Grading and Reporting Student Learning Follow Up

Breakout session with Thomas R. Guskey
A question and answer session following his keynote on grading and reporting student learning


This breakout session consisted of Guskey responding to audience questions about his keynote. Some relevant conversations: 

The ACT cannot be used as a measure to evaluate your educational program.
As outlined in his keynote, Guskey states that the grades that high schools report have no meaning. A 4.0 GPA from one high school means something totally different than a 4.0 GPA from another. Colleges cannot rely on a GPA to determine a student's knowledge. Enter the ACT - this test is NOT designed to assess student skills; it is designed solely to create a bell curve, a spread, a normal distribution to help colleges make distinctions between students for college entrance. Even if there is a quality question on the ACT that accurately measures a worthwhile skill, if everyone teaches this skill and students start getting this question right, the next year this question would be removed from the test. The ACT is scored on a curve, which goes against the purpose of grading. A test graded on a curve fails 50% of the students, regardless of what they have learned. This is not the appropriate test to measure student learning.

High percentages are not the same as high standards.
Let's say I decide that students need to score an 80% or above to demonstrate proficiency. This style of percent cutoff is completely unreliable because of the variability in the design of assessments. An example to illustrate how assessments are unreliable: here's a low-level but difficult question:

Who was the 17th president of the United States?

Fewer than 10% of students can answer this correctly. However, consider the following alteration: 

Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading

Keynote by Robert Marzano
A breakdown of a more reliable grading scheme for skills based grading



 You can't rely on standardized tests or common assessments.
Marzano presented research which shows that large standardized tests are reliable when looking at general trends for a whole school (87% reliability), but are incredibly unreliable when using the same data to examine class or individual performance (33 to 57% reliability). Multiple choice tests are hugely unreliable. Using a single assessment is unreliable. Solely using common assessments is unreliable - formative assessment has to take into account a complete picture of teacher-student activities.


You can't rely on the 100-point scale.
Marzano went through an interesting exercise with the entire crowd. He asked everyone to grade a hypothetical test consisting of 10 simple questions, 5 complex questions, and 2 higher order questions that go beyond what was taught in class.  Everyone gave a grade to a student who got all the simple questions right, half of the complex questions right, and none of the higher order questions right. The results? The highest grade from the audience: an 83%. The lowest grade from the audience: a 20%. The bottom line: percents don't mean anything with regards to student knowledge! The exact same student with the exact same knowledge demonstration had a 60% error in their final grade. So if we can't use percents to determine knowledge, what can we use?

Too Much to Teach!

Breakout session with Chris Jakicic
How teachers can collaborate to create power standards and essential outcomes for better results for students



Because teachers have so many resources telling them what to teach (state standards, curriculum guides, text books, YCCS), it is difficult for them to know which skills are most important.Many teachers do "random acts of improvement" in their classroom that are totally isolated from what their colleagues are doing. In order to make real progress with students, teachers have to be aligned and on board with each other. This session showed how teachers can collaborate to create and use essential learnings; why it is important to have clear essential outcomes; and processes to identify power standards.

Interesting points that rang true:

• We spend a lot of time filling in what kids were supposed to know when they got to us instead of focusing on where we want them to be at the end of their time with us
• One of the biggest factors in "successful" schools: having a guaranteed and viable (having time to teach what is to be taught) curriculum
• According to Marzano and Kendall's analysis, we would need at least 23 years with each student to teach the k-12 education
• We tend to "cover curriculum" instead of prioritizing

Power Standards:

• Not all standards are equal
• We should determine 7-12 per grade, per subject area
• Criteria for Power Standards: Endurance, Leverage, and Readiness for the next level of learning

What to do with Power Standards within your department:

A Vision of Success: Leading the Design of Quality Classroom-Based Assessment

Breakout session with Tammy Heflebower
Using quality assessment criteria for valid assessment results to guide student achievement goals


 
Sound assessment results are crucial when teachers are making many important decisions about their goals and teaching based upon them. This session showed participants how to review and revise existing assessments for quality based on key criteria.

A balanced assessment system has 3 types of assessments:

• Large Scale (Assessment of) - these are summative, norm-referenced, aptitude, and achievement tests. The ACT and the TABE would be considered large scale. Essential Question: What have students already learned?
• Mid-Scale (Assessment for) - these are formative, criterion-referenced, often teacher- or district- made, and achievement tests. Essential Question: How can we help students learn more?
• Small-Scale (Assessment for) - these include questioning, day by day, minute by minute, and achievement tests. Most of our time and energy should go to these. Essential question: How can we help students learn more?

Why the ACT is used all wrong:

Performance Tasks for Authentic Learning

Breakout session with Kay Burke
Creating standards-based performance tasks with teacher teams




This session was meant to educate teachers on how to create authentic performance tasks in which students apply knowledge and skills to problems relevant to their worlds. There was an emphasis on developing students' skills that would be of use to them in the 21st century. Included in the packet were lesson plan formats for performance tasks and several examples of performance tasks in different content areas (though only two were for high school).

Positives of using performance tasks:

• Students must work both collaboratively and individually
• Target multiple standards at once
• Relate standards to real-life situations
• Motivate students to think critically and work creatively
• Integrate subject areas

Some of the things that teachers should consider when designing performance tasks:

Examining the Role of Students in Assessment

Breakout session with Chris Jakicic

Effective strategies to involve students in self-assessments

The key to student self-assessment is helping them answer three questions: Where am I going? where am I now? How can I close the gap?

