How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices With an Eye on Equity. But as Sigmon looked at the logic and supporting data Feldman presented and tried tweaking a few things in his classes, those challenging ideas started to make sense to him. He realized the way he graded was largely based on his own experience in school and beliefs about what students “should do.” But when he started to see each teacher’s grading policies as a set of arbitrary rules students are expected to follow, as opposed to a coherent indication of what a student knows, he was ready to make a change.
“I have to be more thoughtful. My grades now are meant to be an accurate reflection of a student’s mastery of the standards set by the state in high school physics,” Sigmon said. If a student can display their knowledge of those standards without doing the homework, he shouldn’t be penalized for that in his grade, especially because students all have different responsibilities outside of school that can make getting homework done difficult.
What does the the research say about standards-based grading? A research primer [printer-friendly pdf] Authors: Matt Townsley and Tom Buckmiller, Ph.D.
One hundred years, No research to support. Traditional grading practices have been used for over one hundred years, and to date, there have been no meaningful research reports to support it (Marzano, 2000).