I chose the image above because when I view it I feel calm, which is really what I need right now.  Like other teachers I have a fair amount of anxiety about when and how to reopen schools safely during the current coronavirus pandemic.  This post is not about that though; it's about another anxiety I have - how to equitably assess my students this school year.  As my previous blog posts about Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity book have indicated, I need to make a change in my assessment of student work if I want to make it more equitable.  And I do.

So after months of thought as well as conversations with my spouse (an English professor) and lots of amazing science teacher colleagues from the American Modeling Teacher's Association, I have a plan.

To make my assessment of students more accurate I've decided to stop using a traditional 0-100 scale, which is too granular and weighted toward failing scores.  Instead I will use a much simpler 5 level scale.  This 5 level scale has a minimum floor and avoids using zeroes which can really tank (sometimes irrevocably) a student's grade.  I plan to only assess students individually, not as part of a small group, and my plan involves weighing more recent performance as a more accurate indication of a student's progress.

To make my assessment of students more bias-resistant I will only be using summative assessments and not formative ones like classwork, homework, labs, etc.  While I will continue to give feedback and have conversations with students on this work, they will not factor into a student's grade (except that their efforts on their formative work will likely impact their performance on summative work).  That means I will also not be penalizing students for late work or my perception of their participation or effort.  There will be no extra-credit for students; instead students can request to reassess specific required content. If cheating occurs on a summative assessment, the student's grade will not be penalized for cheating, some other restorative practice will be employed, and the student will be required to reassess.  

To make my assessment of students more motivational I will be using the minimum grading and simpler 5 level scale that I mentioned above.  These practices help students maintain hope of productive improvement even after setbacks.  I also plan on making reassessments mandatory.  That means every week or two I'll set aside class-time for students to reassess one or more standards that they have yet to master. Reassessments are motivating to students and requiring them as part of the class is a bias-resistant practice.  Finally, I'll be renaming my grades by using words and phrases that emphasize learning and growth rather than a reductive numerical score.  

I have a reasonable amount of anxiety about how parents and students will react to this and also about the fact that I'll be the only teacher in my school doing this  work (that I know of).  I suspect I'll have lots of questions to answer before colleagues, parents, and students are comfortable with the system, but it's my belief that eventually they will be.  I sorely wish I had done this work years ago, but my guilt for not trying this earlier will not be assuaged by just doing the same things I've always done.  Most of the plans outlined above are big changes for me, but now that I know better, I must do better. 

If you are interested in specifics, I created a document so that students and parents could see the details of my assessment plan and how I will eventually have to convert the standards based assessments into a traditional letter grade in Infinite Campus.  

​Standards Based Assessment in Mr. Bryant's Classes

I'd be happy to hear your feedback/suggestions.

[email protected]

Grading for Equity Part 1,  2,  3,  4

Grading for Equity (Part 5) - Reframing Grades and Retakes
(Practices to Support Hope and a Growth Mindset)

Chapter 11 of Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity book contains an eight-word sentence that made me stop, put down the book, and really--I mean really--start thinking about how I had approached grading my students in the past.  I had wrestled with other questions that I mentioned in my previous posts, but this idea shook me.  Before I get to that eight-word sentence, let me set up what he writes leading up to it.

Feldman spends the beginning of the chapter discussing research on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and how each plays a role for students in school: “The conclusion is now established fact among psychologists and education researchers: Contingent extrinsic awards--do this and you’ll get that--undermine intrinsic motivation” (p. 154).  That’s not to say that extrinsic rewards don’t have their place in simple behaviors like providing stickers to children who stay seated during an activity or for formulaic tasks like helping a teacher stuff envelopes, but “when the task requires creativity and expansive complex thinking...extrinsic motivation lowers performance” (p. 155).  Feldman also cites evidence that extrinsic motivation can increase unethical behavior and then sums up with the conclusion that “extrinsic rewards may reap short-term results but can smother intrinsic motivation and its benefits and cause undesirable side effects.” (p. 155)

