Grading Pupil Performance 1 страница

chapter eight

Grading Pupil Performance

We have seen that teachers use a variety of techniques to gather in­formation about their pupils' learning. We have considered meth­ods for carrying out formal assessments by means of paper-and-pencil tests and formal observations. We have seen that these methods provide information that describes each pupil's perfor­mance. But classroom teachers are called upon to do more than de­scribe their pupils' performances; they are also required to make judgments about the quality of the performances. The process of judging the quality of a pupil's performance is called "grading." It is the process by which scores and descriptive information are turned into marks or letters, into grades that denote how well each pupil has learned. Assigning grades to pupils is one of the most important professional responsibilities a teacher has, and it is a responsibility that is carried out many times during the school year.

To grade, a teacher must compare a pupil's performance to some group or standard. There can be no grading without comparison. Suppose that Jamal got a score of 95 points on a test. His score de­scribes his performance, 95 points. But how good is a score of 95 points; does 95 mean excellent, average, or poor achievement? In order to answer this question, one needs to have more information than just Jamal's test score. For example, one might want to know how many items were on the test Jamal took, and how much each item counted. A score of 95 does not provide this information. It probably would make a difference in the way Jamal's performance were judged if he got 95 out of 200 items right as opposed to 95 out

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of 100 items right. Or one might like to know how the other pupils in the class did on the test. A score of 95 does not tell one this. It might make a difference to know that Jamal's score was the highest rather than the lowest in the class. It might make a difference to know that Jamal's 95 represents a large improvement over his pre­vious test score as opposed to a decline. A score of 95 does not tell one this.

To grade a pupil's performance, it must be compared to some­thing else. We could not judge the quality of Jamal's test perfor­mance until we had something to compare it to. Grading, then, goes beyond scoring because it requires the teacher to examine scores and make a judgment about their quality. When a teacher says, "I am grading my pupils," the teacher means, "I am making a judg­ment about the quality of each pupil's performance by comparing it to a standard of good performance that I have chosen."

Teachers assign grades both to individual assessments and to groups of individual assessments. When a pupil says, "I got a B on my essay" or "I got an A on my chemistry test," the pupil is talking about grades on individual assessments. Report card grades, on the other hand, represent a pupil's performance across all the individ­ual assessments that were completed in a subject area during a term or grading period. Some people refer to the former process as "as­signing grades" and to the latter as "assigning marks," but the basic processes are similar, so we will use the term "grading" here. "Grad­ing" will mean making a judgment about the quality of a pupil's performance, whether it is performance on a single assessment or performance across many assessments.

Grading is a difficult task which few teachers look forward to with pleasure. Part of the reason for this is that few have had formal instruction in how to grade pupils or in the purpose and conse­quences of various approaches to grading (Hills, 1981). Most often, teachers have only a vague sense of what they're doing when they grade.

Moreover, teachers know that grades are taken seriously by both parents and pupils. The grades a pupil gets will be scrutinized, an­alyzed, and often challenged by parents and pupils. Throughout this book we have seen that teachers make many judgments about their pupils. Most of these judgments are not made public beyond the classroom society. Many are kept in the teacher's head and not even transmitted to the pupils. Grades, however, are different. Grades are teacher judgments of pupils that are formal, perma­nent, public, and important parts of a pupil's school record. Grades represent the public and permanent record of a pupil's perfor­mance in a subject area. Somewhere in the files of the community where you attended elementary or high school is a folder which contains the grades you received in each course you took while at­

tending the schools in that community. This is probably the sole formal indication of how you performed while in the schools of that community. Consequently, there is pressure on the teacher not only to provide an accurate report on pupil performance, but also to minimize the negative repercussions of the grades. These pressures also contribute to making grading a difficult task for teachers.

A final factor that makes grading difficult for all teachers is a fundamental ambiguity of the teacher's classroom role (Lortie, 1975). On the one hand, the teacher is expected to be a classroom leader, disciplinarian, and judge. In carrying out these roles, the teacher is expected to interact with the pupils in an objective, dis­passionate manner, treating all pupils alike and showing no favor­itism. On the other hand, in order to provide effective instruction, the teacher is expected to know and understand the individual qualities of each pupil and also to be sensitive to each pupil's aca­demic and personal needs. To do this, the teacher cannot be an ob­jective, dispassionate observer, but must know each pupil more closely and individually. Earlier chapters described the process by which teachers accumulate information about their pupils' charac­teristics as well as the ways they use the information.

