Grades That Really Inform Students and Parents

“Making High School Grades Meaningful” by Thomas Guskey in Phi Delta Kappan, May 2006 (Vol. 83, #9, p. 670-675) no e-link available

University of Kentucky professor Thomas Guskey starts off this Kappan article by profiling two students who attend the same high school and take many of the same classes:

• Michael is super-bright – but also stubborn. He gets high marks on classroom quizzes and tests, but he rarely turns in his homework and is often late to class. Although his compositions and reports are brilliant, teachers mark him down because he usually turns them in two or three days late.

• Sheila is a hard-working, dedicated student who turns in every homework assignment, comes to class on time, does extra-credit work, and attends special study sessions offered by her teachers. But despite her efforts, Sheila scores poorly on classroom quizzes and tests, and her compositions, although well-organized and always turned in on time, are superficial and lack insight.

When it’s time to take the state accountability tests, Michael scores at the highest levels and qualifies for an honors diploma. Sheila scores so low that she may qualify only for an alternative diploma. But within the high school, Michael and Sheila receive almost identical grades – Cs – and they are very close in class ranking.

Guskey says that this scenario – students with very different knowledge and skill levels getting similar grades – is common in American high schools. It’s the product of a marking system that tries to squeeze too much information into a single letter grade. Here are some of the factors that teachers use, to varying degrees, to decide what grades to give their students:

• -  Major exams or compositions

• -  Class quizzes

• -  Reports or projects

• -  Student portfolios

• -  Exhibits of student work

• -  Laboratory projects

• -  Student notebooks or journals

• -  Classroom observations

• -  Oral presentations

• -  Homework completion

• -  Homework quality

• -  Class participation

• -  Work habits and neatness

• -  Effort

• -  Attendance

• -  Punctuality submitting assignments

• -  Class behavior and attitude

• -  Progress made

Some teachers base their grades on two or three of these; others use evidence from as many as 16. When teachers try to combine multiple criteria into a single A or C or F, the result is what Guskey calls a “hodgepodge” grade that often does a poor job of communicating vital feedback to students, parents, and the community – and produces anomalous grades like Michael’s and Sheila’s.

How can this mess be straightened out? Guskey says that we need to be much clearer about the purpose of grades, and then we need to present grades in a way that is more informative to everyone.

• Getting clear on why we give grades – There are really three different messages that most teachers want to send when they give grades:

• -  Product – Telling students their summative achievement based on final exams, reports, projects, overall assessments, and other culminating demonstrations of learning.

• -  Process – Giving students feedback on how they worked in the class, based on classroom quizzes, homework, punctuality handing in assignments, class participation, or attendance.

• -  Progress – Giving students feedback on how much they gained from the learning experience – the “value added” or improvement delta over a specified period of time.

  Most teachers are loath to use only product criteria, believing this might damage some students’ motivation, self-esteem, and peer relationships. Instead, teachers combine product, process, and progress criteria in an attempt to be fair to all students. The answer to the question “Why do we give grades?” is that teachers want to tell students how they are doing in all three areas. Teachers also want to hold higher-achieving students accountable for working hard (not coasting) and avoid discouraging low-achieving students from working hard.

  But clearly there are problems when the three criteria are combined in one hodgepodge grade. How can parents, students, administrators, and community members make sense of such grades? “A grade of A, for example,” says Guskey, “may mean that the student knew what was intended before instruction began (product), did not learn as well as expected but tried very hard (process), or simply made significant improvement (progress).” Clearly, the more teachers use process and progress criteria, the more subjective grades become. And yet there are good reasons for taking these two elements of student performance into account.

  • Splitting apart the components of grades – The solution, says Guskey, is to give three separate grades for product, process, and progress. This allows teachers to give explicit feedback on all three aspects of a student’s work – and not water down the all-important mark on academic achievement. Some high schools in the U.S. have begun to split apart their grades, and the practice is quite common in Canada. The usual approach is to mark academic achievement with a percent or letter grade:

  A = advanced B = proficient C = basic

D = needs improvement

F = unsatisfactory
Grade-point averages and class rank are computed from these achievement or product grades, which are based on explicit learning goals for the course.

For process and progress grades, teachers most commonly use a 4-3-2-1 scale, backed up by a rubric. Some schools divide process grades into homework, class participation, punctuality of assignments, effort, learning progress, etc. Here’s a sample rubric for homework grades:

4 = All homework assignments completed and turned in on time.
3 = Only one or two missing or incomplete homework assignments. 2 = Three to five missing or incomplete homework assignments.
1 = Numerous missing or incomplete homework assignments.

Teachers who have tried giving multiple grades report that it actually saves time, while providing much more explicit feedback. The worry of estimating how to weight the different subcomponents for a single grade is gone, and everything is clear and explicit to students and parents. Teased-out grades also send more meaningful and helpful messages. For example, if a parent questions a C achievement grade, the teacher can point to other grades and suggest that perhaps if the child did homework, showed up on time, and participated more in class discussions, the product grade might improve.

Split-apart grades also provide college admissions officers and prospective employers more detailed information on students’ work ethic and overall status. “The transcript thus becomes a more robust document,” says Guskey, “presenting a better and more discerning portrait of students’ high-school experiences.” He also predicts that schools that decide to present grades in this way will have a much higher correlation between letter grades and students’ scores on state tests.

What’s critical, concludes Guskey, is being explicit about the criteria for product, process, and progress grades. “Teachers must be able to describe exactly how they plan to evaluate students’ achievement, attitude, effort, behavior, and progress,” he says. “Then they must clearly communicate these criteria to students, parents, and others.” No surprises, no excuses. 

From the Marshall Memo #136