Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Ken O'Connor. Ken is an independent consultant known internationally for his work in helping educators communicate about student achievement with grades that are calm, consistent, accurate, learning-focused, and meaningful. He's the author of numerous books on grading, including the Repair Kit for Grading, 15 Fixes for Broken Grades, now in its third edition, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_01:

Ken, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:44] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin.

[00:45] SPEAKER_01:

It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm excited to talk about this topic because it's of course a perennial topic. It's not always the hottest topic of the day, but it's one that we deal with constantly as educators, how to assess student learning, how to report on student learning. And there is a lot of, you know, just kind of tradition, kind of craft knowledge, practice that maybe no one's even teaching, but that we all kind of grew up with. You know, there's a hundred point scale. There are the letter grades.

[01:10]

There are, you know, there's waiting assignments. There are all these things that we just kind of inherited as students and then as teachers that it's sometimes difficult to rethink. And you are one of the primary thinkers and re-thinkers on this topic. So to start things off, what do you see as some of the primary challenges and problems that educators face with grading, especially when it comes to that kind of inherited craft knowledge, those traditional grading practices.

[01:35] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right about the traditional practices. It's not something that most teachers were taught about. They didn't get anything on it in their pre-service training. And in most cases, probably not much in service, at least until relatively recently. So it is something that we just do the way it was done to us or the way we were mentored early in our career.

[01:56]

And I think that creates a lot of problems because in the last probably 30 years, I would say, we have moved to a much deeper understanding of assessment. I think up until about 30 years ago, for the most part, we focused on assessment of learning, getting scores that were going to be part of grades. But starting in the early 90s with people like Rick Stiggins, we started to understand that assessment has a much better use so that we can use assessment for learning. We can gather information about student achievement that tells us how they're doing, and then teachers can make appropriate adjustments. And students can make appropriate adjustments to improve their learning and that we should see that as the primary purpose of classroom assessment.

[02:48]

Now, we're still going to have to have grades. So then on top of that, we have to say, well, OK, if our primary focus is on assessment for learning, how are we going to determine grades? And I think, as you said, there are a whole lot of traditions that have led to grades not meeting those four conditions that you mentioned. consistency, accuracy, learning focus, and meaningfulness. And so it requires a real rethinking. And maybe the number one thing for me is the use of percentages.

[03:23]

The number one thing change I would like to see is the complete elimination of percentages from classroom assessment because they are what I think causes a focus on grades rather than learning because people focus on whether it's 1% or 0.5% difference and they really have no meaning on their own. I mean, if we say that something's 80%, in some situations, that's really good or almost impossible, for example, hitting in Major League Baseball. But we don't want a pilot only landing a plane successfully 80% of the time. So percentages on their own have no meaning. It depends on the difficulty or the importance of... And so, for example, we see across North America...

[04:10]

that 80% can be anything from an A to a C. And I think another problem with percentages is that people think they're precise. But it's a false precision because nobody can tell the difference between 59% and 60%, which is often the cut for pass-fail, or 89% and 90%, which is often the cut for between an A and a B. But if we move to proficiency levels, a limited number of levels that we describe clearly Then we have grades that have real meaning. And we also know from reams and reams of research, going back to the 1910s, that even when teachers are trained to use grading scales or rubrics, when they use percentages, they are incredibly inconsistent.

[05:00]

A group of teachers scoring an essay will vary for maybe 40, 50%. But if they're only working with four or five or even maybe six or seven levels, there will be far greater consistency.

[05:16] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Ken, I'm thinking back to when I became a teacher about 20 years ago and got my own classroom. We got computers, I think, midway. I didn't have a computer when I started. We got computers midway through the year. And the computers came with grading software. And I have no idea which gradebook software it was.

[05:31]

Probably doesn't even exist anymore. But it, of course, did support those percentage grades, right? Everything is 100 points unless you change it, and you can change the weight. And the grading software was, I think, pretty powerful. But I have the feeling looking back on it that it was kind of the situation like, you know, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when it's easy to put in percentages, then it's easy to conduct all of your assessment on that basis.

[05:58]

Talk to us a little bit, if you would, about the role of standards and objectives and mastery as a kind of a missing piece in that thinking about grading.

[06:07] SPEAKER_00:

Grading software has definitely, or for a period of time, led to a real focus on percentages and simply calculation. But that doesn't really fit with standards or competencies in the idea of proficiency, which is about levels of proficiency. In a pure system, it would only be two levels, because ultimately that's what we're concerned about, proficiency or not proficient. But generally, we seem to want to have more levels. And so that is what should be being recorded. And for a long time, that wasn't possible in software, grading software.

