Guidelines for Effective Grading

1. Describe grading procedures to students at the beginning of instruction
2. Clarify that course grade will be based on achievement only
3. Explain how other factors (effort, work habits, etc.) will be reported
4. Relate grading procedures to intended learning outcomes
5. Obtain valid evidence (test, etc.) for assigning grades
6. Try to prevent cheating
7. Return and review all test results as soon as possible
8. Properly weight the various types of achievements included in the grade
9. Do not lower an achievement grade to tardiness, weak effort or misbehavior
10. Be fair. Avoid bias. When in doubt , review the evidence. If still in doubt, give the higher grade.

Developing of a Grading and Reporting System

• Achievement reports should be separate from effort expended
• Should be developed cooperatively (parents, students, school personnel) in order to ensure a more adequate and understandable system

Grading and Reporting System should be…

• based on clear statement of learning objectives
• consistent with school standards
• based on adequate assessment
• based on the right level of detail
• provided with parent-teacher conference

Assigning Letter Grades and Computing Grades

• Grades assigned to students must include only achievement
• If achievement and effort and combined in some way, grades would mean different things for different individuals
• Grades reflected on report cards are numbers or numerical quantities arrived at after several data on the students’ performance are combined

Types of Grading

1. Norm-Referenced Grading

• Reflects relative performance (i.e. score compared to other students)
• In this system,
• Grade (like a class rank) depends on what group the student is in, not just his own performance
• Typical grade may be shifted up or down, depending on group’s ability
• Widely-used because much classroom testing is norm-referenced

In norm-referenced grading….

• An outside person can decide which student in that group performed best 
• Takes into account circumstances beyond the student’s control such as poor teaching, bad tests etc. since these would affect all the students equally, so all performance would drop but relative standing would stay the same
• An outside evaluator has little additional information about what a student actually knows since this will vary with class
• Assumes sufficient variability among student performance that the difference in learning between them justifies giving different grades

2. Criterion-Referenced Grading

• Reflects absolute performance (i.e. score compared to specified performance standards)

In this system,

• Grade does not depend on what group the student is in, but only on his own performance compared to a set of performance standards
• Grading is a complex task because grades must clearly define the domain, justify the performance standards and be based on criterion-referenced assessment
• Conditions are hard to meet except in complete mastery learning settings

In criterion-referenced grading…

• An outside evaluator knows only that the student has reached a certain level or set of objectives
• The grade will always mean the same thing and will not vary from class to class
• Outside factors might influence the entire class and performance may drop
• No way to tell from the grading who the best students are, only that certain students have achieved certain levels
• Criteria are known from the beginning that allows student to take responsibility

3. Learning Ability or Improvement Performance Grading

• Reflects ability or improvement performance (i.e. score compared to learning potential or past performance 

In this system,

• Grade are inconsistent with a standard-based system because each child is his/her own standard
• Reliably estimating learning ability is very difficult 
• Cannot reliably measure change with classroom measures
• Should only be used as a supplement

Giving and Reporting Learners' Grades

• One of the more frustrating aspects of teaching since there are so many factors to consider and so many decisions to be made
• The main aim is to provide results in brief, understandable form for varied users

Questions usually asked:

• What should I count- just achievement or effort, too?
• How do I interpret a student’s score?
• Do I compare it to other student’s score, a standard of what they can do, or some estimate of what they can do?
• What should my distribution of grades be, and how do I determine it?
• How do I display students progress or strengths and weaknesses, to students and their parents?

Functions of Grading and Reporting Systems

Enhancing students’ learning 

• clarifying instructional objectives for them showing students’ strengths and weaknesses
• providing information on personal-social development
• enhancing students’ motivation 
• indicating where teaching might be modified

Reports to parents/ guardians

• Inform parents and guardians of students on the progress of their wards
• Communicate how well objectives were met so parents can better plan

Administrative and guidance uses

Help to decide 

• promotion
• graduation,
• honors
• athletic eligibility
• reporting achievement to other schools or to employers
• providing input for realistic educational, vocational and personal counseling

Grades and report cards should promote and enhance learning rather than frustrate and discourage students

Parent-teacher conferences are encouraged to effectively function as motivation for further learning

Types of Grading and Reporting Systems

Traditional letter-grade system

• Students’ performance are summarized by means of letters
• Is easy to understand
• It is of limited value when used as the sole report because they end up being a combination of achievement, effort, work habits and behavior
• Do not indicate patterns of strengths and weaknesses

Pass-Fail

• Utilizes a dichotomous grade system
• Either a student has complied and reached certain standards, which case he passed, or he failed to do so, and gets a failing mark
• It does not provide much information
• Students tend to work to the minimum (just to pass) and no grades are reflected until the mastery threshold is reached