How does grading fit in?  Well, Feldman argues that grades often function as extrinsic and contingent rewards and punishments.  If a student performs well, then they are rewarded with a high grade and if they perform poorly they are punished with a low one.  I’m sure every teacher has encountered a student that is more concerned with getting a high grade than with the learning the teacher really wants for them. Feldman lays out an underlying rationale “Many of us assign Fs believing (or perhaps merely hoping) that those Fs will motivate struggling students to work harder, to improve their behaviors and approach to learning.  These students often have weaker educational backgrounds, who come tour classes often already behind academically and with a history of struggle in school. And when they get an F (for a low performance, a missing assignment, or wrong behavior) and their next performance has not sufficiently improved, we give them another F, presumably to reiterate their subpar performance and to motivate them to improve.  Each time we must think that the most recent F will be the one that finally spurs the student to turn around their performance” (p. 157).  

Ouch.  That hurt to read because I’ve actually had those thoughts--not on my good days, but on days that I’ve been frustrated by my ineffectiveness with a particular student or class.  Thankfully, Feldman continues, “As we might suspect, no research supports the idea that assigning low grades as punishment encourages students to try harder or do better” (p. 157).  Getting rid of grades altogether is one option, but for the majority of teachers that’s not likely to happen; we need to find a way to “reduce the impact of grades as a contingent, extrinsic reward and refocus students on learning.  For our struggling students with repeated failure in school (and whose families for generations have experienced a history of academic failure), it becomes our moral imperative to stop using grades as punishment and instead reframe and reemploy them to give more students a sense of self-efficacy, endless capacity, and hope” (p. 159).

What to try instead?  We must always provide hope.  Teachers must show students that no matter where they start from or how many mistakes they make, success is still possible.  Feldman reiterates the idea of minimum grading (see my previous blog post )--that is, adjusting our grading such that an F is recorded as no lower than a 50%, which will allow a student to recover from early failures.  This practice restores mathematical accuracy and motivates struggling students by preserving the possibility of redemption and success. (p.164)
He next suggests renaming grades.  He writes, “Replacing letters and numbers with short descriptors gives the teacher and school the opportunity to make their expectations and their beliefs about student learning more explicit for students” (p. 164). One example he gives is:     

• Exceeding Standards
• Meeting Standards
• Approaching Standards
• Not Yet Met Standards
• Insufficient Evidence

Notice how they indicate how students are in the active process of learning (not yet, approaching) and that they can, and eventually will, meet the standards.  The lowest level is not really “failing” but indicates that there simply isn’t any evidence--perhaps because the student didn’t submit any or was absent for an assessment. Of course given various local and state reporting requirements teachers and schools will likely have to convert these to the more standard A-F and numerical scores. However, “Until it’s necessary to convert to the traditional ‘language’ of grades, many schools have found that the seemingly cosmetic change from the letters of grades bolsters the school’s internal culture of growth mindset in which every student is on a trajectory toward eventual academic success” (p. 165).  (I’ll be writing more on how I’ll be trying this with my students next semester in future posts.)

The last half of the chapter is devoted to retakes and redos.  I think it’s pretty obvious that Feldman thinks that retakes and redos are an important part of a classroom that motivates students, supports a growth mindset, and provides opportunities for redemption.  He asks rhetorically, “Why should a teacher stop a student’s learning?” (p. 167),  knowing that no teacher really wants their students to stop learning. He argues that every student, whether initially earning a D or a B, should have the opportunity to continue their learning.  He goes on to say that this applies to all types of assessments; after all, “in equitable grading . . . where the student is in her learning progression defines whether an assessment is formative or summative” (p. 167). Feldman makes a point of saying that the summative/formative assessment division is and should be flexible in equitable grading.  A retake of a formative assessment could be used as a summative one if the teacher believes the student has demonstrated proficiency on a standard.

He also offers suggestions on how to manage logistics of retakes by only asking students to retake portions of the assessment that they missed, rather than the whole, and organizing assessment questions based on standards to facilitate this.  This can be especially helpful when working with some special education students who would benefit from “chunking” standards or ideas into smaller more manageable pieces.  Before a student retakes an assessment, Feldman wisely suggests having students correct previous mistakes on assessments, receive tutoring, or complete and submit previous relevant assignments.  