[06:46]

I think in the last probably... 10 years there has been a big change and now even the the ones that are attached to sis's have much greater flexibility quite a number of the what i call the big ones have the capability to do standards-based grading and there are also a number of standalone programs that do that and do it well and i think it's getting better all the time so i look at sort of as an excuse or that's what the gradebook does, or that's what the software does, used to be an excuse in a sense, because that was true. but it's no longer the case. We now have software that really will do standards-based grading that's focused on proficiency mastery.

[07:33] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit about the audience for this information, if we could, because I think one of the challenges of changing anything about our approach to grading and deviating from the tradition of, you know, numerical grades and percentages and things like that is that parents often expect, you know, a numerical grade and a 90 or above is an A and anything else is just confusing. And, you know, Possibly sacrilege to communicate in any other way. So what kinds of information should we be communicating to parents via grades? And how can we ensure that they understand and like receiving that information and don't run us out of town as soon as we try to change things up?

[08:12] SPEAKER_00:

We should be communicating information to parents that provides information real information about their child as a learner. I mean, simply getting a report card that has the subjects listed with a percentage grade really doesn't tell anything of great value. What is of value is something that says, these are the learning goals, the standards, the outcomes, whatever we choose to call them. Here is how your child is doing. They're strong on some of them. They're okay on some, and maybe they have some where they're not so good.

[08:47]

That's the useful information, knowing where the strengths are, knowing where the areas for improvement are. Now, this is a huge change from what has been done traditionally. And so I think schools, districts have to do a lot of parent education. They have to explain why we have changed. And I think one of the ways to do that is to emphasize the mission and vision statements, because they are very clear, usually, about what the school is about. And the school doesn't say that it's about precision in grading.

[09:23]

The school says, you know, if we look at current mission and vision statements, they're all about lifelong learners and things like that. So I think to me, that's the first step. But the other one is pointing out or helping them understand the changes that have taken place that have led us to do things differently in school. And if I may use a quote from the book that I think drives this home, it's a quote from Professor Christopher Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And he said this to a panel in 1997. quote, the most dangerous experiment we can conduct with our children is to keep schooling the same at a time when every other aspect of our society is dramatically changing.

[10:09]

So things have changed dramatically. The economy is completely different. Society is different. We know so much more. We know so much more about the brain, about how children learn. We know, as I said before, so much more about how we can use assessment for learning well if all those things have changed why would we keep doing things the same and i what i try to do when i work with parents is ask them to think about things that have changed since they were in high school and whether they would really like it to be what it was when they were in high school and One example that I use is what's changed with your dentist.

[10:50]

I mean, if we look at the equipment that dentists have now, compared with even 10 years ago, their ability to have data about and use computers and all of that stuff is just, I mean, it's night and day. And so I ask parents to think about things like that. And then I think it helps them to say, well, yes, so much is different than when I was in school. So it makes sense that In all sorts of areas, schools are doing things differently.

[11:15] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Ken, I'm conscious of our role as educational leaders. You know, often we're setting expectations, we're upholding expectations around grading, and those might become out of date in some cases. So as part of your set of recommendations for how to fix broken grades, what are some things that educational leaders can do differently as far as the expectations they set for teachers? And perhaps what expectations do we need to abandon because they're not consistent with what we know now is best practice?

[11:45] SPEAKER_00:

I think apart from what I said earlier about abandoning percentages, I think the number one thing that administrators need to abandon is requiring teachers to have X number of grades in their grade book every week. And I often see requirements for one, two, or even three. And this I think is a complete misunderstanding of the type of information that we're collecting and what should go into the determination of grades. We basically have three purposes for assessment, diagnostic, formative, and summative. Diagnostic assessments, what we do before instruction, which is really important so that teachers know where their kids are. Then there's formative assessment, the assessment that happens while learning is going on, the assessment information that teachers and students use to make their adjustments.

[12:38]

And then there are summative assessments where towards the end of a learning sequence we have some sort of an assessment that which we use to evaluate where the students are at that point in time now traditionally i don't think very often has diagnostic assessment found its way into grades but traditionally everything that kids do formative or summative has found their way into grades but formative assessment happens when kids don't know. I mean, the whole purpose of learning is to move from not knowing to knowing. And so to include data on formative assessments when students don't know, when they haven't had the benefit of teaching, makes no sense to me. And so the only evidence that should be going into the determination of grades is evidence from summative assessments.