• Students put the state standard into kid-friendly language
• Turn those new standards into "I can" statements
• Students track their own formative assessments
• Students decide when they are ready for a summative assessment on any given skill

Example of students tracking their learning

Other tips:

• Show students specific examples of a skill that was executed well
• Show students examples of weak work and have them identify what was wrong
• Have students reflect on their work, compare it to quality work, and write specific goals and action plans for how they will make their work better. (For example, I will rewrite the paper with stronger transitions between paragraphs.)

Teaching and Assessing 21st Century Skills

Breakout Session with Tammy Helfebower

Strategies to integrating 21st century skills

There are 3 types of assessments:

1. Obtrusive: stop the class and take a test, quiz, etc. Usually these are paper and pencil assessments.
2. Unobtrusive: you observe the students and assess their progress.
3. Student-generated: the student feels that they have mastered a skill, and they decide how they want to show the teacher. The student takes ownership of their learning, the timeline of their learning, and of how they demonstrate their learning.
   

Question to ponder: Will my students need to know this 40 minutes after the class ends, 40 days after the class ends, or 40 years after the class ends?

Grading and Reporting Student Learning

Keynote by Thomas R. Guskey

Designing new reporting structures to better communicate and involve parents in students' learning



Why do we use report cards and assign grades?

 Here are the 6 different possible reasons that Guskey listed:

1. Communicate with parents
2. Student self-evaluation
3. Placement information for future classes
4. Student motivation
5. Evaluate effectiveness of educational programs
6. Evidence of students' lack of effort or responsibility

Here's the problem - within a school, there is a great deal of dissent about which purposes should be used. These purposes are not all compatible with one another - focusing on 1 and 2 implies giving up on 3 and 5. Guskey states that the staff at a school must reach a consensus on the purposes of grading before being able to examine and improve upon the method.

The problem goes deeper when you consider grading elements. Put yourself in a student's shoes. In one class, your grade depends on quizzes and homework; in another class, your grade depends on homework quality, participation, and punctuality, etc. In the end, you have little clarity about how your grade is determined from class to class; this lack of clarity leads to grades serving none of the above purposes they were supposed to serve.

No one method of grading and reporting serves all purposes well.
The bottom line is that grades need to serve multiple purposes. They need to communicate achievement to parents. They need to guide student self-evaluation. They need to document student effort. Yet when we average everything together into a single grade, the result is a piece of information that doesn't communicate anything. So what's the solution?

"We're Nomads": Wrong Turns and Course Corrections on the Journal to Quality Classroom Assessment

Keynote follow-up by Anne Davies
Correcting frequent wrong turns when involving students in classroom assessment

This presentation gave a lot more examples relating to the "Leading the Way to Quality Classroom Assessment" keynote (below). It will probably make more sense if you read that one first.

Why should we co-construct criteria with our students?

• Ask students how they would feel if they received a test or exam with a grade but no explanation as to WHY they got that grade. This process will help them understand exactly what goes into their grade -- and it allows them to choose what that is.
• Show students the state standard they will be working on. Have them come up with synonyms for each word in the standard. Breaking it down on a semantic level will help them understand exactly what the standard is asking for.

Tip for making rubrics:

• When making the "Does not meet standards" column, use POSITIVE language. Instead of writing "uses vague language," write "should use more descriptive language." Tell them what they should be doing, not what they're doing wrong.
• After making a co-constructed rubric, do NOT type it up using teacher language. Use their words. It will make more sense to them.

Leading the Way to Quality Classroom Assessment

Keynote by Anne Davies
Using assessment for learning by involving students





Students should be involved in the assessment process. They should know where they are going, what their destination looks like, and be able to communicate their learning. Here are some ways to do that:

Co-constructing Criteria

1. explain the purpose of the assignment (relate to standards and class goals)
2. show samples (good ones, medium ones, and bad ones)
3. have students develop a rubric by thinking about the goals and considering the sample work
4. students develop "I can" statements that you use as your daily objectives

Visual Rubrics

• The teacher put up samples of student work at various levels of quality.
• The students checked it out and compared their work to the visual rubric.
• The students could see which paper was most similar to theirs; therefore, they could see where they should be going by looking at the paper that was a step above theirs.

Checklists and Rubrics: The Heart and Soul of Standards-Based Teaching

Breakout session with Kay Burke
Creating student-friendly checklists as formative assessments to drive standards-based teaching and learning



Checklists are a step below or before rubrics. They are formative assessment tools that the students can use as part of their process while doing an assignment. Checklists can be used to scaffold big, complex, or multi-part assignments. Checklists are more student-friendly than rubrics, which sometimes have too much teacher-y language crammed on them.

Check out the sample checklists. The "Teacher Guidelines for Creating Students Checklists" explains most of Burke's major ideas, which I summarized below the picture:

How To...

Things to include:
Workshop Title, Contact info for the presenter

What you learned (objective summary of the workshop)

Review/your opinion of the workshop/how it applies to RLLA

If you want to upload any documents/pictures/examples, that's awesome.

Tag things with the topics from your workshop AND your name.


Make a post for each workshop that you attended
If you want to make posts for the keynotes, that's cool too -- and we can edit/add to each others' keynote posts as well.


Due date: Monday, May 17


Possible tags:
skill-based grading
ACT
rubric
power standards
grading scale
formative assessment
report cards
purpose of grading
assessment for learning