When it is time for a teacher to act as a leader, disciplinarian, or grader, the teacher is expected to be objective and treat all pupils the same—but this is difficult to do because of the personal infor­mation and the perceptions of each pupil that the teacher has accu­mulated. Elementary schoolteachers live in classrooms with a single group of pupils for an entire year. In comparison, middle and high school teachers see five or six different classes each day. For this reason, elementary school teachers generally know more about their pupils and have a more difficult time separating their judging role from their helping role when they assign grades. Few teachers at any grade level can separate completely what they know and feel about a given pupil from the judgments they make about the pupil when they grade.

When assigning grades, teachers have a responsibility to be fair to all pupils and not to misuse the power that they possess. But what is fairness and what is a misuse of power? Must a teacher always be fair to the institution that expects dispassionate grading, or can fair­ness include consideration of a pupil's own unique needs, circum­stances, and problems? Is it a misuse of power to take individual cir­cumstances into account when grading or is it a misuse of power not to take them into account? The special relationship that teachers have with their pupils makes it difficult for teachers to judge them. This is especially so for grading, because the judgments are public, perceived to be very important, have overt consequences for pupils, and can influence the pupil's educational, occupational, or home status.

The following remarks indicate some of the ambivalence teachers feel about grading.

Report card time is always difficult for me. My pupils take grades seriously and talk about them with each other, even though I warn them not
to. They're young (fourth graders) and some let their grades define them
to themselves, so grades can have a negative effect on some. Still, I guess it
doesn't do a kid much good to let him think everything's great in his
schoolwork when it really isn't. I think each kid knows about where he
stands in the academic pecking order of the classroom, but putting it down
on a report card makes it final and permanent. You know you can't make
everyone happy when you grade and that some hopes will be dashed. You also know that some kids will be motivated to try harder, and that's good.

One thing's for sure. I agonize over the grades I give.

The first report card of the year always is the toughest because it sets up future expectations for the child and his or her parents. I want to convex accurate information about each child's performance, but I don't want to destroy a child's hopes, effort, and parental support. One of the hardest things about the first report card of the year is dealing with the parents who believe their child is an Albert Einstein or Madame Curie but who, in reality, have kids who are extraordinarily ordinary.

At the high school level where I teach, grades are given more "by the book" than I think they are in the elementary school. Here we don't get to know our students as well as elementary school teachers and so we can be more objective and give grades based almost exclusively on the students' academic performance. For many teachers at this level, the rank book av­erage defines the grade a student gets, plain and simple. I have to admit that not all the students are strangers to me and I do recognize differences in interest, effort, politeness, and the like that probably influence mv grades a little bit.

Sitting in judgment of students is always difficult, but report card grades are especially so for me. One obvious reason is that I know my stu­dents as individuals, each with unique talents, aspirations, and weaknesses. Subject matter grades are supposed to reflect only academic performance, so some good and desirable qualities of students get left out. Yet parentі and many kids take these incomplete indicators very, very seriously. I try to cover each student's good nonacademic qualities in my written report card comments. Another reason report card grades are so difficult for me is because my grade level is the first one in which students receive letter grades in subject areas. Before reaching my grade level, they've gotten "satisfactory-unsatisfactory" information on their report cards. Every time 1 give a report card grade I am aware that I am setting expectations for the student, the student's parents, and future teachers who might look at the student's record file at the start of the school year. Grading at my level is a big responsibility.

Grading is not an easy process for most teachers, nor is it without consequences. Grading is difficult to do, it is time-consuming, and most teachers expend considerable psychic energy on it. It is fur­ther complicated by the fact that there are no uniformly accepted strategies to use when assigning grades. Instead, each teacher must find his or her own answer to questions about the grading process. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the questions each teacher needs to ask about this process and to provide general guidelines that help answer these questions. The main intent is to present basic information about the process of assigning report card grades in ac­ademic subjects. However, the principles discussed are also appro­priate to grading single tests or performance assessments. A logical place to begin the discussion is with the question "Why grade?"

Why Grade?

The simplest and perhaps most compelling reason why classroom teachers grade their pupils is because they have to. Grading is one form of official assessment they are required to carry out. School systems demand that teachers make periodic written judgments about their pupils' performance.

