How Accurate are your Grades?

As I am finishing my second year of teaching, the area I need most improvement is assessment. Creating assessments that measure a child's ability to complete a task and to make sure the assessment correctly demonstrates their knowledge can be a difficult task. Jenifer Gonzalez, author of Cult of Pedagogy, wrote an article this week asking teachers, "How accurate are your grades?"

This article really spoke to me and got me thinking about changes I would like to make next year. Gonzalez says, "When constructing assignments, assessments, and grading policies, every teacher makes dozens of small decisions that determine how much a grade reflects a student’s academic work and how much it reflects a mishmash of other factors. Those quantities are different for every teacher and every assignment. Despite that, we tend to treat grades as if they mean the same thing all the time."

She suggests teachers ask themselves the following questions when creating assessments of students' mastery of a skill:

Grades are inherently imperfect. To truly assess students’ learning, teachers need to get to know them, observe them, and study a wide sampling of their work over time. When they reduce all that to a single measurement for the sake of efficiency, they lose that bigger picture. But as long as grades remain a reality in our system, let’s be thoughtful and deliberate when we calculate them.