These skills become important to building skills to work independently later in life. As more schools have gone to no homework assigned, it is evident in students’ work behavior. The students who had homework have better developed skills for working through content. The students without homework have less skills to complete classwork. They require more teacher guidance and encouragement to complete the work assigned during class. The students who had homework also have the skills to complete work they did not complete in class. Other students have to be reminded it is still their responsibility to complete work.

Grading needs to change to address how school has changed, especially in light of the last two years of school. Teachers have started to flip their classrooms more, having kids participate in more passive learning like lectures at home. The work that used to be assigned as homework is now being done in class, where the teacher is present to guide and address the learning as it is happening. As the practice of how school has changed, the grading practices need to change to match that. The grading practices should reflect what a student knows, and then there needs to be a grading practice to provide feedback about students’ skills. Grading for equity does not provide the practices to build both content and learning skills. The grading policy needs to change, but grading for equity does not provide the opportunities to help the students learn how to learn.

Citations on flipped classrooms:

Johnson, G. B. (2013). Student perceptions of the Flipped Classroom (T). University of British Columbia https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0073641

Mastery Learning is an educational approach to learning that focuses on ensuring a level of mastery on a set of learning outcomes (Collins & Halverson, 2009). It requires that each student achieve the pre-established level of mastery before they move on to the next learning outcome (Lalley & Gentile, 2009). Lalley and Gentile state that a minimum passing score of 75% or 80% be used to ensure that a high rate of initial competence has been achieved. If a student fails to achieve mastery on their initial attempt, “corrective instruction may take the form of tutoring by the teacher, teacher aides, student tutors or by students who did achieve at the criterion level" (Overmyer, 2010, p. 4). In subjects like math, where content is organized in a hierarchy, it is necessary that students have a strong grasp on the prerequisite skills (Overmyer, 2010). One of Mastery Learning’s greatest weaknesses is that it takes significant classroom time to implement (Guskey, 2007). Teachers have traditionally valued the principals of Mastery Learning since its inception in the last 1960’s by Benjamin Bloom, but have not had time to practice it effectively. The Flipped Classroom provides teachers that time.

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Demonstrating mastery is conceptualized as the endpoint rather than the initial phase of the learning / memory / applications process;

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Grading incentives to encourage students to reach beyond initial mastery and strive for fluency in the material, to better organize, and apply, and even teach others. (Block, Efthium, & Burns, 1989; Gentile & Lalley, 2003 as cited in Lalley & Gentile, 2009, p. 31)

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