Authentic Assessment in the Affective Domain and Communicating Authentic Assessment Grading and Reporting

Teacher Beliefs and Values vs. External Pressures

  • Teachers' assessment and grading decisions are significantly influenced by their beliefs and values regarding student learning.
  • These beliefs often conflict with external pressures like mandated statewide testing, parental concerns, and district policies.
  • (\text{Bonner, 2016}; \text{McMillan, 2002b, 2003}; \text{McMillan & Workman, 1999})
  • The push for centralized assessment and accountability systems creates tension between objective grading practices and teachers’ subjective professional judgment.

Ethical Dilemmas in Assessment

  • Studies show teachers often negotiate conflicting demands when making grading decisions.
  • (\text{Pope, Green, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2009})
  • High-stakes testing environments pressure teachers to prioritize auditing and reporting student achievement over promoting learning.
  • Teachers require “objective” evidence of student performance to justify grades to parents.
  • District policies may restrict the types and uses of grading procedures.
  • Easily audited measures demanded by these pressures may not align with what teachers consider quality assessment.

Practical Constraints on Teachers

  • Practical constraints limit what teachers can realistically achieve in assessment.
  • Using multiple samples of student performance for grades may not be feasible due to other instructional needs.
  • Teachers should consider external factors in relation to their own beliefs and values about teaching and learning.
  • Tension may exist, but grading decisions should primarily focus on what is best for student learning and motivation.

Importance of Teacher Values and Beliefs

  • Teacher values and beliefs are essential as they provide a rationale for grading practices that align with the teaching/learning process.
  • Teachers may offer extra credit to help students improve low grades or use varied assessment types to accommodate individual student differences.
  • Performance assessments can be more motivating and engaging than multiple-choice tests and allow for grading participation.

Teacher Perspectives on Grading

  • Grading is secondary to the overall teaching process; assessment is used to identify areas where students need more support and what they have mastered.
  • Teachers strive to ensure all students can achieve success, not just a select few.
  • Effort and improvement are considered; students who try to improve are not given failing grades.
  • Thought-provoking questions for teachers:
    • Why do we grade at all?
    • What do you want your grades to mean to your students?
    • How do you want students to be affected by grades?
    • What might students’ grades mean to other stakeholders (parents, school officials)?

Intended and Unintended Impacts of Grading

  • Grades should positively impact student learning and motivation, but they also have various intended and unintended effects.
  • Example: Mr. Wren adjusts scores based on the top score in the class to be “fair.”
    • This might not be fair if one or two students are exceptionally bright.
    • It can affect student motivation negatively.
  • Important influences on how grades are interpreted:
    • Level of feedback communicated about student performance.
    • Whether grades are used to compare students.
    • How grades motivate students.
    • Whether factors other than performance are included.

Providing Feedback

  • One of the most challenging decisions is determining the nature and amount of feedback students receive.
  • Example: Ryann McMillan's experience with a B+ grade on her Italy report with minimal feedback.
    • Ryann was disappointed and confused because she didn’t know why she didn’t get a higher grade.
    • The teacher could have provided a detailed summary of each section’s evaluation with its strengths and weaknesses.

Practicality of Providing Detailed Feedback

  • It is not always possible to give detailed comments on every assignment due to time constraints.
  • Example: A high school English teacher with over 100 papers to grade must budget time carefully.
    • Spending just 5 minutes per paper still requires over 8 hours of work for one assignment.
  • Teachers must make judgments about which assessments to target for intensive feedback.
  • Some feedback can negatively affect student achievement.
    • Vague or unclear feedback is not helpful.
    • Too much “red ink” can discourage students and negatively affect motivation.

Importance of Professional Judgment in Feedback

  • Providing appropriate feedback is essential, but challenging.
  • More detailed, individualized feedback generally has a positive effect on motivation.
  • It allows students to connect their study habits and preparation with their performance.
  • Effective teachers learn to provide consistent, detailed, and useful feedback within practical constraints.

Basis of Comparison

  • Grading provides a basis for comparison using three forms:
    • Individual student-referenced.
    • Norm-referenced.
    • Standards-based.
  • The central question is, “What are we comparing when we assign grades?”
  • This distinction has implications for teaching, learning, and educational equity.