Now, I have resisted student retakes for the bulk of my teaching career for all kinds of reasons. Feldman spends eight pages (p. 174-181) deftly addressing common teacher concerns about permitting retakes and redos.  (I don’t want to go over them, but let me just say, he dispels those concerns convincingly.) Even so, I was ready to start employing retakes in my classes next year, but Feldman’s take on whether to make retakes optional was the section that really, really shook me--made me put the book down, stand up, and say “Wow!” out loud in my apartment.  On page 172 he writes, “Retakes are equitable only when they are mandatory.”  

Should a kiddo taking a retake depend on them having parents that required it of them? Should it depend on them having a study hall for them to come and take a retest? Should it depend on them being willing to skip lunch to reassess?  Should it depend on them having after school transportation?  Should it depend on them not having an after school job, family, or extracurricular responsibilities?  Should it depend on them already possessing a growth mindset? Should it depend on a student’s current level of belief in their ability to improve?  In an equitable classroom, the answer to all of these is a simple no, for the simple reason that “students recognize that when we require them to succeed, we’re saying something about what we believe about their potential and how we feel about them” (p. 172).  

Retakes are equitable only when they are mandatory. Those eight words made me realize if I was serious about providing hope, fostering a growth mindset, and I wanted to make my classroom more equitable, I needed to require retakes as part of my regular practice.   

TLDR: A teacher’s grading should motivate students to achieve academically, support a growth mindset, and provide opportunities for redemption.

• Minimum Grading
• Renaming Grades
• Mandatory Retakes/Redos

Next up… What I’m trying this school year...

Extra Credit, Late Work, Cheating, Participation & Effort.
If you bring any of these four topics up in a department or faculty meeting, you’re likely to get an earful of opinions. My opinion on these has certainly evolved over my teaching career and in the last few years I’ve even asked students to help me craft late work policies. Joe Feldman takes on all these issues in Chapter 9 of his book Grading for Equity.

​Feldman makes the argument that if we want grades to be an accurate reflection of a student’s academic performance and equitably assigned, then “grades should be based on valid evidence of a student’s content knowledge, and not based on evidence that is likely to be corrupted by a teacher’s implicit bias or that reflects a student’s environment.” (p. 110)  I generally don’t believe teachers are knowingly biased against some students, but I do believe that we all, myself included, harbor unconscious or implicit biases. These biases are based on our own lived experience and are sometimes counter to our espoused values. They can be triggered very quickly upon meeting our students and are not intentionally controlled, according to the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State. Given those facts, we need to put in place grading practices that are bias-resistant.

Don’t grade participation or effort.
Participation and effort grades are often used by teachers as grade “hacks” to make up for other unfairnesses they perceive in the grading system they use (or are forced to use). But even if participation and effort aren’t used in this way, they focus more on the conduct of the student rather than what the student has learned. Grading effort is a minefield because it involves imagining what’s going on in a student’s head. Because of this, they are a fundamentally subjective judgement of student behavior. Even the most well-meaning teacher will be affected by their unconscious bias when awarding grades for participation and effort.

Participation is also problematic because it involves students conforming to a teacher’s expectations of a “good student.” Feldman explains, “Students who haven’t been successful in school, and who have experienced school as an antagonistic place where they have been tracked, disproportionately suspended, and then told they are failing, are less likely to engage and invest in that very institution than the students who have had a pattern of success.” (p. 121)

Additionally, attempts to grade participation and effort would be based on wholly incomplete data--teachers cannot observe each of their students outside of class or even within the classroom on a constant basis. My time as a teacher is better spent on finding clever ways of encouraging participation than trying to track it.

Don’t grade participation or effort.


