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In my teaching philosophy statement, I include the following passage describing my views on grading and performance assessment:
Safety and honesty inspire learning. In order to truly respect the wholeness and agency of students, I believe they must be actively involved in their own grading and performance assessment and should have a say in developing the evaluation criteria. From my professional background in evaluation, I have witnessed the potential of honest, strategic, reflective assessment—and the creative internal tension it inspires—to motivate extraordinary levels of learning and performance. However, to effectively serve as a tool for learning, assessment cannot simultaneously function as a tool of accountability (Patton, 2017). Even with democratic assessment, fear of failure can prevent students from challenging themselves, trying something new, taking creative risks, or engaging fully in honest self-reflection and evaluation—all of which are essential to maximizing learning. To foster a safe and honest learning environment, I divorce grading from performance assessment, grading based on engagement and initiative rather than on performance. Doing so creates space for students to experiment, learn from honest assessments of failure and excellence, and—ultimately—maximize the value of their educational journeys.
In developing this statement, I based my emphasis on divorcing grading from performance assessment on my experience as a professional evaluator. I drew my emphasis on democratic assessment from my recent experiences of being on the receiving end of grading and performance assessments as a PhD student. Since returning to school, I’ve taken classes with professors with a variety of different grading and assessment schemes. I've greatly appreciated courses that allowed me to take an active role in determining what coursework would best serve my learning and how that work should be graded. Conversely, I have also felt resentment and curtailed curiosity in classes where I felt forced to complete graded assignments that failed to contribute meaningfully to my learning and devoured entirely too much time and energy. I have no interest in asking students to complete assignments that will not contribute to their learning. As students' learning needs and preferences vary, I figure one of the best ways to serve students is through democratic assessment—allowing them to play an active role in setting course expectations.
However, it was brought to my attention last year that, while implementing a highly democratic grading/assessment scheme in a class of around dozen students may be a fairly simple matter, implementing such a scheme in a class of 30 students (let alone 200 students) would be no easy task.
In reading about assessment this week, I think I may have found a grading scheme that would be feasible in larger classes, while still functioning to keep grades from getting in the way of learning. In his essay Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement, Elbow (1993) describes what he calls ‘contract grading’:
[At] the start of the course I pass out a long list of all the things that I most want students to do—the concrete activities that I think most lead to learning—and I promise students that if they do them all they are guaranteed a certain final grade. Currently, I say it's a B—it could be lower or higher. My list includes these items: not missing more than a week's worth of classes; not having more than one late major assignment; substantive revising on all major revisions; good copy editing on all final revisions; good effort on peer feedback work; keeping up the journal; and substantial effort and investment on each draft.
I like the way this system changes the "bottom-line" for a course: the intersection where my authority crosses their self-interest. I can tell them, "You have to work very hard in this course, but you can stop worrying about grades." The crux is no longer that commodity I've always hated and never trusted: a numerical ranking of the quality of their writing along a single continuum. Instead the crux becomes what I care about most: the concrete behaviors that I most want students to engage in because they produce more learning and help me teach better. (pp. 195 - 196)
Though I may not use the same criteria as Elbow (1993), I like that this grading scheme focused on learning behaviors instead of specific knowledge or skills. As such, it aligns with my philosophy of divorcing grading from performance assessment. Also, I can think of various democratic feedback mechanisms I could employ, depending on the size of the class, so that students could still have a hand in shaping the ‘contract criteria’.
I still have some thinking to do on this topic, particularly about (A) the guaranteed grade and criteria I’d wish to use and (B) how I’d want to reward excellence. For instance, if I set the contract grade at a B, how might I determine if a student deserves an A?... Perhaps I could base this on performance and/or evidence of improved performance? But, if I did this, wouldn’t I be compromising my ideal of divorcing grading from performance assessment? Maybe I could employ self- or group assessment?... On the other hand, perhaps it would be better to make the contract grade an A. After all, if I am confident that my pedagogy will foster the desired level of learning so long as students engage in the ‘contract behaviors’, then why not make the contract grade an A? I can still recognize excellent student performance through performance assessment without making it a requirement for earning an A. This would still be fair, right? If I make the contract grade an A and make the behavioral contract criteria feasible, then I should only need to negotiate grades (or, preferably, performance recovery) with the few students who are not meeting those criteria.
What are your thoughts? I’d greatly appreciate your feedback!
References
Elbow, P. (1993). Ranking, evaluating, and liking: Sorting out three forms of judgement. College English, 55(2). 187-206.
Patton, M. Q. (2017, Nov. 11). Utilization-focused evaluation [Professional development workshop]. Evaluation 2017, Washington, DC, United States.