Motivation

  • Grading practices can either enhance or diminish student motivation.
  • Student motivation is enhanced when they attribute success to internal, controllable factors such as effort.
    • Success due to something they did and can control in the future, rather than luck or help from others.
  • Teachers can reinforce the connection between effort and grades to build self-efficacy.
    • Self-efficacy: belief that they can accomplish learning tasks.
  • Standards-based grading promotes effort and ownership of performance.

Examples of Motivation Strategies

  • A student who puts effort into some parts of an assignment but doesn’t meet all requirements:
    • A low grade may decrease motivation.
    • A high grade based solely on effort may be misinterpreted as full performance.
    • A checklist or rubric can help connect effort and performance.
  • Learning tasks should be moderately challenging.
    • Grades on very easy tasks lower motivation.
  • Effort is more important than ability.
  • Grades are most effective when used formatively during learning, not just summatively after learning.
    • Formative feedback encourages self-monitoring and reflection, enhancing self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation.
    • Summative judgment tends to focus on extrinsic rewards and compliance.

Using Factors Other Than Academic Performance

  • Teachers often incorporate nonacademic factors (effort, attitudes) into grades.
  • Assessment experts generally agree that nonacademic indicators should not significantly influence academic performance grades.
  • The business community recognizes nonacademic factors as important for workforce preparation.

Effort

  • Common arguments for considering effort in grading:
    • Students who try harder learn more.
    • It rewards low-achieving students.
    • It aligns with societal values of effort.
    • It reinforces effort as a controllable factor in success.

Arguments For and Against Including Effort in Grading

  • For
    • Students who try hard learn more.
    • Rewards motivation and engagement.
    • Rewards lower-achieving students for something.
    • Rewards an internal attributional factor that is in control of the student.
    • Leads to higher grades.
  • Against
    • Teachers operationalize effort differently.
    • Hard to define and measure.
    • Can be faked.
    • Favors more assertive students.
    • Lack of consistency in how effort is weighted.
    • Teaches students that they can get by with effort and not performance.
    • Takes focus away from performance.

Suggestions for Including Effort in Grading

  • Use it for borderline cases only.
  • Never allow effort to be a major part of the grade.
  • Report effort separately from performance.
  • Define effort clearly and stick to the definition.
  • Share the definition with students and provide examples.
  • Include effort for all students, not just some.
  • Emphasize effort attributions related to performance even if effort isn't part of the grade.

Attendance

  • Many schools have guidelines linking attendance and grades.
    • Students may become ineligible for credit or fail automatically after a certain number of absences.
  • Justification:
    • Students need to be in class to learn.
    • School should hold students accountable for attendance as preparation for the workplace.
  • Risk: Punishing students academically for nonacademic issues can overshadow the purpose of grades.
  • Better solutions: Implement attendance-related consequences like making up class time after school or on Saturdays.

Attitudes

  • Rewarding positive attitudes is appealing, but attitudes are difficult to define, measure, and can be easily faked.
  • Like other nonacademic factors, it is generally not advisable to include attitudes in grading.
  • Grades should primarily reflect student performance in relation to learning targets.
  • If other factors are included, their influence should be minimal.

Group Work

  • Experts in cooperative learning advise against assigning group grades.
  • Differentiate between skills to be graded and skills to be assessed but not graded.
  • Use rubrics and reflection prompts to assess participation and clarify expectations.
  • Use peer review to evaluate each member’s contribution, combined with teacher observations.
  • Assess individual learning outcomes with separate rubrics, reflection prompts, or tests aligned with learning goals.
  • Key to successful group work: clearly articulate the need for group work, intended learning outcomes, and assessment/grading criteria before implementation.

Types of Grading Symbols or Scores

  • Various types of symbols or scores can be used to mark and grade student performance:
    • Letter grades.
    • Percentage correct.
    • Rubrics (checklists).
    • Standards-based grades.
    • Written descriptions.
  • Most teachers use a combination of these to balance consistency and adaptability.

