Grades Reinforce Learning as Process, Not an Event
When it comes to getting students on track for post-secondary opportunities, it’s important to inspect the role played by our grading practices. How do we actually measure and grade learning? We support teachers to ask questions like ‘Are my grading mechanisms sophisticated enough to capture when a student goes from not understanding to understanding? If a student didn’t understand something at one point in time, but comes to understand it at a later point in time –– do I have a way of capturing that?’
At California Education Partners, our partner districts strengthen four interrelated fundamental systems for instructional improvement: clear expectations, effective practices, building capacity, and monitoring outcomes.
For districts in the 8th-9th On Track Collaboration, applying the four fundamentals to grading practices is an important part of their improvement process. We support teams of teachers and administrators to gather evidence to ensure that grades accurately reflect the level of learning of students. It helps to know what we intend students to learn. Students learn things at school- if they’re learning the things that we intend for them to learn, it should be by design.
Effective grading systems allow for ongoing assessment and feedback throughout the learning process—not just at the end of instruction. This continuous feedback helps both teachers and students identify specific areas that need attention and adjust instruction accordingly.
For teachers, it is essential to know how specifically their grading practices can illustrate what a student knows and can do. If a student receives a B on the Chapter Four test, with five big ideas, do we know which ones they understand well? Does the student have an equal understanding of all of them, or does the student understand some concepts better than others? How does the grade communicate that? Accuracy is one of our top goals. We want to support teachers to make sure grades are calibrated, clear, and communicate to students in a meaningful way the state of their learning.
Grades that feel true, accurate, and meaningful help motivate students to focus on improvement rather than feeling judged. These can make clear where to go next and which skills or knowledge need strengthening. A low grade begins to feel less like a sentence, and more like feedback, letting the student know where their understanding is right now. Students begin to recognize this feedback lets them know where they might need to direct their attention.
A good grading system can re-engage students. Students can feel like what they do in a class doesn’t matte when they find a mismatch between their grades and their perceived effort and understanding. There comes a point in a marking period where students begin to think, “I’m already in such a big hole, I’m going to disengage”. When teachers have a grading system that allows for multiple learning opportunities that are measured whenever learning happens, it encourages students who might have struggled at the one point in the term to reframe and value their learning process, thinking,“I think I’m starting to get things together and I see my grade reflecting that”.
I’ve seen many teachers make several significant changes to their grading and instructional practices through the course of our 3-year partnership with them:
- They moved from a traditional grading approach to one that incorporated progressive, cumulative assessments within a unit. Rather than assessing only at the end, the teacher gave regular quizzes that revisited content. This helped students recognize the material and recognize their progress in understanding. The teacher taught and gave a quiz. A few days later, he added a few more things that they were learning to the next quiz, but included concepts that were taught at the beginning of the unit. Each new assessment had new material on it along with previous topics so the students could see the connections and recognize their growing understanding. As a result of this spiraling, more students understood and could demonstrate their learning on the assessment at the end of the unit.
- They shifted reassessment and reteaching into regular classroom routines, rather than requiring students to come after school or on their own time. This shift made it easier for all students—including those most in need—to access opportunities to relearn and demonstrate improved understanding.
- In the gradebook, instead of recording grades as a single entry per test or assignment, the teacher began tracking performance on specific topics or standards. When a student improved in a particular area, that new evidence could directly and easily update their grade.
Overall, these changes resulted in a grading system that was more responsive to individual learning, gave students frequent feedback and encouragement, and made grades a clearer indicator of specific skills and knowledge. This, in turn, helped keep students engaged and motivated throughout the learning process.
When grading systems are set up to truly reflect student learning and are aligned with what is taught, they reinforce instructional priorities, ensuring that grades act as meaningful indicators of progress toward learning objectives.