The most common type of feedback that students receive in a typical classroom is grades, more often than not a letter grade or a numeric score by itself. Grades provide a convenient summary of students’ performance and inform all interested parties of students’ achievement but they may not be telling the whole story of progress or serving students well.
What is wrong with grading systems?
Every year, during the May/June WASSCE or NECO examination, you’d find schools pay invigilators and examiners to look the other way while they help their students solve questions and pass excellently. They do this to increase the ratings of their schools at the expense of the student’s education.
Students who are unfortunate to be in this system, who graduate with supposed ‘distinction’ now find it difficult to thrive in the real world. They’ve already established that the grades they see on paper are more important than learning. They now rely more on cramming than understanding the subject matter.
Instead, what would it feel like to receive your child’s report card and it’s filled with important details of their learning journey?
“Ayo is a really creative writer and he’s working hard to finish an effective introductory paragraph. He likes to incorporate catchy hooks to his writing to grab the reader’s attention, but he’s having a difficult time crafting comprehensive views that lays out his argument. We’ll continue to work on this next term.”
Instead, what we get is a report card that shows the performance levels with simple grades. A+, B, C, through F. And sometimes, the difference between getting the grade “A” and “C” may even mean the same thing as the above statement, but it is not depicted that way.
An “A” can be interpreted to mean success and a “C” sometimes interpreted to mean mediocre or failure. The issue here is that a mere letter is not enough to fully capture the learning process of a student.
Take for instance Ayo’s case, you can picture the process of his journey and somewhat measure how well he’s doing from the descriptive feedback. Imagine slamming just a ‘C’ on his report card, there would be no telling that he knows how to captivate the attention of his readers with his writing. It would be easy to assume that Ayo is just an average student that is not trying hard enough.
Sometimes, teachers spend the bulk of their time grading papers that they become less innovative in their teaching. They have less time to reflect on the structure of a course or on the aspirations of learning improvement. With all of these, it is hard to tell if the grade on a student’s result is a true representation of their educational growth.
What works best?
An academic research carried out at the University of Otago, New Zealand on the response to assessment feedback has proven that detailed, specific, descriptive feedback that focused on students’ attention to their work was the most advantageous kind of information that should be provided to students. It also suggests that using this method rather than more numerical or letter grading improves student performance and success.
Among the Ivy League schools, Brown University is one of the schools that do not calculate grade point averages. In their statement on grade point average in 2004, they stated that employers, as well as graduate and professional schools, seek Brown graduates for their
analytical ability, independence, creativity, communication, and leadership skills, qualities not necessarily reflected in a GPA.
Is there a solution?
What if teachers spent more time planning in-class discussions of homework and simply assigned a small number of earned points to students for completing the work? What if students viewed their peers as resources and collaborators, as opposed to competitors in courses that emphasized grading?
Implementing changes like combining the grading system with more emphasis on the descriptive feedback model might allow schools to promote more student learning differently than they used to. This will also guide students on their pathway to learning success and ensure excellence even beyond the school walls.
With Gradely, teachers are able to understand each individual student better, and using the knowledge of the students’ strengths and weaknesses, they can apply the right learning strategy for all of them. This way, learning is more attractive to the students because it is tailored to them specifically, and parents can know exactly how to participate in the collaborative learning of their child.
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