Grading and Reporting Student Performance

When it comes to reporting, I often feel like this person in the photo - standing before a wall of evidences and then trying to come up with a summary of it all. While I always have something to say about each student, reporting time of the year can be daunting.

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GRADING AND REPORTING

This is time to communicate all the positive things students are doing, and to also communicate what the students and their support team can do to further student learning. At this time, we are not focusing on labeling a kid with a numerical value but rather to offer a snapshot of where the student is at performing their learning.

In EPSE 310, Bel says: " The primary purpose of grading and reporting primary purpose should be to communicate with students and parents about the achievement of core and curricular competencies and where to go next."

It is important as educators to be aware how we phrase our wording when grading and reporting student performance. The way we phrase our message can either come across as "These are your strengths.... and you have not done well in ...... Next, time, do better here......" Rather, we should approach to exercise positive feedback "Here are the things you've been working on, I think you can further your learning by....".

Jen says: "The purpose of reporting is to communicate with parents/guardians their child's process & performance:

• academically

• socially

• behaviorally

also to consider to communicate: support their child is receiving."

LITTLE NOTE: Check out Standards of Assessment, as encouraged by the Ministry of Education (check out Classroom Assessment and Reporting, BC Curriculum).

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REPORTING STYLES

Right now, there is a great shift in education of moving away from using letter grades to proficiency scale. Certainly, this change comes with a great resistance to accept the new style of reporting and its implications in the classroom.

Back in July 2018 (prior to my admission to the Education Program) I remember when one of the senior lady of a family friend approached me to ask me about proficiency scale. At the time, I, too, was questioning this new shift in reporting pedagogy. Why are we getting rid of the letter grades? By replacing letter grades with more broad categories of proficiency scale, are we ultimately remove clear boundaries we can categorize students into? Reflecting on my own childhood experience, I did not settle anything less than 100% and A+. It was the sole motivation of my academic education. To remove this system would have meant... relaxing in my education journey. So why is education shifting to adopting proficiency scale in reporting?

LETTER GRADES

Now that I am having conversation around grading and reporting, I am beginning to recognize that the letter grade system is an arbitrary reward of how well you played the game called the education. The core critique to letter grades and percentage reporting is that "how accurately can we grade our students when using nothing more than an imperfect system of grading of imperfect assessment of imperfect representation of student learning from imperfect mediums of teaching?" It's true. letter grades often come with assessment pieces that have weak validity (how well it measures what it intend to measure) and reliability (how consistent is the student performance). And yet, despite these imperfection in the letter grade system, students often live through anxiety, fretting about the 1% that may make a difference between a C and a B.

Nevertheless, letter grades can serve both educators and students well if the education game that is being presented is fair and reasonable. If the system truly serves the students in a way that it requires them to refine/present their competencies consistently throughout the year (rather than emphasizing the important of regurgitation of facts), it might actually do good for education. At the same time, the tension of letter grade still remains: how can we numerically measure qualities that cannot be quantifiable? For example, how do you score how well a student can analyze the impact of ancient Mesopotamia on modern civilization? The answer is, such qualitative question cannot be assessed with quantitative (percentage) score.

PROFICIENCY SCALE

Proficiency scale, therefore, is a way to address issues of letter grades. It is a way to qualitatively describe student learning in a learning continuum of four stages: emerging, developing, proficiency, and extending. This works great because it can have more validity and reliability to assess student learning and performance.

The downside of the proficiency scale is that it is not able to rank student performance since the categories are so broad.