After 10 years of teaching, I retired from the classroom and am working on my Ph.D. in Teacher Education, researching grading and assessment. Here are my most up-to-date practices—frozen in time like Pompeii or Herculaneum right up to my last day in the classroom—that were fundamental to my teaching, making all the daily activities possible:
**Updated 4.6.24 w/ quantitative results on minimum 50 grading**
We know that the 100-point scale has a staggering 60 points that fall within the F range, then just 10 points for each letter grade above. This major imbalance means that averaging zeros into a student’s course grade often has disastrous results, and can become mission insurmountable for getting out of that rut.
Still, the argument against zeros is surprisingly still going on, with advocates in plenty of schools everywhere claiming the old “something for nothing myth” when alternatives are suggest, like setting the lowest grade possible as a 50 (i.e., “minimum 50). In other words, teachers are still unconvinced that they need to stop using zeros. Well, we’re heading back 20 years to when Doug Reeves (2004) used a 4.0 grading scale example to show exactly how utterly absurd and destructive zeros are in practice. This is perhaps the most compelling mathematical case against the zero I’ve come across yet….
Grading is a summative function (i.e., formative assessments should not be graded). (Black et al., 2004; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Brookhart, 2004; Frisbie & Waltman, 1992; Sadler, 1989; Shepard, 2019)
Findings from an overwhelming number of researchers spanning 115 years suggest that grades hinder learning (re: reliability issues, ineffectiveness compared to feedback, or other negative associations). (Black et al., 2004; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Brookhart et al, 2016; Butler & Nisan, 1986; Butler, 1987; Cardelle & Corno, 1981; Crooks, 1933; Crooks, 1988; Elawar & Corno, 1985; Ferguson, 2013; Guberman, 2021; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Johnson, 1911; Kohn, 2011; Mandouit & Hattie, 2023; McLaughlin, 1992; Meyer, 1908; Newton et al., 2020; Page, 1958; Rugg, 1918; Shepard, 2019; Starch, 1913; Steward & White, 1976; Stiggins, 1994; Wisniewski et al., 2020)
In other words, 1) any assessment that a teacher grades automatically becomes summative, even if they call it “formative” (I’m referring to these as false formatives), and perhaps more importantly, 2) grades get in the way of learning. These findings suggest that best way to support learning is by a) limiting grading to only true summative assessments given at the end of the grading period (e.g., quarter, trimester, semester, academic year), and b) using alternatives to grading formative assessments that otherwise effectively make them summative. Therefore, my next stage of reviewing literature focuses on reducing summative grading and exploring formative grading alternatives (i.e., so they remain formative). As for now, one of those practices *might* be retakes, which has been on my mind ever since I saw a tweet from @JoeFeldman. Given the findings above, which establish a theoretical framework to study grading, let’s take a look at how retakes are used now, and how they could be used in the future, if we even need them at all…
I was recently asked a very good question about how to change one’s assessments to align more with CI. By that, we’re talking about comprehension-based language teaching (CLT) that prioritizes comprehensible input (CI) in the Latin classroom. First, it helps to think in terms of what standards were being assessed beforehand, even if they weren’t explicitly called “standards.” These old standards were mostly discrete skills you’d expect to find in tests accompanying popular textbooks, like vocabulary recall, derivative knowledge, grammar identification, and cultural trivia. New standards based on CI—whatever they are—will have meaning at the core. My suggestion is to focus on assessing comprehension of Latin, because that’s more than enough to ask for. One benefit of this standard is that is that it has those old discrete skills embedded within something larger and more meaningful that you can assess (i.e., comprehension). Let’s look at how each one of the old standards is contained within assessing comprehension…
I’m going to start sharing some findings in a series called “Current Reading” as part of a lit review I’m doing on assessment and grading; nothing too fancy or cerebral, but definitely more than blog post ideas.
Why the announcement?!
On the one hand, this is not new. I’ve shared plenty of direct quotes and sources in my blog posts in the past. Also, consider this a symptom of being steeped in academia once again. I’m reading hundreds of pages of research a week, and it’s important to digest and keep track of studies that support my own research. This includes knowing who wrote about what, and when. On the other hand, a second language acquisition (SLA) researcher Bill VanPatten mentioned something online recently when I shared a 2020 post with a summary of CI non-examples. His comment was how ideas in that post were oddly familiar ones throughout the field. That’s completely true; I never claimed they were *my* original thoughts. Like many of my posts written to pass along information, that 2020 summary doesn’t include citations to any particular study. It’s a collection of ideas that have consensus in the SLA community, and that lack of citations was intentional, not an oversight.