[13:31]

And summative assessments should happen relatively infrequently. We need to have a teaching learning cycle, a teaching learning assessment cycle, where we teach, we do formative assessment, find out where the kids are, reteach, relearn. And maybe that cycle, you know, takes two or three cycles. And then we do summative assessment. So I wouldn't want to put, you know, exact proportions on it, but I would suggest that maybe it's sort of a 90-10 relationship. which means we don't have, or we shouldn't have a lot of scores for grades because it's only the summative assessment evidence only after they've had the benefit of the teaching and being able to engage in the teaching learning process.

[14:15]

that the information that we collect should be in grades. This means that, for example, in a quarter, probably there shouldn't be any more than three pieces of evidence, hopefully for each of the standards that have been focused on in that quarter. And so to require one or two grades per week means that teachers have to put formative assessment in, which is incredibly unfair to students. The comparison that I make is think about sports. In sports, every contest that we've ever seen starts 00. Nobody has gone out and evaluated the quality of practice.

[14:54]

But basically, that's what we're doing when we include formative assessment in grades. Every sporting contest starts 00. When it's time for summative assessment, the kids should be at 00. It shouldn't be that some have an advantage because they knew it before we started teaching. And those that didn't have a clue but really learned, really went from not knowing and understanding, basically had their grades reduced because they got poor scores on formative assessments at the beginning of the process.

[15:25] SPEAKER_01:

Right. When we were still in the process of teaching them. So, you know, why would we expect them to have mastered content that we've not finished teaching?

[15:31] SPEAKER_00:

And there's one other thing I'd like to add to that. And I said, you know, there shouldn't be formative scores in grades. I believe and I think many other people believe that there shouldn't even be scores on formative assessments because both intuitively from research, I think we know that if a teacher puts both a score and descriptive feedback on a formative assessment, most students will ignore the descriptive feedback. They look at the score and say, oh, I got a good score. Fine. Bad score.

[16:03]

And equally, they just put it aside. But if we only give them descriptive feedback, which is what helps them to learn, then that is what is valuable. And so teachers are actually wasting their time from a learning point of view when they put a score and descriptive feedback on anything that students do. So basically, we need to make a choice. If it's formative assessment, it should get descriptive feedback only. If it's a summative assessment, it gets a score, which becomes part of grades.

[16:35]

I mean, you can also give feedback if you want, but depending on how much it's an end, it's not terribly valuable.

[16:44] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and it seems like we're really talking about an entirely different set of implications for the student and for the student's parents to come from those grades. And I think a lot of times what parents are looking for is, based on this report card, do I need to yell at my kid? Does my kid need to get their act together? Do they need to work harder? Do they need to pay attention more? Do I need to get them a tutor?

[17:04]

And it seems that the type of grading that you're talking about lends itself to entirely different implications. So if we are reporting on mastery of the content standards, what are some of the implications for parents if they're not that kind of binary, is my kid working hard enough or not? What do they actually do with that information that we report when we get this right?

[17:26] SPEAKER_00:

Hopefully, all of the information they're getting, if it's good information about learning, provides them with information on which they can have meaningful conversations with their child. I mean, you cannot have a very meaningful conversation about 70%. You can have a meaningful conversation about something that says, and I'm going to oversimplify it, in English language arts, you're good at reading and writing, but you're not very good at vocabulary and listening, speaking and viewing. I mean, I'm being a little silly when I put it like that, but you know what I mean. It would be much more specific than that. And so I think there are two things about that.

[18:06]

Most of the software programs now allow for words. So there can be comments there. In the grade book, teachers can, they can record formative assessments, but ideally that, in my view, that would be done with checks and pluses or minuses, done, not done, done well, done okay, done poorly. So teachers with the parent portals, parents would be able to see that. But I think even more powerful, which goes along with it, and some of the grading programs have this, some is standalone, is digital portfolios. I mean, I really believe that schools should be using digital portfolios so it's easy to share with parents examples of students' learning evidence, whether it's formative or summative.

[18:52]

And that is where we get... That's where we get the real value because they're actually seeing the samples of student learning evidence. And I mean, I think it's something that still happens quite a lot at the elementary level. Doesn't happen much at middle school and high school where lots of things used to go home.

