How can one measure learning? This question, as old as organized education
itself, is becoming more important as calls for school accountability and
improved academic achievement grow louder.
Assigning students letter grades is one way. The concept is simple. Teachers
give students an A, B, C, D or worse. Each letter grade is based on a range
of percentages.
It would be hard to find students and parents who could not recall moments
of anxiety, disappointment and pride when reports cards landed on the kitchen
table.
(Some schools put percentages on report cards instead of letter grades.
While this approach allows for more detail, the idea is the same.)
Whether this is the best way is, of course, open to debate.
In fact, a growing group of academics and administrators question grades
as a means to measure success and give feedback.
Deborah Stipek belongs to this group. Dean of the education school at Stanford
University, Stipek is a leading researcher on student motivation. Her research
suggests grades can discourage slower-learning students.
"The thing that turns kids off and gets them to stop learning and alienated
from school is this sense that 'I can't make it no matter what I do,'" she
says.
Grades may also do little to encourage students who get straight A's. If
kids who learn very easily and quickly are not challenged, they can slack
off and still get good grades.
So letter grades may not be an accurate measure of how much a student has
learned. They are just measures of how much a student has learned in a period
of time.
Alfie Kohn has covered education for a number of publications, including
the New York Times, Education Week and other education journals. In a 1999
High School Magazine article titled From Degrading to De-Grading, he writes
that students lose interest in learning if the focus is on grades.
And since such students are less interested in learning, the quality of
their thinking is likely to suffer. Students of all ages are also likely to
pick the easiest possible assignment if they have a choice, he writes.
There are other reasons why letter grades are under fire.
A grade point average of 4.0 at one school is not the same as at another
school, says Don Nielsen. He is a former president of the Seattle School Board.
Curricula, standards and the quality of teaching can vary greatly across
schools. A student with high grades in a school with low standards may only
get mediocre grades in a school with comparatively higher standards.
And does an A in, say, basket weaving carry the same academic heft as an
A in advanced calculus?
Admission officers at colleges and universities know this. They factor
it into the admissions process by considering the coursework and the reputation
of the school.
Still, 30 percent of all first-year students in the U.S. require some form
of remedial help because high school did not properly prepare them, even if
they have the marks to attend university. And they may be the lucky ones.
"You have heard the stories," says Nielsen. "There are kids who graduate
from high school who can't read their diplomas. That can't happen anymore."
Are letter grades entirely responsible for this? Hardly. Educators face
bigger problems these days.
Spending on public education is down while the shortage of teachers is
going up. And many young teachers who enter the profession leave soon after
because they can earn more money for fewer troubles in private industry jobs.
Yet plans to reform tried-and-true methods of measuring and assessing students
are gaining more consideration, probably because they are cheaper and require
less political capital.
Forty-eight U.S. states as well as eight provinces and territories administer
some kind of standardized assessment of learning on top of in-class assessments.
Such standardized tests reflect increased calls for accountability in public
education from parents, private industry and the political right.
The education reform proposal of U.S. President George W. Bush, for example,
requires public schools to meet standards within a number of years if they
want to keep getting federal money.
And this higher emphasis on standards is directly changing the grade system.
Consider the school board in Seattle. It was considering plans to replace
traditional letter grades with statements like "at standard," "above standard"
and "honors" to reflect its new academic standards that it introduced a year
and a half ago.
"Standards, in my mind, negate the need for grades," says Nielsen.
This is where the whole debate about grades and testing veers off into
politics. If standards negate the need for grades, some fear that they may
also negate the need for teachers who give those grades.
Diane Meaghan is a professor of general education and a critic of standardized
testing. Standards send a message to the public that teachers cannot be trusted
to evaluate students, she says.
"It is a way to break down this whole profession of teaching," she says.
"If you do that, you can bring in a lot of part-timers and under-qualified
people and ultimately pay them far less."
Meaghan also questions standardized tests from a pedagogical perspective.
She says students who take standardized tests are forced to regurgitate information
like a bad lunch.
"But what has that got to do with critical evaluation, and being able to
write a good essay?" she says.
Others also question the effectiveness of standardized testing. Lorrie
Shepard is a professor of education. She has also been a president of the
National Council on Measurement in Education.
She says standards can make a difference. But standardized tests may not.
She says they may not be timely enough to identify and help students who are
struggling.
"They can tell us at the end of the year that a student is way off," she
says. But the feedback that comes from the test doesn't directly help students
improve, she says.
"They are very remote from the classroom. So the kinds of feedback that
help students actually get better is very unlikely to come from these external
tests."
Nielsen admits this would be correct if children were to be tested only
once a year.
"There are going to be multiple measurements, and there are going to be
multiple time frames," he says. "We are even talking about changing our high
schools from a four-year program to a three- to five-year program."
Of course, none of these changes has taken place yet. And they may face
some considerable resistance on several fronts.
Grades, by their very nature, select and separate students. And this may
be just fine for some parents, thank you very much, writes Kohn in a 1998
Phi Delta Kappan 1998 article titled How Privileged Parents Undermine School
Reform.
Such parents -- they tend to be white and affluent -- view education as
a competition among students. Without grades, it's hard to tell who's winning.
The absence of grades would also make it difficult to win scholarships
and get into the best post-secondary schools. And what kind of school doesn't
give out A's and B's, anyway?
"In today's world, grades almost take on a life of their own," says Nielsen.
"And parents, and to some extent, children are often more concerned about
their grade point average than...learning."
Nielsen admits he expects a lot of resistance from parents. "I think the
parent resistance to new paradigms is going to be substantial," he says.
He says he expects parents to change once universities embrace the idea
of standards more fully. But here is the catch. What if universities don't
go along?
Nielsen is well aware of the consequences. "The only way we can implement
what we are talking about is if we can get universities to buy into it," he
says.
So far, they seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach.
Joyce Smith is the executive director of the National Association for College
Admission Counseling. She says the approach proposed by the likes of Nielsen
would raise more questions unless the students in question come from schools
and districts that already have a reputation for quality.
"It would somewhat complicate the process," she says. "More information
would need to be available."
A move from traditional grades is likely to put more emphasis on standardized
tests like the SAT. But criticism of it is becoming louder.
Then there is a question of perception. Kids might simply translate the
new terms like "at standard" into old letter grades, says Stipek.
"If kids worry about getting straight 'honors' like they worry
about getting straight A's, then it is going to have the same motivating effect,"
she says.
She adds that this new grading method can work if it spells out clear standards
that students think they can meet.
"You have to have very clear, unambiguous standards that are well articulated...to
students and parents," she says.
And if students fail to meet the standard, they have to get clear feedback
about what they already know, what they do not know and what they have to
do to meet standards.
Some of these proposed changes might appear far out. But some are already
found in elementary schools. There, letter grades are passe. Will they disappear
from higher grades, too?
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