Transforming Classroom Grading

This book helps you come to grips with what you have been thinking and what you know. Introducing new concepts to children and then grading them immediately on their grasp of the concept doesn't work. Students need time to learn, apply, and then utilize the information across curriculum. Grades for new concepts should be harvested along with evidence at the end of the quarter/trimester rather than the beginning of the quarter/trimester. This book argues that we should be utilizing grades for effort along with knowledge grades. It further argues for informative report card comments rather than just a grade. Comments need to include what evidence we found to indicate that the student has a grasp on the concept.

I'm about to rave about this book, so let me say first that I'm not a friend of the author and I have no connection to the publisher. I'm a professor in a school of education with an interest in all sorts of assessment, but classroom assessment in particular. This is the best book on grading I've read yet. Marzano first argues that grading is a very important matter, at the heart of the instructional process, but one that is also under-studied, generally poorly done, and very resistant to change. Then he argues that grades should mainly reflect academic attainment of particular objectives, not the accumulation of points, and he proposes a gradebook organized as a table for each student, a matrix of objectives by demonstrations, scored through the use of rubrics. If teachers can get past the initial concern that this will require a lot of time up front to implement, the result could be a system that empowers students and focuses them on what they need to learn.