1. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute OBJECTIVES You will understand: 1. Different ways to summarize student progress and achievement in a course or level. 2. The challenges inherent in grading students for reporting and advancement purposes. You will be able to: 1. Generate relevant and meaningful grades for student progress and achievement reports.

2. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute GRADING At the end of any course, language or otherwise, all students expect to receive a grade, either a letter (A, B, C, D) or a number out of 100 from the teacher to tell them how they did in the course. If students don’t receive a grade, they will probably feel that they did not get their money’s worth out of a course. Perhaps through our cumulative experiences in our education systems, we are conditioned to expect a grade at the end of a course. From a pedagogical perspective, the purpose of grading is to sum up all of the assessments given over the span of the course. The assessments may be weighted differently to indicate how important the teacher or school considers each of the different kinds of assessment. Grading is used to determine if students pass a course. In language instruction, grading is also used to determine if students can move up to the next level in a series of courses of increasing difficulty.

3. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute Grading is not as simple as just assigning a letter or a number to a student. There are many issues that immediately rise to the surface as soon students are assigned a grade. Grading, then is quite a politically-loaded step in the teaching process:  Students will get together and compare grades and make judgments about each other based upon the grades.  Different students and their parents will assign different meanings to the grades.  Some students will hang every ounce of their self-esteem on their grades; other students will not care at all what you give them.  Some parents will accept the grade you assign; others will protest the grade you give their son or daughter and force you to justify it.  Grades can be high stakes; a student’s entrance into a program or course may be determined only by the grade they receive. Given how much weight students and parents put on the grading process, it is surprising how little consideration is given to this process.

4. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR GRADE TO REFLECT? In Brown’s Language Assessment, one of the first questions to ask in grading students is what we actually want the grade to reflect. In other words, which aspects of student performance in the course do we want to capture in the grade? We could use any of the following criteria:  language knowledge and performance as demonstrated on tests  language knowledge and performance as demonstrated on alternative assessments  participation in class  behaviour in class  improvement over the span of the course  effort  motivation  punctuality and attendance  the teacher’s informal observation about student performance

5. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute DETERMINING CRITERIA FOR FINAL GRADES Logically, the criteria that you choose to include in your final grade should be related to your overall course objectives. It makes sense, then, to heavily weight the tests and alternate assessments that you have administered, because these should be a direct reflection of your course objectives. However, you may also want to include other aspects of student performance in your final grade in order to acknowledge other student behaviour that meets the course objectives. For example, if one of your course objectives is to improve student confidence with the language, then you could choose to include things like attendance, effort, motivation, and participation in your grading. A problem to be aware of with some of the criteria, (effort/motivation/participation) is that they are very difficult to quantify, and can therefore be very subjective.

6. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute ADVICE FOR DETERMINING GRADING CRITERIA Brown gives the following advice for deciding what criteria to use in your determination of your final grades and how to weight those criteria: 1. All teachers at your school or institution should use the same weighting of the criteria in order for there to be consistency among classes and levels. 2. At the beginning of the course, you should explicitly state how final grades will be determined and give all students a copy of the breakdown. Students should be reminded periodically throughout the course how their final grade will be determined. 3. You should be aware of which criteria in the final grade are subjective and make an effort to quantify them as much as possible. 4. You should still allocate the majority of your weighting to the concrete assessments (tests and alternative assessments) that closely match your course objectives. The other criteria should be used to round out the picture.

7. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute DETERMINING THE LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY OF AN ASSESSMENT One of the challenges in grading students is making sure that the assessments used for the final grade are at the right level of difficulty. If your assessment is too easy or too difficult, your final grades will not effectively differentiate students who are competent from those who are not. The key to correctly determining the level of difficulty of your assessment is to clearly delineate your expectations of how students of different capabilities will perform on it. Brown offers tips to keep in mind for creating an assessment at the right level:  Tap into your past experience with student performance on similar assessments  Make your assessment items clear and relevant to the objectives of the course  Make your tasks reflective of tasks students have done in class  Have a variety of tasks on the test or assessment  Reference prior assessments that teachers have made for the same course  Take your time preparing your assessments - good assessments can not be created quickly  Review your assessment once you have written it  Know your students’ collective ability

8. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute ABSOLUTE VERSUS RELATIVE GRADING Absolute grading means that whatever actual percentage or grade students receive in the assessments used to calculate the final grade is directly associated with a specific letter grade. The advantage to absolute grading is that a student’s grade is a direct result of their own effort, regardless of how the other students in the class perform. The pass/fail standards are also very concrete and clear. The disadvantage to absolute grading is that if the assessments used to determine the final grade are too easy or too difficult, the class as a whole may look either very capable or very incapable.

9. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute RELATIVE GRADING Relative grading means that students are assigned grades relative to the performance of the other students in the class. The teacher decides that they will assign a certain number of A’s, B’s, and C’s in the class. There are several ways to distribute grades in relative grading.  In one, the teacher can divide the class into four groups by score. The top 25% of the class gets an “A”; the next 25% of the class gets a “B”; the next 25% of the class gets a “C”; and finally, the last 25% of the class gets a “D”.  In another relative grading system the teacher distributes grades according to a normal curve. This is called “bell-curving”. In bell-curving, the top 10% of the class receives an “A”; the next 20% of the class receives a “B”; the middle 40% of the class receives a “C”; the next 20% of the class receives a “D”; and the lowest 10% in the class receives an “F”. Relative grading can compensate for flaws in an assessment that may be too easy or too hard, so that the competent students can still be differentiated from those that are not as competent. The problem with relative grading is that a group of students may actually be more competent than average, so competent students at the lower end of the group do not receive marks that reflect their real ability. The pass/fail standards also become less clear with relative grading. The actual percentage that constitutes a pass or fail will vary from class to class. *See p. 572 in this module’s lecture notes for final notes on absolute and relative grading.

10. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute WHAT DO THE GRADES MEAN? Related to the issue of absolute or relative grading is the basic question of what the letters or numbers actually mean. If a student receives an “A” what does it mean? What does a “B” mean? And a “C”? We are so used to having these letter grades assigned to us as students (and to using them as teachers) that we forget what we want to actually convey with their use. Brown is blunt in his assessment of the usefulness of letter or number grades on their own: “A number or a grade provides absolutely no information to a student beyond a vague sense that he or she has pleased or displeased the teacher, or the assumption that some other students have done better or worse.” (p. 295). We can not simply tell students that an “A” means excellent or above average or exceeds expectations. We need to associate an “A” with descriptors that detail what an “A” student can do with the language, or how many of the course objectives they mastered. We might also consider combining the grade with an alternative grading system.

11. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute WHAT ARE SOME ALTERNATIVES TO LETTER AND NUMBER GRADES? Using letters or numbers to grade students gives a precise and therefore easily defensible way to provide student feedback. This is important, given that grades are often used as admission to other courses, or for other high stakes purposes. If it seems letter or number grades do not provide the meaningful information we want our students to have at the end of the course, the following may be useful:  Qualitative comments, descriptions or narrative about past and current student ability  A checklist of abilities that the student has or has not demonstrated  Student self-assessment, (rather than teacher assessment) in the form of a checklist, description, or journal *The above methods provide a lot more information to the student about their ability because the methods are personalized and detailed.

12. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute WEAKNESSES OF ALTERNATIVE GRADING SYSTEMS The downside is that some alternatives can be time-consuming and subjective; in addition, some students or parents expect to receive a grade and will feel cheated if they do not. In education and social science research, there is a concept called triangulation. Triangulation simply means that a researcher uses three different ways to collect research data, to compensate for the weaknesses of each form of data collection. A researcher might use a questionnaire, journaling, and focus groups to collect data: The questionnaire provides quantifiable information, the journaling provides open-ended qualitative information, and the focus group provides directed qualitative information. We can apply the same principle of triangulation to our grading. We can provide three types of feedback to our students, so that we compensate for the weaknesses of each method. For example, we can provide a letter grade, a checklist, and a comment. We therefore achieve the preciseness of a letter grade, the directed information in a checklist, and the open information in a comment.

13. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute CROSS-CULTURAL FACTORS An interesting twist in language instruction is that students may not come from the same culture as we do, and therefore may have a different set of assumptions about assessment and grading than we do:  In some cultures, the only acceptable form of assessment is a test.  In some cultures, student self-assessment is unheard of, so the only tasks that are considered assessments involve the teacher.  In some cultures, students never question the grade the teacher has assigned, while in others this is completely acceptable.  In some cultures, it is unheard of for students to receive perfect on an assessment or a final grade, as this means that the teacher hasn’t made the test hard enough to challenge the students.  In some cultures, the final grade is determined solely by a final exam at the end of the year, so having different kinds of assessments is considered strange.  In some cultures, a teacher’s ability and performance is determined solely by how their students perform on that single final exam.

14. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute YOUR SCHOOL’S GRADING SYSTEM Answer each of the questions below to evaluate the grading system used in your school or institution (or a school with which you are familiar) for the final grades of students. A. Describe your school’s grading system. B. Do you think this is a clear and consistent grading system? Why or why not? C. Do the teachers all follow this grading system? Why or why not? D. Is your grading system clearly spelled out for your students? Why or why not? E. Is it absolute or relative grading? F. What changes would you make to your grading system to make it more meaningful?