Secondary Standards- Based Grading and Reporting Handbook

Secondary Standards- Based Grading and Reporting Handbook offers some valuable input on effective grading that clearly reflects each students ability. They lay out six principles to help teachers avoid misconstruing a students ability by focusing on extraneous details. Principle one suggests that “Grades and reports should be based on clearly specified learning goals and performance standards.” This is the baseline for consistent and efficient grading, for the effective grading is directly tied to standards, which need to be clear if we are to clearly grade. Principle two states that “evidence used for grading should be valid.” What this means, the students competence, with respect to the standard you are measuring, shouldn’t be influenced by their abilities that aren’t directly specified in the standard. For example, while it is important for students to turn in work on time, that variable doesn’t have much to say about their ability to do the assigned math problems. A student can be proficient in multiplication but turn in their work late. Another principle I liked was to not use everything in grades. Lets say Student A struggles in a unit in the early stages and gets poor grades on the formative. The teacher realizes this and helps the student learn the material and the student then aces the summative. The student if graded on everything, would get a final grade of significantly much less than if not graded on everything. Those earlier formatives are intended to be mile-markers to help inform the teacher, not grades that can be potentially detrimental to a students overall success. The student who mastered the material, when once struggled, needs a grade to reflect their mastery of the content, not the struggle it took them to get there. Learning is about improving, making mistakes and learning from them, and there a certain necessity for grace in the classroom as we, teachers, guide the students through the struggle of learning and towards mastery.