Being True to Yourself (and your students)

Fall is a beautiful time of year.  The temperature is changing, the colours are beautiful and school is back is session.  With all of this comes the inevitable reporting periods.  It is a very difficult task to make 'judgements' on students, in particular, when they are very young (i.e. grade 1).  However, being true to the students (and thus ourselves) will help them (and us) improve.  

Our Assessment & Evaluation begins and ends with our Growing Success document.  This document needs to be at our finger-tips with 'dog-eared' pages, highlights, 'notes to self' and many more examples of constant usage.  The process of Assessment & Evaluation has the following components:

1. Planning (i.e. Long-term, Short-term & daily) beginning with the Curriculum
2. Diagnostic Assessment (i.e. PM Benchmark & CASI)
3. Learning Goals & Success Criteria
4. Performance Tasks (Rich Tasks)
5. Formative Assessment
6. Student Self-Assessment
7. Summative Assessment
8. Reporting Period (i.e. Provincial Report Card/Progress Report)

Our Assessment (both Diagnostic & Formative) 'drive our instruction' (i.e. the numerous practice sessions leading up to the 'big game').  The Summative Assessment (i.e. the 'big game') is where the students put of their newly acquired skills on display and we award them with a 'grade'.  We then evaluate all of their summative assessments to determine an overall 'grade' for a particular reporting period.  Being truthful during this process is extremely important to both you, the student and your colleagues.  This 'truth' is based on standards.  These standards are established and move from grade to grade and thus being 'truthful' is key to student achievement.

Below is an excerpt from Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson (Brookhart & Moss 2012).  They have created a theory of action that states, "The most effective teaching and the most meaningful student learning happen when teachers design the right learning target for today's lesson and use it along with their students to aim for and assess understanding."

Report card grades that accurately summarize achievement over a set of learning goals must start with a set of ingredients—that is, individual summative assessments—that each accurately summarizes achievement of intended learning goals.

To make an omelet, you need eggs. To make a good omelet, you need to put the eggs and other ingredients together and cook them properly. Report card grades that accurately summarize achievement of learning goals must combine the component grades in ways that maintain the intended meaning about student achievement. 

If you summarize the information well, you will see that there is a direct link from the learning goals to the report card grades. The learning goals were the basis for learning in classroom lessons, and the performances of understanding (i.e. Rich Tasks) yielded formative assessment information for improvement. 

After weighting the individual "ingredient" grades so that they contribute more or less heavily to the final grade, as you intended, summarize them into one grade by taking the median of the individual grades. In most circumstances, the median will be a better representation of typical performance on a standard than the more familiar mean (sometimes called the "average").

Therefore, after you have your class list of median grades, do a "judgment review" and revise the grade in the rare cases when the median is not, in your judgment, the best representation of student achievement. There are two circumstances when the median may not be the best representation.

The first is when a student's pattern of achievement has been one of steady improvement. In that case, privilege recent evidence. Suppose, for example, that a student began a report period at Basic level on a standard, but improved so that he reliably performed at the Proficient level by the end of the report period. The median grade may be Basic, but this student's current status on that standard is Proficient. Use your judgment, based on the pattern in the achievement evidence, to revise the grade and assign Proficient.

The second circumstance is when the grade is right on the borderline between two categories. Then the question becomes, "In my judgment, does the higher or lower grade best represent this student's achievement in the subject or on the standard?" Use additional achievement evidence to answer that question. We don't mean that you should put more numbers into your calculation of the median. Rather, consider how the student did in the performances of understanding you observed. Which grade or proficiency level did the student's work, overall, reflect? Use your judgment, based on this additional evidence, to assign the appropriate grade.

But don't stop there! Remember, your task is not to do a set of calculations on your class grades. Your task is to select, from the choices available in the grading scale on which achievement is reported, the symbol that best represents student achievement in that subject or on that standard. The median grade will be the best representation for most—but not all—students.