A Nontraditional Approach to Grading

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for A Nontraditional Approach to Grading. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer, what does Thomas Guskey's work on evaluation and grading include? Thomas Guskey is known for his book Practical Solutions for Serious Problems in Standards-Based Grading. This was published in 2008.

Essentially, he is an advocate for making grading and report cards more effective and fair for students. He's particularly concerned with making it representative of the students' abilities in the class. And he wants teachers to eliminate the idea that grades need to fall on a bell-shaped curve.

He wants teachers to focus more on developing talent rather than differentiating students based on grades. And so essentially that just means recognizing each student for their own individual talent instead of separating them out into, this is an A's group of students. This is a B group of students, et cetera.

He also thinks that the bell-shaped curve really has no room in education because it forces a certain percentage of your class to fail. Instead, he says that we should be moving all of our students towards the higher end of distribution, which isn't possible with a bell-shaped curve. He also says that when students have a low grade, it really just devastates their motivation for them to try harder.

So how does Guskey propose we deal with students with failing grades? Well, he says that really a zero is not representative of the student's performance. A zero on one assignment really brings down a student's grade, even if all of their other grades are A's. And it really defeats the student and doesn't show their hard work that they've done throughout the grading period.

It essentially just allows the students to give up because the hole that they have to dig themselves out of is too deep. So it's an easy out for them. Instead of giving zeros, Guskey advocates for giving incompletes. Essentially, an incomplete would require a student to go back and do the work. So this is if a student doesn't do well on an assignment or if a student skips the assignment completely. It also necessitates immediate action.

So if a student has an incomplete in the grade book, they have to have a consequence right away. An example of a consequence might be that they have to stay after school that day and attend a study session or attend a study session during lunch. His suggestions for grading include using a recent assessment for the most recent grade that's going to be on a student's report card rather than an average of assessments that have been done throughout the year or throughout the semester.

And he suggested teachers vary their grades by using several types of grades. So one might be a product grade-- a grade that they get on the end product. One might be a grade that they get on the process-- so the work that they've done leading up to the product. And one might be on progress, whether or not they've grown. This way grades are assigned on that most recent assignment rather than a collection of their cumulative work.

Let's reflect. What problems or issues do you think might arise in your classroom or school if you use this type of grading? To conclude, today we answered the following essential question of, what does Thomas Guskey's work on evaluation and grading include? Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video.

The Additional Resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resource you want. Thank you for joining me today. And happy teaching.