Tim Westerberg

Assessment and Grading Common Belief # 9: Classroom assessment and grading practices should motivate students to persevere and strive to produce their BEST work, not just their first work.

Assessment and Grading Common Belief # 8: We have a responsibility to ensure students have opportunities to learn what we expect them to know and be able to do.

Grading and Assessment Common Belief # 7: Valid assessment tasks evaluate student performance vis-a-vis identified student performance expectations--nothing less and nothing more.

Assessment and Grading Common Belief # 6: PLANNED formative assessments are an indispensable component of effective instruction.

Assessment and Grading Common Belief # 5: Performance expectations should be consistent across all teachers of the same grade level/course.

Assessment and Grading Common Belief # 4: Student performance expectations--what students need to show they know and can do--should be clear and transparent.

Assessment and Grading Common Belief # 2: Priority outcomes (standards) should be the same for teachers of the same grade level/course.

Assessment & Grading Common Belief #2: Student and parent understanding is enhanced when there are common agreed-upon assessment & grading policies and practices in place across schools/levels.

Assessment and Grading Common Belief #1: Instruction and assessment should be based on identified course/grade-level standards. (Stay tuned.)

Reassessment opportunities promote a growth mindset and reinforce hard work and persistence. All students should have more than one opportunity to demonstrate competency, not just students in danger of failing. If a student who has a "3" wants to go for a "4," good for her!

Descriptive feedback is regular, formative assessment- and rubric-based, specific, corrective, includes both strengths and areas needing work, and promotes student reflection.

"Holding students accountable by penalizing them with zeros for late/missing work teaches them responsibility." REALLY? What happens in life after K-12 when the points go away?

Formative assessments are planned, measurable, tied directly to learning targets and scoring scales, targeted at critical junctures in the learning progression, mirror summatives in format, testing conditions, & cognitive demand, and provide descriptive feedback to students.

Wormeli and Stafford's 2018 ASCD book "Sumarization, 2nd Edition" is an excellent practical resource for increasing the cognitive level of classroom instruction and assessment.

Anyone who has been in a classroom for any period of time has witnessed the frustration, the hopelessness, and the disengagement of students who have given up because of assessment and grading practices that punish early mistakes and discourage continued effort.

Anyone who has ever been a student, a parent, or an educator knows that course grades, and thus grade point averages, class rank, college admission, scholarships, and athletic eligibility, can depend in no small way on which teacher the computer schedules a student.

We are deluged with reports decrying the plight of students with grade point averages of 3.00 and above who must take remedial coursework in college for which they must pay tuition and for which they receive no credit toward a college degree. Why do we allow this to happen?

Do our current assessment and grading practices encourage persistence and continued learning? According to experts and an increasing number of practitioners the answer is "not always."