Within America, the question “Can this be taken for a grade?” has become common in every classroom. Nevertheless, I think the question that should even be asked often is “What is the essence of grades?” Presently, a kid’s report card shows grades that do not just reveal the child’s academic performance, but also include other aspects like behavior as well as attendance. Can we really learn what we want to find about our kids’ education using the traditional grading systems?
Is there Anything Amiss with the Traditional Grading System?
Perhaps so much, that’s what the perception of most professionals. Using the conventional grading system, late work, additional credit, participation in the class as well as assignments not related to academics can impact a child’s grade or score. Although these factors outlined to reflect life skills and play an essential role, they are not real parameters when it comes to determining a student’s performance or knowledge in terms of educational content.
Eric Harder and Curtis who are both teachers in Austin, Minnesota School discovered problems with this in their school. In their school, you could find a diligent student who has excellent life skills performing poorly in standardized test; notwithstanding, such student may still get a passing grade. On the other hand, a student who has second-rate life skills and grades that are relatively poor may likely top the class after taking the same standardized test
Thus, if the non-academic factors have become the significant parameters in determining the grade of a student, then it means grade raise (giving higher total scores to substandard work) may likely turn to be a problem. These two teachers – Harder and Bartlett are of a strong opinion that traditional grading has high prospects of representing a kid’s success academically or in class.
These two teachers (Harder and Bartlett) who taught the eight-grade students’ math in Austin, Minnesota School had taken it upon themselves to research on grading as an aspect of funding partnership with the University of Minnesota, Hormel Foundation, as well as Austin Public Schools. As these groups ventured into this research, they have explored the book ‘A Repair Kit for Grading’, written by Ken O’Connor. According to this author – who is also an evaluation and assessment professional, traditional grading (which considers several non-academic factors like conduct as well as participation) does not actually represent kids’ knowledge accurately.
Harder and Bartlett were able to discover a solution for this discrepancy through ‘A Repair Kit for Grading’ (Ken O’Connor’s book). And what is that solution – evaluation accuracy should be increased by dividing kids’ scores into parts that are more accurate. Now, a philosophy known as Grading for Learning has turned to be a new assessment philosophy born of what merely started as a curious act by Harder and Bartlett.
The new philosophy – Grading for Learning differentiates the two components of the traditional grading system; it accomplishes that by assigning a content knowledge grade to each student, as well as life-skills grade related to the student’s behavior.
According to Harder, in order to enable parents, colleges, teachers and also the students themselves get a grasp of what they are being taught, it is not practicable to give the one-letter grade to a student.
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