Don’t use extra credit.
I stopped giving extra credit some time ago because I didn’t feel I was doing so fairly or equitably. I also thought it would prevent students from annoyingly asking me for extra credit points instead of doing the work I had already assigned and asking for help. (That partially worked.) Joe Feldman cites four reasons why extra credit doesn’t match up with the principles of grades being based on valid evidence of a student’s knowledge and not based on evidence that is likely to be affected by implicit biases or a student’s environment: 

1. Extra credit reinforces the idea that the class isn’t really about mastering a standard, but is instead about acquiring points however possible.
2. Extra credit teaches students that points are interchangeable. Weakness on one learning standard can be compensated for by strength on another.
3. Extra credit “undermines a teacher’s own curriculum and instruction.” It supplants a teacher’s lessons with things that may have nothing to do with a target learning standard--think of extra points for bringing tissues or canned food, attending the school play or a guest lecture.
4. Extra credit is “inequitable because it reflects a student’s environment over which she has no control [and] because it requires extra resources beyond the course requirements.” (p. 114) Extra credit can often require money and/or transportation.

If the work is important, require it. Don’t use extra credit.


No grade penalty for late work
I’ve been conflicted over my own late work policy and I’ve changed it nearly every year over the past decade--sometimes enlisting students to help me develop the policy. However, I’ve always included a grade penalty of some sort. Mr. Feldman argues against any grade penalty for late work because “the practice creates inaccurate final grades.” (p. 115) If a student who demonstrates A-level work and then has their grade lowered to a B (or lower) because it’s a day late, does that accurately reflect the student’s academic performance?

He goes on to say that:
  “late work penalties can disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable students. Students turn in assignments late for all sorts of reasons. They have few resources, weak prior knowledge, overwhelming schedules, a lack of engagement, stress, and simple forgetfulness. They may not have been able to entirely control all the circumstances that caused the assignments to be late, and our implicit biases influence the assumptions we make about whether they had. They may learn at a slower rate and need more time to complete assignments to actually learn from them.” (p. 115)

When we penalize late work, we may inadvertently cause students to stop working and not complete the assignment, and or cause others to resort to copying in order to get the work done by the deadline.

Not penalizing late work sends the message that high-quality work is valued and that if the work is important, it’s important whether or not it’s done by the due date or a week later. Meeting deadlines is also important, of course, but teachers can still indicate on most grade programs whether or not assignments were completed on time even if there is no grade penalty.

Additionally, no teacher wants to grade a flurry of assignments at the end of a marking period and so some set deadlines for late work. Last year I started accepting late work up until the summative assessment for a unit since it was designed to help them perform well on that assessment. The policy wasn't perfect, but it was a step in the right direction.

Grade the work, not the timing of the work.


Don’t give zeroes for cheating
Cheating is often viewed as the antithesis of learning and some teachers view cheating as “an act of treason--violating the trust between the student and teacher, and casts doubt on the validity of a student’s...performance.” One of the most common punishments for cheating is the zero. Feldman acknowledges that “we want students to understand how severe a transgression cheating is, and we hope the zero teaches that lesson.” (p. 117) But the zero violates the idea that grades should be about academic performance and not behavior. 

Why do students cheat? Lots of reasons, of course, but they basically come down to the fact that the student doesn’t believe they can be successful without cheating. Maybe they didn’t learn the material as fast as others; maybe they were prevented from studying by some extra-curricular event or family emergency. In any case, Feldman suggests that when it comes to cheating, “we might treat it as a symptom of a student’s academic or personal struggle, and that alone might warrant a different kind of consequence than irredeemable punishment.” He goes on to write, “The real irony of assigning a zero for cheating is that it lets the student off too easy.” (p. 118) If we penalize students with a zero, it makes their grade inaccurate and robs them of the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned and robs the teacher of knowledge about what the student still needs to learn. Assigning a zero may punish cheating but also “exempts cheating students from learning.”

​Feldman further discusses potential aims of punishment (including deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation, and restitution) and how these aims come into play for punishing cheating. Just as schools are thankfully moving away from retributive and deterrence punishments (think “no-excuses” and zero-tolerance policies) that often have a disproportionately negative impact on students of color, we can think about more rehabilitative and restitutive consequences for cheating. He writes, “The consequence for cheating that aligns most closely with these purposes is not to assign a zero, but instead to require the student to complete the test or assignment and reveal her true level of content knowledge.” (p. 119) The student would be undergoing rehabilitation. Perhaps the cheating student “...must complete the assessment, or future assessments, with closer monitoring until she has restored our trust--in other words, restitution.”

Cheating is a behavior and should have behavioral consequences, not grading ones.

