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…

Classroom Assessment
There cannot be grading research without assessment research. Period. That is, grades don’t just materialize out of thin air. Even if the criteria for an assignment is done/not done, an assessment still takes place. One result of that assessment is whether, or how grades come into play (e.g., ungraded, or graded on basis of 100/0, points/no points, or A/F, or perhaps labeled as missing, incomplete, etc.). Of course, assessments don’t have to be particularly good, and some are downright awful, but the point is that they must occur if we’re talking about grading or ungrading. Therefore, I’ve started my grading research by reviewing studies on classroom assessment. These studies serve as foundational texts that supply a theoretical framework for what classroom assessment even is. Broadly speaking, according to Shepard (2019), classroom assessment is “intended to aid directly in the learning process (not merely to measure learning outcomes)…[it] includes formative assessment used to adapt instruction and help students improve, and summative assessment used to assign grades or otherwise certify student achievement” (p. 184). Since formative assessment is where there learning takes place, that’s our starting point.

Formative Assessment
The theoretical framework for formative assessment goes well beyond common definitions and descriptions like “assessment for learning,” or “assessment during the learning process.” I’ve used these myself, and they’re not wrong. There’s just more out there, and what’s out there should help teachers and students. Granted, we’re going back 35 years for this framework, which partly infuriates me since I began studying teaching 12 years ago and none of this was discussed in my M.A.T. program, or in any of the schools I worked in afterwards. Surely, this would’ve helped teaching and learning if the profession had caught up by then?! Alas.

There were two main sources for a framework that kept popping up: Sadler (1989) and Black & Wiliam (1998). Sadler’s theory begins with a definition: “formative assessment is concerned with how judgments about the quality of student responses (performances, pieces, or works) can be used to shape and improve the student’s competence by short-circuiting the randomness and inefficiency of trial-and-error learning” (p. 120). For Sadler, formative assessment relies on certain feedback conditions: “the learner has to (a) possess a concept of the standard (or goal, or reference level) being aimed for, (b) compare the actual (or current) level of performance with the standard, and (c) engage in appropriate action which leads to some closure of the gap” (p. 121). Note that this is a framework that doesn’t really apply to correct/incorrect assessments, which has pedagogical implications right away. Teachers who give an exit ticket based on correct/incorrect accuracy won’t be giving the kind of feedback that Sadler was studying under his formative assessment framework. Thus, teachers might not see much improvement from what Sadler suggests because they’re only assessing correct/incorrect, and students might not improve much because they’re only being told that their work is correct/incorrect. As we’ll see, providing feedback is a major component of formative assessment across researchers.

Black & Wiliam (1998) reviewed 250 research articles on formative assessment, which they define as “all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by their students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged” (pp. 7-8). Unfortunately, the concept of formative assessment across the profession has been reduced to something like short quizzes, exit tickets, and classwork, which is what teachers have done in all the schools I’ve worked in. It’s quite common. This reduction is also mirrored in grading when teachers set up categories of assessment type rather than anything useful for learning. For example, Tests, Classwork, Participation, Homework, blah blah blah is really only telling kids how well they take tests or how often they do homework, not whether they understand Unit 1 any better than Unit 2, etc. Similarly, thinking formative assessments as particular types of assessments misses the mark, especially when feedback to improve learning isn’t given. In the past, I’ve advocated for conceptualizing the difference between formative and summative as having more to do with timing, rather than type (e.g., the same test can be used as either depending on when it’s given). This is true to an extent, though if there’s no way to improve, or no way to overwrite a grade—regardless of timing or type—you’ve got a summative. These researchers go further and get us thinking more in terms of function rather than anything else. Asking “what’s this assessment used for?” will result in whether it’s formative or summative.

