Examine your beliefs about grading. State your belief, justify why you believe what you believe. At this point, how well aligned is your grading system with your beliefs, and what are your goals to more closely align them? What specific actions do you need take in order to make this happen?
Well, at this point I don't really know what I believe when it comes to grading. The reason for that is the ongoing work I am doing with the standards-based grading program that I have implemented in my Algebra 2 Concepts class this fall and the research for the very Masters program for which I am writing this reflection. Previously, I might have said that grading should provide the students, parents, and anyone else interested with a concise record of a student's level of achievement in a course. Having an A or B or whatever would be enough to tell everyone that they're a strong, mediocre, or struggling study in a particular field. Now that I have done some research into standards-based grading I like the fact that in that system a student's grade is not a boiled down single letter, but is a record of everything that the student has worked on, had success with, shown improvement on, or still needs to attend to. I am struggling a bit with how I will turn the results of a standards-based graded class into a final grade (my school is on a traditional A - F grading system, so my standards-based class needs to be "converted" for final grades.) The sheer amount of work that it took to get this one class into a standards-based grading system has left me with little energy to try this in my other math classes, though that my change if I believe that is is a model that is better for my students. Any specific actions that I take will have to wait until I have reached a more firm conclusion as to whether I like using a standards-based grading system. I will have the other half of this two-trimeter Algebra 2 Course in the spring and am planning (for now, at least) to grade that the same way I graded the first half, in a standards-based system. Once that is done, I'll be able to make some determinations for the future.
I notice that implementing standards based grading has been a LOT of work - I hope that there will be a big payoff too. I also see that you do believe that grades should communicate a level of achievement, but are limited by the system's A-F requirements. There is a struggle there between showing mastery of a standard and somehow "averaging" these into a letter grade. I'm betting that there will be a more effective system in the near future!
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