In cobbling together sources for my 2025 MTA Summer Conference presentation on “Getting More from Your Formative Assessments and Grading,” I searched my blog to link posts on books I consider foundational. Somehow, I never published the post I wrote after reading Zerwin’s “Point-less” years back. Her work deserves some attention…
Continue readinggradeless
Current Reading: Flexible Deadlines ≠ “No Deadlines” (i.e., Extensions vs. Reassessing)
One concern with flexible deadlines is that in the absence of late work penalties, students will wait until the absolute last, last, last, last, LAST possible moment to turn in their assignments. The fear is that this will create a ton of extra work for the teacher, and that students will not develop time management skills since there are no consequences of a lower grade/reduced points)…because all students in traditional points-based grading systems turn in ALL of their assignments on time, right? And then they graduate and become college students who continue to turn in ALL of their assignments on time, right? And then they graduate and become employees who complete ALL of their tasks on time while being adults who get done ALL of their errands on time, right? All because of low grades and reduced points in school…right? This belief has prevailed despite the lack of empirical evidence to support it. Granted, the fear does seem to play out in some cases when flexible deadlines are misused, or there is some other assessment policy getting in the way. Nonetheless, for any change to take place, this belief must be addressed…
Continue readingSorting vs. Grading: How To Properly Use Standards
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…
Continue readingSelf-Grading: Explained
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…
Continue readingA Year Of Grading Research: 30 Articles, 8 Books, 1 Pilot Study
You’re looking at my school desk. There’s some wormwood lotion for our desert-like winter classroom conditions here in New England, some peacock feathers (why not?), one of the deck prisms my great grandfather made in his line of work, the growing collection of my ancient wisdom series obsession, and what remains of this year’s unread novella order. What’s not there is the stack of articles and research reports that had been piling up since last spring. I’ve finally read them all during my planning periods. Of course, each report itself produced at least another to read, and often two or three more, making the review process more like attacking a hydra, but those are now tucked away in a “To Read/Review” folder in Drive. My desk is clear, and that’s enough of an accomplishment for me while teaching full-time. Aside from the reports, I’ve read 8 books, too:
- Hacking Assessment 1.0 & 2.0 (Sackstein, 2015 & 2022)
- Ungrading (Blum, 2020)
- Point-less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More Meaningful Grading (Zerwin, 2020)
- Proficiency-Based Instruction: Rethinking Lesson Design and Delivery (Twadell, et al. 2019)
- Embedded Formative Assessment (Wiliam, 2018)
- Assessment 3.0 (Barnes, 2015)
- Grading and Reporting Student Progress in an Age of Standards (Trumbull & Farr, 2000)
- Punished By Rewards (Kohn, 1993)
In case you’re wondering and were to ask for my current top five, which includes Grading for Equity (Feldman, 2018) that I read a couple years ago, it’d have to be Ungrading, Pointless, Punished by Rewards, and Hacking Assessment. Beyond the books, this year I also completed a small-scale pilot study, which I’ll be presenting at the CANE Annual Meeting. While not specific to Latin teaching, a case could easily be made that *any* grading research can apply to *every* content area. In fact, it’s somewhat remarkable what researchers have found, yet the profession just doesn’t seem to know. And there’s consensus. I’m not prepared to make sweeping claims and cite anything specific, but my impression of the consensus so far is:
- Grading does more harm than most people think. It’s one of the few relics of antiquated education still practiced today en masse, in pretty much the same way, too. Considering everything that’s changed for educators in the past two, five, 10, 20, and 50 years even, now realize that the current dominant grading paradigm predates all of that. The fact that most grading systems are still based on the 0-100 scale with a “hodgepodge” of assessment products that are averaged together to arrive at a course grade is nothing short of astonishing.
- Schools with a more contemporary (i.e., 30-year old) approach that claim to have standards-based learning (SBL) and grading (SBG) systems are actually still in their infancy, with some not really implementing the systems with much fidelity at all, thus, giving a lot of SBG-derived or SBG-adjacent practices a bad name. It’s mostly teacher/school misinterpretation and poor rollouts of these practices that render the efforts ineffective, not the practices themselves.
- Gradelessly ungrading is probably the only sure bet for fixing the mess that grades have gotten us into. If you’re putting all your time and effort into SBG, I recommend that the second you understand the basics, see if you can skip right on over to a) using portfolios, b) getting rid of all those points, and c) having students self-assess & self-grade just once at the end of the term. You’re gonna need to provide a bit of feedback with this kind of system, too, so maybe try Barnes’ SE2R model.
How To Ungrade Gradelessly In Two Steps
I’ve been told that going gradeless and ungrading are different. While that’s certainly possible, I haven’t seen a clear difference so far. That is, between blogs, Facebook groups, books, and the rare research report under either term (plus more), the similarities stand out way more than any notable differences. There’s quite a bit of consensus among even the most discerning of grading systems related to reducing or eliminating grades. Even a few systems that fall under a generic “standards-based” approach have basically the same features as those that fall under the “gradeless/ungraded.” Whatever you want to call these approaches, this post will show you how to get rid of all the points, scores, and assignment grades while keeping the focus on learning. There are two basic steps:
- Have students put all their classwork, assignments, and assessments into a portfolio.
- Students self-grade, citing evidence from the portfolio.
Grades: Going, Going, Gone!
Here’s a quick report having gone nearly 100% gradeless. I say nearly because at my school, the halfway point of the quarter (i.e., progress reports) requires a grade. So, as of right now there’s a course grade that shows up. This practice isn’t quite in line with a true ungrading approach that would have a grade only at the very end of the grading period. I’m nearly there, and have a feeling this is as far as I’ll go, too. But that’s not a problem. There’s already been a big difference in the most important areas, and I expect things to get even better.
Continue reading
Magister P. 