Liberating grades/liberatory assessment

Interchange, 2008

Assessment of students' learning in school is deeply implicated in teaching for social justice. Yet classroom assessment is neglected relative to other aspects of curriculum and pedagogy in the literature on teaching for social justice. Some books have a relatively clear theory of anti-oppression education at their core but do not provide details about the links between assessment and their anti-oppression theory, while others provide a more detailed view of assessment practices but do not specify precisely how particular assessment strategies either promote or hinder antioppression education. This article provides a theoretical framework that spotlights key links between teaching for social justice and classroom assessment. To illustrate these connections, we draw on guided group discussions with ten high school social studies and English teachers, interested in pursuing professional development in this area. We conceptualize assessment as a set of institutional processes with the potential either to inhibit or nurture the development of young people as well as their capacity for selfdetermination. We analyze: (a) how teachers, through various assessment practices, can attempt to enable equitable relations within and beyond the classroom; and (b) performance standards aimed at helping teachers assess their students' progress toward becoming more socially responsible and, ultimately, more selfdetermining. We conclude that even as teachers struggle to enact more socially just assessment practices, they need to communicate clearly with students and parents about what constitutes equitable assessment and what institutional practices, by contrast, sow seeds of self-doubt and lead to destructive labeling, ranking, and gate keeping.

Critical Question in Education Journal, 2019

This study examined how teachers' grading impacts students' socio-cultural notions of value and worth. At issue was whether teachers can grade in ways that foster democratic ideals; whether authentic democratic environments can truly exist in public school classrooms ; and whether or not traditional grading supersedes learning in favor of capitalistic interests. Findings indicated that teachers who champion democratic instruction can use their grading practices to eliminate the need for students to accumulate capital as a means of self-achievement, and can refocus classroom priorities on critical thinking, civility, and promoting a sense of community. One implication of these findings may be that values learned through being assessed and graded in school manifest themselves in students' social capacities such as civic responsibility, community engagement, and future employment .

Online Submission, 2006

Few educators receive any formal training in assigning marks to students' work or in grading students' performance and achievement. As a result, when required to do so, most simply reflect back on what was done to them and then, based on those experiences, try to develop policies and practices that they believe are fair, equitable, defensible, and educationally sound. Their personal experiences as students, therefore, may have significant influence on the policies and practices they choose to employ. This study explored educators' recollections of their experiences as students with grading. Data were gathered through questionnaires administered to 320 elementary, middle, and secondary school educators. Questionnaire items asked respondents to describe their most

2017

Variations of the question, "How are you doing in school?" are among those most frequently posed by adults to students (Reeves, 2004). Grades represent the primary source of that information; indeed, Olson (1995) called grades "one of the most sacred traditions in American education" (p. 24). There is so much trust in the messages conveyed by grades that they have gone without challenge and are resistant to change (Marzano, 2000). Yet reporting only a single mark for each subject may be insufficient to answer meaningful questions about student progress (Guskey, 2001). Bailey and McTighe (1996) noted that when clear responses to these questions are not available, grading's other purposes cannot be effectively carried out.Marzano (2000) has pointed out that the current grading system in America is over a century old and lacks a body of supporting research. He also noted problems such as the arbitrary weighting of assessments and merging of diverse knowledge and...

2009

W hen I began analyzing my grading practices several years ago, I was embarrassed by what I found. Although I claimed I wanted my students to think more critically and engage with the world more fully, my grading practices communicated a different message. Students received so much credit for completing work, meeting deadlines, and following through with responsibilities that these factors could lift a student’s semester grade to a B or an A, even as other indicators suggested that the student had learned little. My grading practices communicated clearly that, despite my claims to the contrary, students’ willingness and ability to comply mattered most. I’ve observed that other teachers approach grading similarly. Recently I heard from a parent who, after homeschooling for several years, had enrolled her son in a public school. After just three weeks, her son was failing his language arts class because he had failed to bring a book to read for the daily sustained silent reading time ...

The role played by the grading process in education is ubiquitous and self-defeating. Every teacher knows the dilemmas faced at grading and/or report time. In this article I will interrogate the grading process in critical depth and will propose an alternative way of evaluating academic work. I have theorised about the corrosive impact of competition in education and in everyday life, showing how the competitive ethic is counter-productive and corrosive, and that it is deeply implicated in the maintenance of regimes of exploitation and of global capitalism. I suggested there that if we are to take seriously the impending environmental and economic crises that are threatening civilisation, we needed to abandon the competitive ethic in education as a matter of extreme urgency. In addition, I have elsewhere investigated the role played by Behaviouristic ideologies in the process of student evaluation and have attempted to demonstrate how these ideologies are manifest in extrinsic reward systems which do not address issues of “deep learning”. I have suggested in contrast that these extrinsic reward systems are responsible for the formation of student identities that are characterised by quiescence, conformity and subservience to authority, and that, together with the ethos of competition they constitute perhaps a pervasive obstacle to environmental, social and cultural transformation and healing. The implication of all of this is that at all levels of Education we need urgently to introduce systems of non-competitive learning that are based upon intrinsic, rather than extrinsic reward systems. In this essay, I will describe some of the issues that need to be addressed in the creation of such a system, and will briefly outline examples from teaching practice in higher education that have been tried and tested . These projects were carried out using the so-called Ward Method of creative consensus building which has also been described elsewhere. There, I advocated and described the basis for a methodology to be used in the context of critical pedagogy praxis. Some authors have argued against the use or application of method in that context, maintaining that it stifles the free flow of critical discourse and circumscribes possible dialogical challenges to the form and content of the learning encounter. I have argued on the contrary that the use of an appropriate method can be the basis for stimulating and sustaining just such critiques in a creative project. The essential issue in critical pedagogy remains one of power, and as long as the methodology in question requires and ensures that power is distributed evenly among the teacher-learner participants, then there is nothing to fear and much to gain from its application. In addition to the power that flows and ebbs throughout any successful group praxis, there remains another, essential, seat of power – perhaps the most powerful and significant that must be addressed for transformative education to take place – the power to evaluate, judge and grade the project outcomes and the work of individual participants. In a normative educational setting, this power resides exclusively with the teacher, and his or her power to grade is fiercely defended by the institutions of education in which they work – from kindergarten to University. In most educational institutions in the modern world it is expressly forbidden for students to evaluate their own work, or for teachers to allow students to influence the grading process. This is largely because educational standards are set with the intention of providing willing workers with assessed minimum qualifications to fit the employment needs and opportunities in the “outside” world – a world that requires recognisable, measurable and risk-free standards. Despite the modern progressive rhetoric about educating to realise personal potential, the real and ultimate goal of educational evaluations is to provide standardised graduates to fit jobs in commerce and industry.