The form of these written judgments varies from school system to school system (Hills, 1981; Terwilliger, 1971). Some school sys­tems require teachers to record pupil performance in the form of letter grades (e.g., A, A —, B +, B, B —, C +,...), some in the form of achievement categories (e.g., good, satisfactory, or unsatis­factory), some in the form of numerical grades (e.g., 90-100 = A, 80—89 = B,...), and some in the form of pass-fail. The most widely used systems are letter grades, which are the main grading system in upper elementary, middle, and high schools, and checklists or rating scales, which are the most prevalent in kindergarten and the primary grades (Kunder and Porwoll, 1977).

Most schools use more than one method of reporting pupil achievement to parents. Some school systems require teachers to write comments about each pupil's performance on the report card. Most school systems require teachers to grade performance both in academic subject areas and in social adjustment areas, although the grades for the two areas usually appear in different sections of the report card. There are many different varieties of grade reporting forms, and Figures 8.1 and 8.2 show two examples. Regardless of the particular grading system or report form used, teacher judg­ment is at the heart of the grading process.

The purpose of report card grades is to communicate and make public information about a pupil's academic achievement. Within this overall purpose are four more specific purposes: administra­tive, informational, motivational, and guidance (Hills, 1981; Simon

and Bellanca, 1976). Each of these purposes provides a separate justification for grading. Administratively, schools need grades to de­termine such things as a pupil's rank in class, credits for graduation, and suitability for promotion to the next level. Informationally, grades are used to inform parents, pupils, and others about a pu­pil's academic performance. Grades represent the teacher's sum­mary of how well the pupils mastered the content and behaviors taught in a subject during a term or grading period. Because report card grades are given only four or five times a year, the information they convey is limited to summary judgments of pupil achievement. Grades cannot provide detailed and diagnostic information about pupil accomplishments and shortcomings. Thus, grades are only one means of communicating with pupils and parents. Other meth­ods such as notes, conferences, or papers sent home can and should be used to provide more detailed information about school progress. The obvious limitation on the specificity of the informa­tion grades provide, however, does not seem to diminish their im­portance in the eyes of pupils and parents.

Grades also are used to motivate pupils to study. A good grade can become the primary reward for studying and learning the things that are taught. This motivational aspect of grading is, however, a two-edged sword. Pupil motivation may be enhanced when perfor­mance is high, but it may also be diminished when a grade is lower than the pupil expected. There is little a teacher can do about the motivational consequences of grades, except to balance them with other kinds of rewards given throughout the school year. Finally, grades are used for guidance purposes. They help the pupil, parent, and counselor choose appropriate courses and course levels for the pupil. They help identify pupils who may be in need of special ser­vices. They provide information to colleges about the pupil's aca­demic performance in high school.

For all these reasons, grades are used in schools to communicate to the pupil and others about the pupil's academic performance. While there are periodic calls to abolish grades, it is difficult to en­vision schools in which judgments about pupils' performance would not be made and conveyed by teachers. The basis on which teacher judgments are made might change, the format in which the grades are reported might be altered, and the judgments might no longer be called "grades," but the basic process of teacher judgment that we now call "grading" would still be going on.

Despite the limitations inherent in grades, it is very important to realize that grades are potent symbols in our society, symbols that are taken seriously by pupils, parents, and the public at large. It is desirable, therefore, regardless of one's personal feelings about the value and usefulness of grades, for every teacher to take the grad­ing process seriously and to devise a system of grading that suits his

or her purposes. The aim is to devise a grading system that pro­vides a fair and valid picture of a pupil's performance on a well-defined set of grading criteria. The system itself, though based largely on teacher judgment, should be applied as evenly as possible across the pupils in the class; achievement of about the same quality ought to receive about the same grade. Grades should not be used to punish pupils the teacher dislikes or who are discipline problems in the classroom. The teacher has a responsibility to be objective and fair to all pupils in assigning grades.

GRADING AS JUDGMENT

The single most important characteristic of the grading process is its dependence on teacher judgments. Thus, while there are gen­eral guidelines that can be used to develop a classroom grading sys­tem, the specific features of that system will depend primarily on several judgments a teacher makes about pupils, the nature of achievement, and what constitutes satisfactory and unsatisfactory performance. In assigning grades to pupils, the classroom teacher is granted considerable discretion and autonomy. It is the classroom teacher's responsibility to make grading judgments because he or she knows the pupils' accomplishments better than anyone else; no one else can or should make grading judgments for a teacher.