Letter Grades

  • Letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) are a common way to mark student performance.
  • They correspond to adjectives like excellent, good, average, poor, and unsatisfactory.
  • Plus and minus symbols provide finer distinctions.
  • Advantages: Convenient, concise, familiar, and easily understood by students and parents.
  • Limitation: Provide only a general indication of performance without specific strengths or weaknesses.
  • Teachers may be influenced by factors other than performance (effort, work habits, attitude).
  • The proportion of students receiving each grade can vary based on teacher value systems.

Percentage Correct

  • Common for objective tests.
  • Indicates the percentage of items answered correctly.
  • Easy to calculate, record, and combine.
  • Letter grades are often associated with ranges of percentage scores.
  • Limitations:
    • Provides only a general indication of performance.
    • Difficult to understand specific skill performance.
    • Tendency to equate percentage with percent mastered, which may not be accurate due to varying item difficulty.

Rubrics/Checklists

  • A variation of the proficient/not proficient approach.
  • Provide students with a rubric or checklist to indicate performance on each aspect of a learning target.
  • Can be dichotomous (checklists) or elaborate (scales of performance).
  • Advantages:
    • Detailed feedback about strengths and areas for improvement.
    • Helps students understand precisely where they need to improve.
    • When presented at the beginning of an assignment, they give students a specific idea of what they need to do to get the grade they want.
  • Difficulty: Developing the rubrics and keeping the system practical.

Standards-Based Grading

  • A relatively new and effective form of grading.
  • Provides meaningful feedback to students and parents.
  • Four steps in development:
    1. Identify major learning targets and standards.
    2. Establish performance indicators for the standards.
    3. Identify benchmarks that indicate graduated levels of proficiency.
    4. Develop reporting forms that indicate progress and final achievement toward meeting the standards.
  • A direct descendant of criterion-referenced grading.
  • Emphasizes an absolute, established level of performance in a carefully defined domain.
  • Represents a student’s knowledge of content related to specific standards.

Written Descriptions

  • An alternative to giving only a grade or score.
  • Advantages:
    • Can be highly individualized.
    • Points out unique strengths and weaknesses.
    • Focuses attention on important issues.
    • Students appreciate the effort of teachers.
  • Disadvantage: Time-consuming for teachers.
  • Added complication of converting descriptions to grades.

Determining Report Card (Composite) Grades

  • Despite the move towards standards-based grading, end-of-unit and semester grades are still prevalent.
  • Professional judgment is essential for determining final grades.
  • Three key steps:
    1. Select what to include in the final grade.
    2. Select weights for each individual assessment.
    3. Combine weighted scores to determine a single grade.

Selecting What to Include in the Final Grade

  • Be cautious about including nonacademic factors (attendance, effort, personal/social characteristics).
  • Grades for academic performance should be primarily based on student academic performance on major assessments.
  • In a standards-based system, the student’s last, best performance should be heavily weighted.
  • If cooperativeness and participation are important, consider separate grades for each.
  • Consider how many assessments are needed for an accurate judgment of performance.
    • A single assessment is generally not sufficient.
    • The more assessments, the better, but avoid excessive assessment that takes away from instructional time.

Selecting Weights for Individual Assessments

  • More important assessments are given greater weight.
  • Factors determining importance:
    • Closely aligned with learning goals and targets (content-related evidence for validity).
    • Reflect instructional time.
    • Are most reliable.
    • Are most current.

Combining Weighted Scores

  • Two main methods:
    • Weighted categories method:
    • Assessments with different scores and grades are scaled and combined by category.
    • Total points method:
    • Each assessment is assigned a number of points reflecting its weight, and the final grade is the total points added.

Weighted Categories vs. Total Points Methods

  • Weighted Categories Method:
    • Flexibility in the weighting process.
    • Homework, projects, and exams can be combined with different scoring systems.
  • Total Points Method:
    • Clearly communicates the importance of an assignment toward the final grade.
    • Can be cumbersome; requires adjusting the number of items to equal points or changing scores.
    • May constrain the nature of the assessments.
  • Recommendation: The weighted categories approach is generally better because it allows better measurement of student performance.