Checklist of Objectives

• Objectives of the course are enumerated and students’ level of achievement is indicated: Outstanding, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor
• A very detailed reporting system and tends to more informative for the parents and pupils 
• Very time consuming to prepare
• A potential problem is keeping the list manageable and understandable

 Letters to Parents/Guardians

• Are useful supplement  to grades
• Very time-consuming to prepare, the accounts of weaknesses are often misinterpreted by parents and guardians, and they are not characterized as systematic nor cumulative

 Portfolios

• A set of purposefully selected work, with commentary by student and teacher
• Are useful for showing student’s strength and weaknesses, illustrating range of students’ work, showing progress over time or stages of a project, teaching students about objectives/standards they are to meet

  Parent-Teacher Conferences

• Requires parents of pupils come for a conference with the teacher to discuss the pupil’s progress
• Are useful for a two-way flow of information and getting more information and cooperation from the parents

STATISTICAL CONCEPTS IN ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING

Statistical Techniques allow to describe the performance of our students and make proper scientific inferences about their performance

A. Measures of Central Tendency

• Numerical values which describe the average or typical performance of given group in terms of certain attributes
• Basis in determining whether the group is performing better or poorer than the other groups

The Mean

• The mean is a single numerical measure of the typical or average performance of a group of students
• Is defined as the sum of observations divided by the number of observations

The Median

• The middlemost score
• Is unaffected by extreme examination scores
• is not necessarily one of the actual scores
• The median is the most appropriate average to calculate when the data result in skewed distributions

The Mode

• The most frequent score

B. Measures of Variability

• While measures of central tendency are useful statistics for summarizing the scores in a distribution, they are not sufficient. Two distributions may have identical means and medians, for example, yet be quite different in other ways. 

For example, consider these two distributions:

• GROUP A: 19, 20, 25, 32, 39
• GROUP B: 2, 3, 25, 30, 75
• Indicate or describe how spread the scores are
• The larger the measure of variability, the more spread the scores are, the group is said to be heterogeneous
• The smaller the measure of variability, the less spread the scores are, the group is said to be homogeneous

The Range

• Represents the distance between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution.
• Because it involves only the two most extreme scores in a distribution, the range is but a crude indication of variability. 

The Standard Deviation

• The most useful index of variability.
• It is a single number that represents the spread of a distribution
• Measure of average deviation or departure of the individual scores from the mean
• The more spread out scores are, the greater the deviation scores will be and hence the larger the standard deviation.
• The closer the scores are to the mean, the less spread out they are and hence the smaller the standard deviation. 

Quartile Deviation or Semi-interquartile Range

• Defined as one half the difference between quartile 3 (75th percentile) and quartile 1 (25th quartile) in a distribution
• Counterpart of the median
• Used when the distribution is skewed

B. Measures of Relative Position

Standard Scores

• use a common scale to indicate how an individual compares to other individuals in a group. 
• These scores are particularly helpful in comparing an individual’s relative position on different instruments.
• The two standard scores that are most frequently used in educational research are z scores and T scores.

z Scores

• the simplest form of standard score 
• expresses how far a raw score is from the mean in standard deviation units

T  Scores

• are z scores expressed in a different form. 
• To change a z score to a T score, simply multiply the z score by 10 and add 50.
• T = 10z + 50

Percentile Ranks

• A percentile in a set of numbers is a value below which a certain percentage of the numbers fall and above which the rest of the numbers fall.
• The median is the 50th percentile. 
• Other percentiles that are important are the 25th percentile, also known as the first quartile (Q1 ), and the 75th percentile, the third quartile (Q3 ). 
• To solve for percentile rank, add the number of students scoring below the value and the number of students scoring equal to the value divided by the total number of test takers.

Stanine Scores

• Tell the location of a raw score in a specific segment in a normal distribution which is divided into 9 segments
• Stanines 1, 2 and 3 reflect below average performance; 4, 5 and 6 reflect average performance; and 7, 8 and 9 reflect above average performance

SHAPES, DISTRIBUTIONS, and DISPERSION OF DATA

A. Shape

• Normal Distribution
• Rectangular Distribution
• U-Shaped Curve

B. Kurtosis

• Leptokurtic
• Mesokurtic
• Platykurtic

C. Unimodal, Bimodal and Multimodal Distributions of Test Scores

• Unimodal – one most common score
• Bimodal – two most common score
• Multimodal – more than two most common scores

D. Skewness

• Positively Skewed Distribution (mean > median > mode
• Negatively Skewed Distribution ( mode > median > mean)