Why intentional? For nearly all of my blog’s 12 year history, I never wrote for the academic community that would be interested in that kind of stuff. I was writing for other teachers. I sometimes added just a shorthand author and year (e.g., Feldman, 2018) to some statements that would give most people what they needed to track down the original—if they really wanted to read that original!In my experience, though, most teachers don’t read research, so I haven’t bothered much with bibliographies. Since I’m no longer teaching, and I’m now using bibliographies a lot more these days, I do want to make a clear distinction between posts of the past and posts moving forward. Granted, my posts are still actually written for teachers, make no mistake! My degree program is Teacher Education and School Improvement (TESI), and I’m still sharing ideas for practical implementation. The one difference is that they’ll now include more breadcrumbs for everyone to follow—myself included. After all, there has been no better way for me, personally, to consolidate thoughts and work through concepts than by writing these blog posts. You might also benefit as well. Now, for the good stuff…
This is my first contribution to a major publication for all teachers—not just those teaching Latin—since I officially began researching grading practices at UMass. I’ll get to what you’ll find from me in Starr’s book later, but I just received my copy and wanted to share some top reasons why you probably want this book…
Years back, I wrote about how a standards-based model to learning and grading (SBG) fell short of the bar. This was true of a particular kind of SBG—the kind with 10-30 standards being tested and graded every single quarter, scheduling multiple reassessments for each one, and still using scores of 1-4 in a way that keeps focus on points (not learning). The good news is that not all models are like that. The bad news is that a LOT of them are, which in turn give standards and accompanying practices a bad name. Teachers end up hating SBG, and admin scrap plans for any schoolwide change.
To be clear, I’m more of a “burn it to the ground” kind of guy, advocating for little to no grading whatsoever, but I’ve also found that a basic understanding of standards is crucial to ungrading. In fact, I’m not sure you can do it without standards…
When I first started playing Chants of Sennaar on Steam, I said “uh oh,” thinking it would be a game that suggested language learning was all about immersion and guessing. Luckily, I was wrong.
“Legend says that one day, a traveler will reunite the Peoples of the Tower who are unable to communicate with each other. Observe, listen, and decipher ancient languages in a fascinating universe inspired by the myth of Babel.”
The basic gameplay is you moving about the world and clicking on things to interact with, like puzzles, or other humanoids, as you’re shown glyphs. The point is to learn the glyphs and progress throughout the narrative. While the game certainly has an inductive element to learning those glyphs, you eventually get what you need: comprehension. And it’s full comprehension, too, not just that “gist” stuff that only gets you so far. The game gives you comprehended input.
Narrative accounts of student learning aren’t new. In fact, I just read about them recently in Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To) One thing I haven’t heard yet is anyone combining narratives with self-grading. This would eliminate a LOT of the issues teachers have reported, namely the time it takes to score them, and the consistency needed to score them well (Schneider & Hunt, 2023).
Narratives go back about 100 years. They were the next step in efficiency following the practice of teachers visiting homes of their pupils and presenting an oral report on how the child was doing. As high school enrollment skyrocketed, though, narratives were abandoned for even more time-saving percentages, with the A-F scale in place sometime in the 40s (Brookhart et al., 2016).
One way to resurrect narratives on a smaller scale by bringing them back into your classroom would be to a) look at students’ learning evidence, b) make a statement, and then c) have the student select a grade that they feel corresponds to what you wrote. For example, my Process criteria—one of two equally weighted categories/standards—was “you receive a lot of Comprehensible Input (CI).” That’s basically it; clear, and effective. When my students self-graded, though, I provided examples in a single-point rubric of what that could look like, as well as some non-examples to help 9th graders with some critical, evaluative thinking. Here’s a screenshot:
That worked well, but maybe you want to add a narrative account to the grading. To come up with a narrative from this criteria, let’s imagine a student missing assignments who doesn’t respond in class, and hardly ever asks Latin to be clarified. The statement could be “you’re missing learning evidence that could otherwise show you’re receiving CI. In class, you rarely show understanding, and hardly ever ask for Latin to be clarified.” Then, the student would select a grade on the 6-point scale (55, 65, 75, 85, 95, 100). If they say something like “85,” just follow up and talk about how missing assignments and rarely meeting expectations surely isn’t something represented by that number. If they say “75,” or “65,” that sounds about right depending on the degree of what is/isn’t happening.
This doesn’t have to be rocket science.
We already know that the more students think about how well they’re doing something, the worse they actually end up doing (Kohn, 1993), so limiting this exchange to once a quarter reduces any negative impact to to a minimum. Overall, this practice might be worth trying for teachers who want to retain a bit of control while still being in pursuit of getting scores and points mostly out of the picture.
Is self-grading effective, and worth it? All signs point to “yes.” Some research findings appear at the end of this post.
Along with the minimum 50, self-grading is another high-leverage practice often found in an ungrading approach that keeps the focus on learning. In practice, though, self-grading is often misunderstood. If anyone hears about students giving themselves a grade and imagines a kid with their head on the desk all quarter who suddenly pops up and says “I get an A,” that’s dead wrong. With a solid self-grading practice that maximizes teacher prep time and empowers students to evaluate their learning, this student would lack evidence to make such a claim. And that’s one focus of this post (i.e., making a claim). Let’s first start with what teachers have been doing—historically—to make a claim about students’ grades so we can explain self-grading…
Magister P. 