Using Judgment When Combining Grades

  • Averaging assessment results is justified, but mindless averaging can distort student capabilities.
  • Example: Averaging a novice’s early performance with an expert’s final performance may not accurately reflect learning.
  • Critical to report student attainment of a skill in relation to the rubric and scoring criteria at the time of the report, regardless of earlier performances.
  • Adjust weights to emphasize more recent work.
  • Think critically about the effect of grading systems.

Cheating

  • Cheating is a serious offense that warrants disciplinary action.
  • Lowering grades may not be appropriate if it has an extreme negative impact.
  • Avoid using grades solely as punishment.
  • Consider alternative punishments and allow the student to retest.

Assessing the Weight of Mandated Assessments

  • Increasing mandated assessments (state, division, school-level) raises the question of whether to incorporate them into the final grade.
  • If teachers have discretion, they should carefully assess the quality and alignment of the assessments with their course curriculum.

Recognizing Teacher Fallibility

  • It is challenging for teachers to write tests at the appropriate level of difficulty and emphasis.
  • If students perform poorly, consider whether the test was unfair or if the teaching was inadequate.
  • Be open to this possibility and make changes.
  • Consider giving an improved makeup test.

Reporting Student Progress to Parents

  • Parents are critical to student learning, and effective reporting can help them understand and support their children.
  • Reporting can take various forms:
    • Weekly or monthly grade reports.
    • Phone calls.
    • Emails.
    • Letters.
    • Newsletters.
    • Conferences.
    • Report cards.

Report Cards

  • The foundation for most reporting systems.
  • Typically provide letter or percentage grades and teacher comments.
  • For report cards to be effective:
    • Parents must understand the grades and comments.
    • Information needs to be accurately interpreted.
    • Parents need to learn enough to guide improvement efforts.

Standards-Based Report Cards

  • A push to develop standards-based report cards to provide more precise information about student learning.
  • Break subject-area grades down into specific standards-based measures.
  • Show both student growth and level of mastery.
  • Challenges:
    • May include several pages of detailed data, causing confusion.
    • General resistance to changing the familiar format.
  • Educating parents about standards-based grading can alleviate resistance.
  • Walking parents through both traditional and standards-based reports can help them appreciate the improved depth of information.

Progress Reports

  • Provide ongoing communication (weekly, biweekly, monthly, or real time).
  • Advantages:
    • Help ensure no surprises at the end of the semester.
    • Have a significant and positive effect on student learning.
  • Can be customized to show:
    • Student grades.
    • Summaries of performance by category.
    • Graphs.
    • Connections between assignments and standards.
    • Student attendance.
  • Include learning targets, rubrics, scoring criteria, descriptions of motivation, and suggestions for helping the student.
  • Include positive comments and identify two or three areas for parents to focus on.
  • Provide specific expectations for parents to help at home.
  • Assert that parents need to be partners in the learning process.
  • Informal notes or letters are also appreciated and show concern.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

  • A common way to communicate in person with parents about student progress.
  • Can be face-to-face or via phone.
  • Brief phone calls with positive feedback are well-received.
  • Two types:
    • Group conferences:
    • Communicate school and class policies, content, evaluation procedures, expectations, and communication methods.
    • Individual conferences:
    • Discuss individual student achievement, progress, or difficulties.
  • May be initiated by either the teacher or the parent.

Recommendations for Parent-Teacher Conferences

  • Plan in advance.
  • Conduct in a private, quiet, comfortable setting.
  • Explain how to interpret standards-based report cards.
  • Begin with positive student performances.
  • Establish a professional tone.
  • Encourage parent participation.
  • Be frank in reviewing strengths and weaknesses.
  • Review language skills.
  • Review learning targets with examples of student performances.
  • Avoid discussing other students and teachers.
  • Avoid bluffing.
  • Identify two or three areas to work on in a plan of action.

Student-Led Conferences

  • A new kind of reporting to parents where students lead their own conferences.
  • Students lead parents through a review of their work.
  • Teachers facilitate by creating a positive environment and preparing students.
  • Students reflect on and evaluate their performance.
  • Promotes additional learning and gives students confidence.
  • Develops a sense of pride and ownership.
  • Students tell a story about their learning, helping parents see progress over time.
  • Parents tend to be more involved.