Weekly Journal Reflection – “Grades are feedback. Do you agree or disagree? Why?”
I disagree that grades are feedback, or to be clear, I do not think they are meaningful feedback. They are a form of quantifying learning, but they do not necessarily tell us how a student is doing, nor do they inform the student as how to they can improve. Sometimes the accuracy of the grades are in question, like losing marks for late assignments, or doing poor on a test one day, which in turn limits the overall potential grade for the whole term. Mid-term exams are notorious for this whenever they count for 25 percent or higher of a student’s overall grade. Doing poor on such exams creates a permanent limiting threshold, and when this happens midway through a learning term or unit, it is extremely demoralizing — as no matter how hard a students works, it will be impossible to get an “A” by the time the course ends.
I agree with Erkens et. al (2017), when they state that, “Educators don’t need grades to teach, and learners don’t need grades to learn.” Certainly, learners do need to be assessed, and educators do need to verify what and how much learning has occurred. In B.C., this assessment responsibility means that teachers need to determine student proficiency in the standards. There are numerous ways to evaluate this that do not rely on grades. Some literacy programs have the assessment built into them, where having different grade level books for children to read determines student proficiency. While math programs might be easier to quantify, it too can be a challenge. Just because a student knows how to calculate the math, doesn’t necessarily mean they understand the math concept, which is crucial to assessing the big idea. My 9‑year old son can understand the idea and do the calculation, but as an ESL student, he struggles to understand what the question is asking. If he were to be assessed without any language support, then his math grade would certainly not reflect his true ability.
References
Erkens, C.; Schimmer, T. & Vagle N.D. (2017). Essential assessment : six tenets for bringing hope, efficacy, and achievement to the classroom. In Communication of Results. pp.176–78 [ebook]. iBooks.