Nick Malakhow
Curriculum and Methods
Prof. Diane Anderson
Transforming Grading? A Book Review
Introduction
Throughout the course of reading Transforming Classroom Grading, I found myself both wholeheartedly agreeing with Marzano and finding his thoughts somewhat misguided. The majority of topics Marzano focused on regarding grading—problems with current trends in grading, kinds of assessments that were worthy of implementation, moving towards a valuable purpose for grades—resonated deeply with me and were concisely and effectively laid out in the book. I did find, however, that a few topics Marzano seemed hung up on, abolishing point systems and using the Power Law to calculate final scores in particular, to be thinly argued for. Overall, Marzano’s book did not “transform” my thoughts on classroom grading. What it did do, however, was reiterate a number of systems for assessment that have fascinated me but I have been too overwhelmed or (to put it bluntly) lazy to implement. Marzano’s book very specifically relayed a system of procedures, large parts of which I believe will be extremely helpful to my future experiences with assessing student work.
What’s This Book All About? (or “A Brief Summary of Transforming Classroom Grading with Annotations by Myself)
Marzano begins Transforming Classroom Grading with a brief summary of current aspects of assessment that are problematic. He ekes out three major points: (1) teachers give widely varying weight to nonachievement factors (behavior, participation, attendance, effort, etc.); (2) teachers weight different academic assessments on a multitude of topics differently, so that what is worthy of understanding becomes ambiguous or vague; and (3) teachers use single-score grades that provide an inaccurate and holistic portrait of student achievement for a marking period or even an assignment, when it is essential to illustrate exactly what topics individual students excel at and what they need work on (Marzano 3-5).
These three issues that Marzano isolates are, indeed, noteworthy shortcomings of current assessment systems! The assessment system that would help solve these problems requires a degree of transparency in student grading, so that students, parents, and administration can isolate specific areas where students have grown and ones where they need to grow further. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, and see where he begins thinking about assessment in terms of rubrics.
Marzano continues by illustrating that the “cost” of this uneven mode of assessment is, very logically, uneven standards of achievement throughout the nation. While this might sound unnerving at first, and like an argument for standardized curricula around the nation, I never thought he was going in that direction. An important fact he points out is how these uneven assessments and weights can lead to grade deflation and inflation throughout the nation. The example he uses to illustrate this as a shortcoming is an instance of grade inflation in lower class urban schools. He notes that scores that upper middle class and elite school children achieve on standardized tests are remarkably higher than scores of lower class school children who receive similar grades. For example, an A-student in the lower class school would score the same as a C-student in the elite school, a B-student in the l.c. school would score the same as a D-student in the elite school, etc (Marzano 9).
While standardized tests are obviously not the end-all be-all determinant of effective learning and teaching, the huge discrepancy in these scores indicates a problematic trend. How grades are used differently in different contexts creates an uneven learning environment between schools divided by class. The concept of having standardizing grading weights across the nation does make me wary—how would this shift in grading procedures benefit lower class schools or make them privy to better resources and teachers? As it stands now, however, systems of grading seem ineffectual in making fair assessments and grade inflation does not lead to post-secondary achievement for lower-class students if they cannot pass standardized tests. So I agree with Marzano on this point also.
In chapter 2, Marzano sets forth examples of what grades are used for currently and a proposition for what they should be used for. Marzano accurately concludes that assessments are currently used for student motivation, student feedback, student guidance for future classes and choices, administrative factors, and for incorporation into teacher lesson plans (14). While acknowledging the prevalence of grades being used as rewards or motivational tools, Marzano concludes that there are two primary factors grades should assess: (1) student and parent feedback and (2) criterion-referenced knowledge of subject matters (23). Marzano seeks to remove the emphasis on grades as rewards and, rather, to have students, parents, and teachers view them as concrete feedback. He, I think, also accurately determines that much of the literature that promotes limited-grade or a grade-free environment inappropriately conflates the terms rewards and feedback (Marzano 23).
Yes, thinking of grades as criterion-referenced feedback is a potentially great idea! This is the moment in the book, however, when I began to think “well, this is going to be a long, arduous, and painful process to try and transform the way that parents and students view grades…” Marzano is the first to mention that this evolution would be a long process. I do question his underemphasis of motivation, and also question his denial of that he includes it in the system he later proposes. By scoring factors such as effort and behavior, some students who are strong in these aspects even if they are weak in academic achievement must be intrinsically motivated to try harder even if the content-specific knowledge does not come to them easily. One particular case in which motivation seems important to me is the student with a learning disability who, try as they might, has constant difficulties achieving certain tasks. Just something to think about…
Marzano then proceeds to outline which factors should be incorporated into a grade. He cites academic achievement factors such as subject knowledge, thinking and reasoning skills, and communication skills. He also describes the importance of including non-achievement factors in a grade, such as effort, behavior, and attendance (Marzano 27-39). Breaking the concept of “the grade” down like this is inclusive and on the mark.
In order to assess students for these various factors, Marzano suggests a rubric grading system in which students are scored from 1-4 using half-score intervals on their knowledge of topics and their performances of thinking, communicative, and behavioral skills. In this way, one assignment may be scored multiple times if it relates to various topics. His proposed grading sheet is a rubric in which the columns represent academic and non-academic achievement factors, and the rows represent assessments, obviously not all of which will be scored for all topics (Marzano 48). For the remainder of the book, Marzano gives numerous helpful examples of how to work within this system, and methods for determining final grades beyond just calculating averages. He also includes a number of tips that would allow teachers to begin incorporating rubric-style grading into a normative grading environment.