Routledge eBooks, 2017

The thesis of this chapter is that college-and career-ready students must be active agents in their own learning. Skills related to student agency are developed in assessment contexts, specifically through formative assessment practices, modeled at first in teacher-student interactions, and subsequently applied by students themselves in self-regulation and peer-to-peer feedback (Clark, 2012; Cowie, 2012). Agentive self-regulation is developed in classrooms where the skill is valued by teachers, time is set aside for its development, and a classroom culture is created that forwards its emergence (Paris & Paris, 2001). Assessment has two fundamental purposes: summative and formative (National Research Council [NRC], 2001). The key difference between them is how assessment information is used-either to guide and advance learning during the process of learning or to obtain evidence of what students have learned after a period of teaching and learning, typically after several weeks, at the end of a semester, or annually. While results of assessment for summative purposes are often used beyond the classroom (e.g., accountability, making decisions about student placement, certification, curriculum, and programs), formative assessment rests entirely with teachers and students in order to advance learning day by day in their classrooms (Heritage, 2010, 2013; Klenowski, 2009; Swaffield, 2011). Notably, formative assessment is not just for teachers; students are actively involved in the assessment process. A key practice in formative assessment is for students to monitor their progress against established learning goals and performance criteria, to compare a current learning state with the goal and criteria, and then to make judgments about how they can attain their goals (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Sadler, 1989). The student role in formative assessment is consistent with contemporary perspectives on learning that acknowledge the importance of learner agency, understood as the ability to actively manage one's own learning through setting goals, monitoring progress toward those goals, and adapting learning approaches to optimize learning (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). If learner agency is to be supported, the assessment relationship between teacher and students must change from vertical to horizontal. Most often, assessment operates in a vertical relationship, as for example, when students take a test at the end of a period of instruction and are just informed of their results, or when they are assigned a grade. In formative assessment, the relationship becomes a horizontal one, where students receive feedback about their learning from teachers, peers, and their own self-monitoring process, so that they can make judgments about the actions they need to take to advance learning. This chapter examines how, when the assessment relationship is changed in formative assessment, students can be empowered to be active agents in their own learning. The first section provides background on formative assessment, which is followed by a discussion of the "spirit" and the "letter" of formative assessment that has direct bearing on student agency. The chapter then addresses feedback as a core practice of formative assessment and of student

Education Research Highlights in Mathematics, Science and Technology 2020, 2020

Researchers in education have made grade progress supporting all students’ learning by providing effective practices. Based on the efforts, teachers’ practices of teaching have shifted from teacher-centered instructions to student-centered instructions. However, this shift in teachers’ instructional practices is not adequately reflected in teachers’ assessment practices. It is well-established that assessment and learning are interwined. Besides, how is assessment carried out and what is being assessed inform student learning. Therefore, assessment practices are essential to engage students in deep learning and closing the achievement gap between diverse students. Using assessment processes to support student learning rather than just providing grades is conceptualized as formative assessment or assessment for learning in literature.

Students’ grades are altered for a variety of reasons in educational systems worldwide. While there has been considerable research on teachers’ grading practices, very little is known about the circumstances and reasons for grade alteration. This article closely examines eight instances where experienced teachers altered or were asked to alter students’ grades in secondary schools in Ontario, Canada. Essentially, the teachers’ responses were based on: a) the need for compassion; b) the desire to provide students with opportunity; and c) the intent to teach life lessons. This work highlights the moral complexity of classroom assessment, and it aims to provoke further discussion on the ethics of grade alteration.

Journal of Education in Black Sea Region, 2016

The goal of the article is to find out the challenges of grading in student self and peer-assessment from teachers' and students' perspectives and to suggest ways to cope with them. Peer and self-assessment have accumulated a great significance in the last few decades related to vast application of the cognitive approach and the attempts of making students active agents of educational process rather than passive recipients of information. The overwhelming majority of modern educators believe that these concepts are the cornerstones of modern pedagogy and contributes to the promotion of learner autonomy to a great extent. Therefore, they lead to an improved learning environment and better learning outcomes. However, the concepts have some challenges when it comes to the final stage-grading. Depending on the social, cultural, and educational background, grading of the peer and self-assessment may be accompanied by hesitation and uncertainty as well as subjectivity and lack of reliability. In this work, the issue was investigated from two perspectives, teacher and student, to find out how the stakeholders perceive the problem and what can be done to cope with challenge of grading in self and peer-assessment. The research uses a questionnaire consisting of 20 questions with participation of 31 teachers and 100 students at Qafqaz University, Baku, Azerbaijan, to come to the conclusion about the issue addressing the challenge. The work is believed to be useful for educators to apply self and peer-assessment effectively, and also it can be a useful source for further research in the field.