Since teachers have varied classroom objectives, pupils with dif­ferent characteristics, and different ideas of what comprises satis­factory performance in a subject area, it follows that there is no one best method of grading that can be applied across all classrooms. Moreover, because every grading system must accommodate vary­ing abilities, interests, performances, effort, and opportunity, each one will have its advantages and disadvantages. Every grading sys­tem will have certain characteristics that make it better for some pu­pils than for others. Consequently, each teacher must rely on his or her own judgments about what is best. Further, because all grading systems are imperfect in some way, it is important for the teacher to know the consequences of adopting one or another of them.

In all cases, heavy reliance is placed on teacher judgment. This reliance is not restricted to grading. As we have seen, classroom life is a series of teacher judgments about discipline, instructional plan­ning and progress, and assessments of various kinds. But grading judgments are somewhat unique in that they are permanent, public judgments that can have significant consequences for pupils. Con­sequently, it is necessary to recognize some characteristics of teacher judgments, particularly as they apply to grading.

First, as repeatedly noted, judgment is a central aspect of teach­ing; teachers make hundreds of judgments daily in their classrooms.

GRADING PUPIL PERFORMANCE 317

Second, judgments are dependent upon two characteristics: (1) infor­mation about the person being judged and (2) standards which can be used to translate that information into qualitative judgments (Green, 1971). Information provides the basis for a judgment. Because infor­mation is part of judging, judging is different from mere guessing. A guess is not grounded in fact, and guessing is what one does when one has no information or evidence to use in making a judgment: "I have no information, so I'll just have to guess." "To judge" implies that one has some evidence to use as a basis for the judgment. A teacher gath­ers assessment evidence of various kinds to help make judgments and decisions about both pupils and instruction. Without this assessment evidence, the teacher would be making guesses.

But judgment also implies uncertainty, especially in the classroom setting. When there is no uncertainty about a pupil, there is no need for a teacher to judge. When teachers make statements such as, "John is a boy," "Mary's parents are divorced," or "Sigmund got the highest score on the math test," they are not making judgments about pupils; they are stating facts that they know with certainty. Judgment, then, is neither mere guessing nor perfect certainty; it is somewhere in be­tween. It is based on evidence, but the evidence is rarely conclusive or complete, necessitating that a judgment be made. Judgment is a type of informed uncertainty, and increasing amounts of information re­duce, but do not eliminate, the degree of uncertainty. It is because as­sessment evidence is incomplete that a teacher must be concerned about its validity and reliability for use in decision making.

Given this context, the goal in grading is to obtain enough evi­dence about desired pupil accomplishments to make a grading judgment that is fair and can be supported. No teacher can gather complete evidence about all of a pupil's accomplishments and fail­ures in a course, but the teacher needs some information on which to base a grading judgment. Moreover, since grades are public and perceived to be important by both pupils and parents, it is advisable that the information on which pupils' grades are based be com­posed mainly of formal evidence such as tests and performance as­sessments. The concreteness of such information not only helps the teacher to be objective in awarding grades to pupils, it can also be used to help explain or defend a grade that is challenged.

Bearing this goal in mind, there are three main judgments that a teacher must make in setting up a grading system. Stated in the form of questions, these judgments are:

• To what standard shall I compare my pupils' performance?

• What aspects of pupil performance shall I include in my grades?

• How should different kinds of evidence be weighted in assigning grades?

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Few schools have explicit policies that spell out how a teacher is to assign grades, what is to be included in a grade, and what level of performance each grade represents. In most schools, teachers are told only that they must grade at specified times during the year and that they must use a certain type of grading format (A, B, C, etc.; good, satisfactory, poor; etc.). They are left on their own to work out the details of the grading system they will use. For these teachers, regardless of their grade level or subject area, the above three questions will have to be addressed and answered in order to assign grades to pupils. Even if a teacher does not consciously ask these questions when grading, he or she implicitly answers them, because grades cannot be assigned without attending to the ques­tions. The next sections will examine each question in detail.

STANDARDS OF COMPARISON

A grade is a judgment about the quality of a pupil's performance. It is impossible, however, to judge performance in the abstract. Recall the difficulty we had making a judgment about how good Jamal's test score of 95 was when this was the only piece of information we had. We needed to seek additional information that would allow us to compare Jamal's performance to some standard. For example, knowing how many items were on the test told us what percent of the questions Jamal answered correctly. This information allowed us to compare Jamal's performance to a standard scale of percent’s from 0 to 100. Or knowing how Jamal's classmates performed on the test allowed us to compare his performance to theirs. The better Jamal did in comparison to his classmates, the higher the grade we would give him. Finally, knowing how well Jamal did on the test compared to his past performance on tests allowed us to compare Jamal's current performance to past performance and thus told us how much improvement he had made. To determine grades, pu­pils' performances must be compared to some standard (Ebel and Frisbie, 1986; Gronlund, 1985; Hills, 1981). All grades represent a comparison of pupil performance to some standard of excellence or quality; without comparison, there can be no meaningful grades.

