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And yet, no dancer, no musician and no athlete gains credit for their practice except through their actual performance in the event. We do not applaud the dancer or musician during practice. We do not add statistics from practice to the athlete’s record.

he assessment should actually be of the effectiveness of the teacher’s instruction and in what areas the teacher should continue to provide instruction to assist student mastery.

Homework allows both the student and teacher to determine if there is understanding of the subject and/or where problems

« Twitter, Simply Complicated. The Homework Option Plan May 22, 2011 by tomwhitby I was recently asked, along with several other educators, to comment on a post dealing with grading homework. The premise on which we were asked to comment involved a teacher grading homework and giving a zero as a grade to those students who did not do the assignment. This is not an uncommon practice amongst educators. I employed this strategy myself for many years. It was and probably still is an accepted strategy, but after decades of teaching, I have grown to a point where i am not a big believer in giving homework. I stated my homework philosophy in this post, Hmwk: Less Value or Valueless? If homework is to be given by a teacher, students need to believe that the teacher will value their efforts in completing it. Homework requires a sacrifice of personal time on the part of the student. If students observe that the teacher is not at least checking homework, they will not spend time, which is important to them, doing the assignments that are not valued. A mistake often made however, is that rather than assess the work, the teacher records a zero, or a failing homework grade for the student. This would also apply to a project prepared outside of the class that was to be presented at a specific time, a deadline. I see assessment having two functions. The formative assessment is to tell me how much the s

he zero seems more like retribution for not finding value in what the teacher values, or has been told to value. It’s more of a control thing, and not an assessment thing. If a student consistently performs well in class, how is it that when assessed on the same skills performed outside the class in the form of homework, the work gets a zero? It is a power issue.

If the grade is an assessment of the work, and the student’s understanding, but it was not done, how can it be assessed?

Letter Grades Deserve an 'F' The adoption of the Common Core could usher in a new era of standards-based grading. Jessica Lahey

When a child earns a ‘B’ in Algebra I, what does that ‘B’ represent? That ‘B’ may represent hundreds of points-based assignments, arranged and calculated in categories of varying weights and relative significance depending on the a teacher’s training or habit. But that ‘B’ says nothing about the specific skills John has (or has not) learned in a given class, or if he can apply that learning to other contexts. Even when paired with a narrative comment such as, “John is a pleasure to have in class,” parents, students, and even colleges are left to guess at precisely which Algebra I skills John has learned and will be able to apply to Algebra II. 

As Alfie Kohn has written, “what grades offer is spurious precision—a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.”

tudents who don’t complete homework receive zeroes, but they learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, many teachers argue, even though there’s no legitimate research connecting responsibility to homework. 

One, students, teachers, parents, and administrators expect me to, and when I don’t I am labeled an “easy” teacher, viewed as less serious or rigorous than my colleagues. Parents may rage about the veritable avalanche of homework that threatens to suffocate their children, but in my experience, parents also view that avalanche as a badge of honor, evidence of academic rigor.

I tried to picture a school year in which I shoehorn all of this work in to class time. I hardly complete a year’s worth of material as it is; a year without any homework at all seemed like a disaster in the making.

One day I realized that I wasn't weeding out the weak mathematicians, but instead weeding out the weak test writers.

Before you continue, I want to remind you that this does not mean I have not assessed, but not one student in my Calculus classes has received a grade at this point.  (Other than the report card mark which I must give).

First, I went through my outcomes, given to me by the government, and identified what the "Rocks" are.  These rocks are the outcomes which I expect the students to master above all other outcomes. 

“I was just someone who shared notes, and now I’m implicated in this,” said a senior who faces a cheating allegation. “Everyone in this class had shared notes. You’d expect similar answers.”

“I felt that many of the exam questions were designed to trick you rather than test your understanding of the material,” “the exams are absolutely absurd and don’t match the material covered in the lecture at all,” “went from being easy last year to just being plain old confusing,” and “this was perhaps the worst class I have ever taken.”

Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior

If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

Another finding weakened Mr. Phillips's argument for cheat-sheet exams. An independent scorer evaluated the students' cheat sheets for organization and richness of detail. Higher-scoring cheat sheets, it turned out, had a weak relationship to performance on the exam.

"I was more adamant that the cheat sheet would result in better retention over all, and that wasn't the case," he said. "I think I might use more of an open book."

But, again, the results yielded a surprise. Students thought they would study most for the closed-book exams, but that view was not reflected in reports of their actual habits. Students in the psychology class spent the most time studying for the cheat-sheet exam, or more than four hours. Open-book exams yielded slightly fewer hours of study, while closed-book exams resulted in the least amount of time studying, 3.32 hours.

To put this point positively, cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”  The same is true in “democratic classes where [students’] opinions are respected and welcomed.”[7]  

Cheating is particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial inducements for good report cards[10] -- in other words, if students are not merely rewarded for academic success, but are also rewarded for being rewarded.

high achievers are just as likely to do it as others.

A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others.

What do you think the purpose of grading is? Is it to communicate students' academic achievement to students and parents? Is it to motivate students to put forth their best effort? Some combination of both? How might that belief affect your grading practices?

If educators' goal is for students to learn, does it matter if it takes some students a little longer than others?

What's your current policy on offering redos and retakes? How did you arrive at this policy? Reflecting on the ideas Wormeli and Dueck present, how might you change your policy? If you don't offer retakes, what steps might you take to introduce them in your classes? If you do, what new ideas do you have for making the practice more effective?

It’s important that the teacher helps the learner to understand what it is they are trying to achieve

It is also important that the teacher (as expert) provide feedback, helping the learner to understand where they are at and how to progress.

If enough opportunities for discussion, collaboration, reflection and evaluation have been offered, in a supportive environment, then I believe that all learners can develop invaluable meta-cognitive skills. Like the first relationship, trust is of high importance here. Trusting yourself is difficult. It takes time to reach a point where you can be effectively self-critical, where you can trust your own judgement. Helping learners to do this is the final piece of the puzzle in helping them to become independent learners.

In a first-semester freshman English class, a student has a score of 45% going into the final. This student has been a discipline problem the entire semester and has not done much homework. No matter what score this student receives on the final, he cannot pass. The entire semester was designed so that students understand the fundamentals and concepts of writing a five-paragraph essay; the final is the culmination of that effort. Since you do not trust this student, you stand over him and watch him write his essay so you know he did not cheat. When you grade the essay, you find it is perfection.  He learned every first-semester English standard. What semester grade do you assign?