RESEARCH ON ASSESSMENT AND REPORTING PROGRESS

Background

Assessment and grading processes are a collective evidence of a student’s learning records that draws upon an inference regarding a group’s or an individual’s up to date level of attainment. The reporting process involves conversing information on a student’s level of accomplishment and progress to an array of stakeholders concerned. The fundamental function of assessment, grading, and reporting is to progress student learning that is consequent to the classroom, school, and system levels. All this processes can be undertaken both formally and informally in order for an effective assessment and report policies for all learners. This paper strives to set out the underscored principles of assessment and grading processes of student learning since they are all manageable with the involvement of a whole school, than the individual teacher approach.

Grades Based on Standards

This principle will facilitate the grading measures be aligned with the declared learning objectives. This arrangement is ideal and quite unswerving since a grade a validated and reported for each and every learning objective without an overall grade. It will help eliminate the meaningless difficulties in combining an achievement on two dissimilar learning objectives into a singular grade. Therefore, for the final grading criterion, a teacher’s record should not be based on assessment methods, but on the learning goals.

Utilizing Performance Standards

Since performance principles are at the core of assessment and grading mechanisms, this standard will help support learning while also encouraging student achievement by ascertaining the grading criteria will largely rely on apparent, public performance principles which are well comprehended by teachers, learners, and parents. This guideline will be applied be teachers especially those teaching similar grade course or level since a student’s own attainment will found the basis of the grades and not on how that accomplishment weighs against other students. This guideline also eliminates the possibility of grades being based on artificial rationing as experienced in relative standards such as norm referencing or even using the bell curve when distributing grades. In this guideline, a transparent performance standard emerges quite well.

III. Grading of Individual Performance

An individual grading performance system is useful for descriptive functions, especially by teachers when ‘measuring’ a student’s individual growth. This guideline will facilitate the level of learning criteria for each developmental progression so that a particular student’s score does represent their mean performance level for a specific skill-reference class or group. Therefore, a grading scale on an individual performance will be a continuous practice that increases student competitiveness as it is reflected across grades since they are also based on theoretical grade-equivalent curves which are not recorded in most interpolated and extrapolated grading equivalents.

Sampling of Student Performance

By sampling a student’s efforts, this guideline will eliminate the marking of every single assignment and learning undertakings for grades in order to evaluate how much a student has learned in each lesson taught. Through formative assessment, a teacher is able to track and grasp a student’s level of lesson comprehension during the learning process while adjusting to summative assessment in test or quiz structures and form of outline. A teacher is also able to weigh upon their teaching efficiency in their class lessons and units for a conclusive assessment.

Emphasis on More Recent Information

This guideline will facilitate the assessment process to rely more on a student’s recent performance and the grading criteria should therefore not be held up by past learning accomplishments. It will help teachers’ grade students on a more recent front while students are also able to gauge themselves on recent information to consequently take charge of their learning procedures and metacognitively reflect on their development by having access to their updated records.

Crunching of numbers

This guideline set course for a concrete grading system that does not compromise a student’s attainment, especially when the performance varies from time to time. There is usually no need at all to number crunch a student’s grading assessment in situations where their performance has been very consistent and in such cases, the grading should be very clear while it does not work in scenarios where the performance has been very inconsistent. Number crunching does lead to the ‘right’ or accurate grade since traditional grades calculates a student’s grade by the mean or average of the overall score which sometimes works against outlier achievements that are almost low. Therefore, there is no need to use zero in the grading system and teachers should emphasize on a test being retaken since the scale permits a ten point degree of difference from one grade letter to the next in sequence, apart from F which has a 0-60 margin.

VII. Assessment Quality and Record Keeping

This guideline will help assess students on formative and summative values and basis that matches their reverenced learning objectives. Recording such information will also influence the grading system to constantly be based on eminence or quality assessment.

Student Involvement in Grading and Assessment Processes

Since students are typically predisposed on the need to know how they are being assessed, they can be involved in establishing such criterions for accurate and meaningful information so that squabbles on the same issue are reduced and eliminated. Involving students in the formative assessment process through self and peer-led conferences can end up being a powerful tool for student-teacher cooperation towards an effective learning process.

VIII. Placing it all Together

By including all performance standards into the assessment process, the resulting information should inform teachers, parents, and other stakeholders involved on a students trend of attainment and should not determine their learning progression or be defensive of the overall assessment procedure. The paramount aim of the process should be to raise achievement in the assessment process and the student’s learning objectives while also enabling teachers to forge a compelling learning experience to their students.

Why is it so important to base grades on learning goals rather than assessment methods?

First of all, learning goals are more iteratively interactive since they are clearly defined to linearly enhance teacher-student cooperation as it develops a sequential set of activities which are carefully designed to promote students’ understanding at firsthand priority. While in performance assessment methods, it has some vicarious shortcomings since its methods are not clearly designed to provide an insight into student behavioral functions and if their failure in a skill or lesson was a consequence of either a skill or performance deficit. Therefore, assessment methods are short of information which limits a teacher’s ability in designing and evaluating an intervention that will promote student success.