There are many comparisons that can be used when assigning grades to pupils (Hills, 1981). Among the most common bases for comparison used in classrooms are

• The performance of other pupils

• Predefined standards of adequacy or quality

• The pupil's ability

• The pupil's prior performance (improvement)

GRADING PUPIL PERFORMANCE 319

The vast majority of teachers use one of the first two types of com­parison in assigning grades to their pupils—which is just as well, since for technical and substantive reasons to be discussed pres­ently, the latter two types are not recommended for use in most classrooms.

Comparisons with Other Pupils

Assigning grades to a pupil based on a comparison of his or her performance to the other pupils in the class is referred to as norm-referenced grading. Other names for this type of grading are "rela­tive grading" and "grading on the curve." The grade a pupil re­ceives in norm-referenced grading provides an indication of how well that pupil performed compared to the other pupils in the class. A high grade means a pupil did better than most of his or her class­mates, while a low grade means the opposite. When a teacher says things like "Jim is smarter than Julie," "Rowanda works harder in social studies than Mike and Pat," and "Wanda completes her math worksheets faster than anyone else in the class," the teacher is mak­ing norm-referenced comparisons. The quality of a pupil's perfor­mance is being defined in terms of how that pupil performs com­pared to others in the class.

When a teacher asks "Who should get the best grades?" and an­swers by deciding that those few pupils who perform better than most of their classmates should get the highest grades, the teacher is adopting a norm-referenced grading system. In this system, not all pupils can get the top grade no matter how well they perform, and the grade a pupil gets depends on how he or she stands in compar­ison to classmates. The system is designed to ensure that there is a distribution of grades across the various grading categories.

Notice that in the norm-referenced system, the grade contains no indication of how well a pupil did in terms of mastering what was taught. A pupil gets an A grade for being higher than his or her classmates. If a pupil answered only 40 out of 100 test questions correctly, but was the highest scorer in the class, he or she would receive an A grade in a norm-referenced grading system, despite a low mastery level over what was tested. This is true at the other end of the scoring range as well. A former pupil told the author about a college science course he took that was a required course for biol­ogy, chemistry, and premed majors. Grading was norm-referenced and competition in the course was fierce. The former pupil told of a midterm examination on which he scored 97 out of a possible 100 points. His grade for the exam was a C, because so many other pu­pils in the class got 98s, 99s, and 100s. Compared to his classmates, his performance was in the middle of the group—even though, in absolute terms, he performed very well.

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In practice, teachers set up a norm-referenced grading system by establishing a grading curve. This curve indicates the proportion of pupils who will be given each of the possible grades. Below is one example of a grading curve.

A Top 20% of pupils

B Next 30% of pupils

C Next 30% of pupils

D Next 10% of pupils

F Lowest 10% of pupils

This curve shows how the teacher wishes to distribute grades among pupils. If the curve is to be applied to scores on a chapter or unit test, the teacher would administer the test, score it, and ar­range the pupils in order of their score from highest to lowest. Then the teacher would give the highest scoring 20 percent (includ­ing ties) an A, the next 30 percent a B, the next 30 percent a C, and so on to the lowest 10 percent of the pupils, who would receive an F. If the same curve were to be applied when giving report card grades, the teacher would first have to summarize the information about pupil performance that had been gathered over the entire term (we shall describe how this is done presently). The summary scores would be arranged in order from highest to lowest, and the curve would be applied to allocate grades in the same way as for the unit test described above.

Clearly, there is no one best grading curve that should be used in every norm-referenced grading situation. Some teachers give mostly As and Bs, while others give mainly Cs. Teachers who use norm-referenced grading should set the curve by considering such factors as the ability of the pupils, the track or level of the course, prior experiences teaching the course, and a general sense of how they think grades are properly distributed in the particular class­room setting. If the curve gives too many high grades to mediocre pupils, pupils will not respect it. If it is too difficult to get an A for even bright, hard-working pupils, pupils will give up. In the end, one seeks a grading curve which is fair to the pupils and which rep­resents academic standards that the teacher feels are appropriate.

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