Brookhart (2004) would agree with Black & Wiliam, stating “formative and summative assessments describe two assessment functions. That is, they describe the use of assessment information” (p. 6). She would also agree with those authors and Sadler that feedback as integral part of formative assessment: “written feedback is particularly good for formative assessment” (p. 8), and “every assignment students do should receive some sort of feedback (p. 11). Shepard (2019) joins the chorus, also stating the importance of feedback: “feedback is a construct fundamental to formative assessment. Practice without feedback does not further learning, and thus feedback, from self-reflection or from others, is essential for learning” (p. 188). So, your quiz might be formative if it includes feedback, but only if it includes feedback. Now it’s just a matter of what kind of feedback…

Feedback
Shepard, Sadler, Black & Wiliam, and Brookhart are certainly not all talking about “good job” praise. For example, Sadler writes of “feedback loops” (p. 120), and uses Ramaprasad’s 1983 definition that feedback is “information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some way.” If information is merely recorded, or passed along, the student can’t do much to improve. Grading is one form of recording information. It’s one-way. [Feedback] loop open, yet case closed. Many schools would tell you that one purpose of grades is “feedback for the learner and their families,” also quite common. According to these assessment scholars, however, that’s untrue. Black et al. (2004) wrote in a follow-up to the 1998 article that “research experiments have established that, while student learning can be advanced by feedback through comments, the giving of numerical scores or grades has a negative effect” (p. 13). Grades more likely exist as an unchangeable judgment, not something used to improve learning.

So, feedback is crucial. Brookhart warns against one-way commentary, and suggests including dialogue: “oral feedback can be helpful, too…[it] leaves room for student choice in the improvement. I once had a student turn in a report making only the changes I had noted. That was my fault! Instead of writing feedback, I did copyediting. The student did not learn anything further about the qualities of a good report” (p. 11). Sadler’s conditions for feedback, once again, are that “the learner has to (a) possess a concept of the standard (or goal, or reference level) being aimed for, (b) compare the actual (or current) level of performance with the standard, and (c) engage in appropriate action which leads to some closure of the gap” (p. 121). Black & Wiliam focus on self-assessment as contributing to (a) and (b), which had considerable effects across many studies that they reviewed (i.e., produced gains), going as far as to state “self-assessment by the student is not an interesting option or luxury; it has to be seen as essential” (pp. 47-48). In terms of feedback, they state “the two concepts of formative assessment and of feedback overlap strongly” (p. 47), and cite Sadler’s definitions above. In other words, we have consensus. All these researchers are getting at the same thing: formative assessment, feedback, and self-assessment. This might be why I had such good results having students self-assess and self-grade (because those are different). By consistently (constantly?) conveying expectations (a), and in writing rationales (b), students often came up with a plan for what to do next to improve (c). This research supports the idea that having students self-assess more is going to help teaching and learning. My 9th grade students were able to do so with considerable support at first, but that’s not always the case. Sadler writes that while the ultimate goal is self-assessment, or what he calls “self-monitoring,” feedback might have to start out being provided by the teacher. If so, you can accomplish this with Mark Barnes’ SE2R model before having students do more of the self-assessing:

Summarize (e.g., “You wrote a one-page summary of the topic.”)
Explain (e.g., “You defined the similarities between X and Y. I didn’t see any statements to support your claim, though. Do you see them?”)
Redirect (e.g., “Add supporting statements and resubmit.”)
Resubmit (e.g., “When you finish, send me an email.”)

Overall, these texts are providing me with a solid foundation of classroom assessment before getting into grading. As of right now, it looks like most assessments deemed “formative” by teachers likely are summative, or just won’t have benefits of feedback shown in the studies (supporting one of those blog post ideas I had last fall), and that involving students in the feedback process (i.e., not just writing comments and being done with it) is paramount for learning to occur as practices move from teacher-provided feedback, to student self-monitoring.

References

Barnes, M. (2015). Assessment 3.0. Corwin, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483386904

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and Classroom Learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969595980050102

Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., Wiliam, D. (2004). Working inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(1), 8–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170408600105

Brookhart, S. M. (2004). Assessment theory for college classrooms. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2004(100), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.165

Sadler, D. R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18(2), 119–144. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00117714

Shepard, L. A. (2019). Classroom Assessment to Support Teaching and Learning. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 683(1), 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716219843818