Marzano offers an effective and sensible plan for assessing students using rubrics. I am entirely on board with his sentiments that grading has to become a process that is more transparent to students, parents, and teachers. There are a couple of ideas that he argues for, however, that serve to obscure or undermine some of the better points he makes.
Marzano opposes the use of points, percentages, and letter grades in assessment of students. What he seems to find offensive about these methods is that they are frequently used in assessment systems that essentialize student knowledge and achievement into holistic scores (Marzano 46). I agree with this point, but he spends a lot of words gushing about how it is counterproductive to try and integrate these methods into rubric grading, in favor of his 1-4 point scale. He does not provide substantial evidence for the detrimental effects of incorporating percentages, letter grades, or points into rubric systems beyond the fact that they are socially tied to holistic grading practices. One thing I am glad for is that he acknowledges that it may be an effective step to implement rubrics with percentages, points, or letter grades as a transitional move into total rubric grading.
While he devotes pages to debunking points, he falters at thoroughly explaining an important part of his system: calculating final scores for students. He asserts that the “power law of learning” dictates that knowledge acquisition occurs in a perpetually upwardly mobile vacuum. He claims that students’ final scores should be calculated using a formula (that he only explains briefly in an appendix) which abides by this principle—that even if student assessments are all over the place, a final score can be calculated that may inflate or deflate individual scores to create a pattern of upwardly mobile learning (Marzano 74). If this sounds confusing, it was to me too, and I’m still not sure I entirely understand his conclusions since he spends so little time explicitly revealing it. This section stands out in the book as a reading challenge in relation to the other chapters. The “power law” also seems to assume too much about knowledge acquisition for me to be comfortable with it. It does not take into account students with learning differences, for example, who might struggle with particular topics simply because of physiological or psychological conditions. It also does not take into account social factors in the classroom—how student comfort with peers and their teacher based on gender, race, national origin, class, or sexual orientation might affect knowledge acquisition. His argument for the use of the “power law” is no more compelling than any argument for the use of his dreaded score averaging to determine final grades.
So How Does it Relate to my Teaching?
As I mentioned in my introduction, Marzano did not transform my ideas on assessment, so much as he solidified my determination to use transparent and rubric-based methods of grading in my future classroom experiences. Such assessment procedures would greatly benefit the students I encountered in English 9 at Westtown Friends. By and large, students had opposing but equally detrimental reactions when I gave them single holistic scores on writing assignments. Students who received A’s seemed happy and simply filed these papers away, still making similar mistakes in subsequent writing assignments that I attempted to ameliorate with written feedback. Students who received C’s, D’s, and even sometimes B’s looked somewhat dismayed and similarly made recurring mistakes in subsequent assignments.
For one essay, I asked students to revise their work based on an in-class revision lesson before they could get a grade. High-achieving students (straight A’s) responded with good-humored (but serious) outrage, clamoring for their next grade. Low- and Mid-level achieving students (mostly C’s and B-‘s) responded with frustrated sighs, daunted by the task of revision. While this exercise was extremely useful for some mid-level achieving students, in the end many students simply made superficial edits that I had pointed out to them and avoided working on the deep-thinking questions I asked them to tackle. They operated under the notion that correcting these simple mistakes would improve their grade rather than absorbing the revision process we discussed in class. Students received single assessments on their returned assignments and many were confused. I made assessment decisions based on how far they progressed from their first draft in addition to how solid their second drafts were. I did not, however, make this procedure evident to the students due to my single assessments. Some were confused that their grades were as high as they were; many high-achievers were disappointed by their final grades. I wish dearly, in retrospect, that I had made my process of grading transparent for students to see.
While going over the final evaluations of my teaching that students filled out, I was pleased with their comments, but several students indicated that I “graded weirdly.” All of these factors I had taken into account while grading were totally undermined by my single scores. I realized Marzano’s system would not only help my students see exactly where their grades were coming from, but would also help me figure out my assessment process.
Given that many of my low- to mid-achieving students benefited from this exercise to a greater extent than my higher-achieving students, I feel that rubric-style grading could act as an easier to understand guideline for low-achieving (and really all levels of) students to see where they need to work the most. In this way, the rubrics could act as an intrinsically motivating exercise, despite the fact that Marzano wishes to shy away from such concepts of grading. A similar beneficial effect could occur if students received report cards that read in a similar way, with two final grades for academic and non-academic factors that are averaged together to create a more holistic score. Even though this practice still essentializes student understanding, having all the information there for parents to see could help students and parents figure out how students can improve in specific areas. I think Marzano is correct in that letter grades might seem more of a reward than rubric scores just because of their social establishment as such, but that might not be a bad thing when a C-content student receives an A for effort and behavior and becomes motivated to work even harder at understanding a subject.
Conclusion
Marzano’s exploration and revision of grading procedures was a quick and mostly easy read. I would recommend any educator who is having difficulty figuring out effective methods of assessment (and even those who don’t think they are) read this book! Even if it doesn’t change your whole philosophy on grading, there are lots of great resources in it to pick and choose from.
WORK CITED
Marzano, Robert J. Transforming Classroom Grading. Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development: Alexandria, VA. 2000.