To sum up:

• Exclude participation / effort from grade calculations
• No extra credit--only required content
• No grade penalties for timing of work
• Non-grade consequences for cheating

Next ...what to do about grading homework...
 

In my last post reflecting on Joe Feldman's book Grading for Equity, I wrote about some of the issues involved in traditional grading practices (TG or TGP).  Before going on to describe his suggestions for more equitable grading practices, I would like to point out that Feldman says that we, as teachers, shouldn't spend time blaming ourselves for our past practices that we may now see as problematic.  We should instead focus on change.  He writes "We have never had the opportunity, resources, and support to examine our traditional grading practices, and so we must forgive ourselves for inadvertently perpetuating outdated and even harmful practices."

But now that I've read and thought about the issue in more detail I can't continue to employ TGPs.  Thankfully, Feldman has some suggestions :-)  He groups his first suggested practices into those involved in making grading easy to understand, mathematically sound, and accurately indicate a student's academic performance.  One practice is to avoid the zero.  It's rarely the case when a student knows absolutely nothing about a topic so the zero is not accurate in that way.  Also, when coupled with a 0-100 point scale, the zero disproportionately punishes students.  Zeroes for a few late or missing assignments can significantly affect a students final grade under TGPs, but they do not indicate final understandings and so are inaccurate in that way as well.
​
The 0-100% grading scale itself is problematic because it allows for many more ways to fail than to succeed.  Often under TGPs, more than half of the scale counts as failing with an F letter grade.  It's also too granular.  I certainly can't tell a student or parent what the difference is between an 85% and an 86% in terms of a student's understanding of a topic.  There's no valid academic reason to have that degree of gradation unless you're simply looking to rank students against each other.  

So Feldman recommends three things: 1) Avoid zeroes, 2) Change the scale to something like 0-4 (five levels instead of 100), and 3) minimum grading.  I'll have more to say about the 0-4 scale later, but if the system in which you are working requires the use of a 0-100, then at the very least you can set a minimum failing grade a student can earn on that scale. Depending on the particulars of your school or district grading scale, that minimum might be between 50-69%.  An example: let's say a student has five assessments on the same topic and gets an 85% (B) on four of them, but is missing the fifth.  Averaging a zero in for the missing one gives the student a 68% (D).  Averaging in a 59% for the missing assignment gives the student an 80% (low B)--which probably better reflects what the student understands about that topic. 

Speaking of averaging...why do we do that? Let's say on a particular topic a student earns these five scores: 82, 84, 40, 94, 94.  The average is  78.8, the middle score is 84, and the score that is most frequent is 94.  In such a scenario, what score more accurately reflects what the student now understands?  It seems like the student was understanding at a proficient level, then had a really bad day, and ended up performing at a really high level.  A 78.8 average for this student doesn't accurately reflect what they now know. 

Feldman writes "Averaging a student's performance over time doesn't accurately reflect what the student came to understand over time and lowers grades for students who took longer to learn and demonstrate proficiency. Instead, a student's most recent performance can more accurately describe their achievement." Although Feldman doesn't specifically call out ways to calculate a student's grade and give more weight to the more recent ones, there are many in the Standard Based Grading (SBG) community that have. Calculation methods like a Decaying Average put more weight on more recent scores and of course teachers can just use their professional judgement as well.  (This of course makes more sense in situations in which the student is being assessed multiple times on the same topic or learning standard.)  I'll also note that widely used computerized grading systems such as those in PowerSchool and Infinite Campus have the capability of calculating grades with methods other than a mean.

Lastly in this section, Feldman points out that group grades reward students for "...working together to create a product regardless of whether each student learned from that group's work.  Awarding grades based on student learning subsequent to the group work refocuses students on its purpose and provide us with opportunities for formative feedback."  I've often graded lab work as group work even though I've required lab papers from every student.  Feldman's comments here (and later) have made me rethink how I will assess lab work going forward.

So, for more accurate grading:

• Avoid zeroes
• Change the scale (0-4)
• Apply Minimum grading
• Weight more recent performance 
• Grade individual performance, not group performance

Next post: Bias-Resistant Grading Practices