Five years ago, I waved my magic wand and eliminated points as a means of communicating student understanding throughout a unit of study. You may wonder, "If you don't count points, how do you account for student knowledge?" The answer is simple, really. I put what students know and can do into words.
More likely than not, you have experienced some form of evaluative feedback in your life outside of the classroom. Imagine if, at your next physical, your doctor said, "I see you are at 60 percent. I'll see you next time and hope you are better." This would leave us asking, "I'm 60 percent what? What does that mean? How do I get better?" Despite knowing this is not an acceptable practice outside the walls of education, many teachers still rely on percentages as the sole means to evaluate student progress.
Doctor's Orders
Kids can learn without grades (Wormeli, 2010). When doctors assess patients, they make a diagnosis that may be summative in nature (your blood pressure or cholesterol numbers, for example), but it is accompanied by descriptive feedback that prescribes a treatment to help the patient improve their health. Educators can take note of this process and mirror it in order to help our students thrive as learners.
For educators, descriptive feedback is a four-part process:
- Establish clear learning objectives
- Assess student work in line with targets
- Diagnose strengths and weaknesses
- Prescribe learning tools and articulate what is necessary for student growth toward objectives
Thinking like diagnostic physicians, it's clear that whether your grading scale is a standards-based 4-3-2-1 or a traditional A-B-C-D-F, grades and points only hold meaning when learning goals, objectives, and levels of understanding are made clear. When learning and assessments are not scaffolded, we cannot effectively assess, diagnosis, or prescribe learning plans for student success. The tallying of points quickly muddies the waters, obscuring both what students know and can do, and what they need to progress.
A Point-Less Prescription
Want to give your magic wand a wave and make meaningless points and grades disappear? Try this in an upcoming unit:
- Scaffold what you want students to know and be able to do for each letter grade. What will it take to get a D, a C, a B, and an A? Have handy your Bloom's Taxonomy, Depth of Knowledge chart, or Rigor and Relevance Framework, because you will need to identify verbs or actions for each learning objective at each desired level of understanding. Share these levels with students at the start of the unit. Post them on your class wall alongside your learning objectives. This visual will serve as their roadmap for understanding.
- Break down or scaffold how students will build understanding and how their knowledge or skills will be formatively assessed.
- Eliminate feedback via points or percentages on homework and formative assessments. Instead, rely on descriptive feedback related to your outlined levels of understanding. If that is too scary a place to start, then provide both descriptive feedback and percentages, but do not count the points or percentages toward students' unit grades.
- Scaffold the summative assessment and assess performance for each level of understanding. This means that if a student can perform only the basic levels of understanding on the unit assessment (even if it is only a quarter of the assessment), the student's grade should be a passing grade because they demonstrated the basics of the unit.
If the thought of letting go of points makes your heart beat wildly out of control, then implement the first two steps and try something like this for the last two steps:
- 3. Provide descriptive feedback and points or percentages on homework and formative assessments. Go ahead and count them in your grade book, but do not let the points affect the student's unit grade by more than 10 percent. (For more on this, watch Rick Wormeli's video at <LINK URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJxFXjfB_B4" LINKTARGET="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJxFXjfB_B4</LINK>.)
- 4. Scaffold the summative assessment and assess performance for each level of understanding. This means that you need to carefully distribute your points or weight each section of your assessment according to levels of performance. For example, you could place 80 percent of the points in the basic section of the test (or whatever you deem basic), another 10 percent for the next level of understanding (the application level, according to Bloom's Taxonomy), and the remaining percentages for the highest level (the creation/evaluation levels of Bloom's) of understanding.
What's the Point?
Of course I did not arrive where I am today with the simple wave of a magic wand. I have taught for 17 years and I am always evolving on my educational journey. We all deserve opportunities to grow from our own levels of readiness. The sad reality is that the tallying of points only creates point chasers. The prescription for curing point chasers is descriptive feedback. Without points to chase and only words to guide us, we begin to seek knowledge and truly embrace what it means to grow as learners.