[19:09]

Well, putting it in a digital portfolio. It can go home. And so, for example, there's one school division in Alberta now that does what they call real-time reporting. Both scores for summative assessments, information on how the kids are doing on formative assessments, plus a digital portfolio is updated on an ongoing basis. So parents can go in at any time. And the only report card that school district does is a summary, a fairly traditional report card at the end of the year.

[19:44]

And I mean, I think that's really taking advantage of the technology that's available to us now and the way that increasingly people are accessing information. I mean, now people are mostly, it seems to me, accessing information on their phones, on tablets, So why don't we use that in the communication we're doing to parents?

[20:05] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And it, you know, as a parent, if I think about the papers that my kids bring home from school, they just finished fifth and third grade, you know, the report card, as you said, leads to almost no discussion. You know, it's just numbers. They are what they are. I don't have any follow-up questions to ask the kids about their numerical grades, but I love seeing their work, seeing their writing, seeing their science posters, you know, seeing the actual work they're producing. And I think you're absolutely right.

[20:32]

As kids get older and get out of elementary school into middle and high school, parents see less and less of their work and have less and less rich information about how their kids are doing. You know, school really becomes kind of a black box to us. So I love that suggestion of digital portfolios and making that work that students are doing on a daily basis more visible to parents.

[20:52] SPEAKER_00:

Through all of that and talking about your kids, you talked about their work. I really believe we need to make a change in our language. and not talk about work, that students are either engaging in learning activities and they're providing evidence of learning. And I think if that was the language we used, it sets a totally different climate to everything that's happening in school, but especially to assessment. I'm not all that hopeful that it's going to become what people do, but it's a message I'm trying to get across.

[21:24] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Ken, as people review your book and read about the 15 fixes for broken grades, I think one of the challenges that we can anticipate facing in making any change to how we approach grading is is the possible accusation that we're going soft on kids, that we're going easy and we're not going to prepare them for college. And I feel like we inherit a lot of our practices and expectations for grading by thinking about what the worst college professors will do. And we think, well, we got to get them ready for that. So we're just going to use terrible practices as well. How can we think about those issues of, you know, kind of preparing kids for the next level while updating our practices so that we're doing things that make more sense?

[22:01] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I would certainly say that the type of grading that I'm advocating is actually hard, not soft, because it means grades are about achievement and achievement only. They're not inflated by compliance and being a nice kid and bringing in food for the food drive or so that actually the grades are an accurate reflection of student achievement. So everybody has much better information about grades. where kids really are. I mean, I think you've only got to look at two things to illustrate that. One is the horrendous first year failure rate in college and university.

[22:38]

And second is the high percentage of students who have to take remedial courses in English and math. So basically, I think the K-12 system does a good job of getting kids into college and but it doesn't do a good job of preparing them to be successful in college. Now, obviously a lot are, but sadly a lot aren't. And I think that's because they've been so focused on grades and basically they've been spoon-fed and they've followed a set of rules and guidelines. They haven't developed as self-directed, independent, reflective learners. And when you...

[23:16]

use the 15 fixes or move to more effective grading practices. A huge focus of what we're doing is developing students as self assessors, developing them as reflective learners. And that's what students need or people need, kids need to be successful in whatever they do beyond high school. And I'd just like to add one thing to that. It's also important to recognize that, you know, you talked about the worst ever professor. Things are changing dramatically at the college level.

[23:49]

The picture is not uniform. I mean, Wellesley and MIT have virtually eliminated grades for first year students. It's basically pass fail because they say they don't want the kids to be focusing on whether they have an A minus or a B plus. Organizations like ACUE, the American College of university, college and university educators is doing all sorts of professional learning for college and university educators, which is based on the sorts of things that I've been talking about. And they're not the only organization that's doing that. So in summing up in terms of your question, one, Doing grading the way I think that should be done actually prepares kids for post-secondary better.

[24:32]

And secondly, we need to recognize the changes that are taking place in the post-secondary world.

[24:38] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Repair Kit for Grading, 15 Fixes for Broken Grades, now in its third edition. And Ken, if people want to learn more about your work, get in touch with you, possibly talk about doing some work together, where's the best place for them to go online to find you?

[24:53] SPEAKER_00:

I have a website, O'ConnorGrading.com, and that has all my contact information. The book is available in the U.S. on Amazon. It's by far the easiest way to get the book.

[25:05]

And I'm always happy to have professional dialogue with educators who are interested in looking at what we're doing in communicating student learning.

[25:13] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Ken O'Connor, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[25:16] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. It was a pleasure for me, too.

[25:20] Announcer:

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