Can focusing on grades be a barrier to learning? Or is it a motivator?

Is the impact of assessment and grading on the students a measure of learning? How can we teach without grading?

What a wonderful feeling for a parent once their son or daughter receives their report - an A or B grade, 90% to 100%. Grades provide reassurance that their child is on track in their learning. A feeling of joy.

​However, the reality is that many parents will not receive this message, as when tested against international benchmarks and international examinations, a large percentage of students fail in examinations. 

In a recent report Sir Martin Taylor, chair of the Royal Society's Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education, told MPs in the UK that pupils who fail to pass their GCSE are "doomed to this cycle of redoing resits again and again with only about one in four ever getting there."

In August 2022, it was reported that almost a third of students still need to achieve a standard pass in English and Maths at GCSE compounding concerns that many pupils in the UK are leaving school without the basics to get on in life.

An independent study reported, "A fifth of all students in England, or around 100,000 pupils each year, do not achieve the grade 4 pass grade in both English language and maths."
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"The forgotten fifth of pupils leaving school lacking basic English and maths skills is one of education's biggest scandals," Professor Lee Elliot Major, co-author of the research paper, said.

High Stakes
Examinations at 16 and 18 years old still carry high stakes and are used to determine a learner's future.

Suddenly, during the Covid pandemic – exams were canceled, and teachers had to find a way to assess and provide a grade. And they did so.

The question up for debate is, do single, high-stakes exams constructively and comprehensively measure genuine learning? And what value do they add?

Or are there ways to better determine if students have demonstrated 'deep' and meaningful learning?

Still, in 2023 many examination boards expect students to sit two to three-hour sit-down, written examinations where students are not allowed to access notes, texts, or any sources of information.

Still and invariably, this measures how much the student has retained and memorized information and how they are, under stress, to recall or even apply factual information.  

Still, evidence suggests that most examinations are narrowly focused, asking students to list, describe, identify or explain.  

Grade boundaries
And more so, only a certain percentage is allowed to get top grades - in 2023, and it is more challenging to get a top grade than in 2019!
When teachers assessed their children, their grades were higher.

Benchmarks
These benchmarks force teachers to - teach to the exam to get a higher grade because they need to play the system for the benefit of their students.

Benchmark examinations in schools do not provide authentic opportunities for genuine creative problem-solving, analytic thought, or evaluation of concepts - in a real-life situation. However, the skills may be used superficially on provided texts, under timed situations which depends on high literacy ability. But it is what is happening now and will continue in the immediate future.

Success in examinations
For many years there has been evidence that many students master the skills of passing exams and demonstrate a natural aptitude for doing so.

Does this measure actual capability, and how much of what they memorized for the exam can be applied to real-world situations?

What is learning all about?

The learning process in schools is to inspire and guide students about their learning to help them improve.

The role of the teacher is to provide a valuable, relevant learning environment in which students are fully engaged in their learning.

There is probably not a teacher in the world that would dispute this.
And whatever the method of assessment used to assess learning, it should provide students with constructive feedback about their progress and help them improve.

What are your views on using single, high-stakes exams in fulfilling such a role for all learners?

​Examinations are summative and only allow learners to improve or learn from their mistakes if schools use the examination process as a genuine part of the teaching and learning process intertwined with formative learning.  

This issue is that exam boards do not return examination papers, so summative means summative.

Forty-eight percent of US teachers say their grades reflect effort more than achievement (Hubbard, 2019).

But even if awarded solely for achievement, grades are poor indicators of students' long-term learning progress.

This is because grades are always specific to a particular work or course of learning.  

They identify students as successfully demonstrating expected learning and often measured against students demonstrating more than others. 

For most students, grades indicate success on year-level learning expectations, leaving parents to infer that their children are on track and ready for the following year's curriculum.  

So parents are given the impression that everything is fine, and they need to do anything differently.
● The problem is that learning is not like this.
● It is a continuous, ongoing process.

Grades are based on the assumption that students make a fresh start in their learning every year – that all commence on an equal footing and that the grades they receive reflect only their efforts and achievements during that particular year.

Personalizing learning
As teachers and educators, we all know that students begin each year at widely different start points, which strongly influence the grades they receive.
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And unless personalized, the year's curriculum may be unrelated to the previous year's curriculum.  

So imagine a scenario where students understand what they can do and provide you with the evidence that despite the year's curriculum ahead, they already have mastery of it.

Or, indeed, a personalized curriculum based on authentic evidence of learning where students demonstrate readiness for what they will learn next. 

Indeed imagine a visible learning journey - a curriculum in student language - so visible that parents can see and appreciate their child's progress in a specific area of learning, becoming effective partners in their child's learning and even providing stretch challenges connected to real life.

But exams prevent cheating!
One argument is that perhaps exams prevent plagiarism, working together, communication – cheating.

But is it cheating when a student tries to improve by asking others? Or asking AI to improve their understanding?

Is this not collaboration, thinking out of the box?

Examination papers, given in advance?
There have been developments in recent years, particularly in the arts, where students are given exam questions and asked to provide a portfolio of evidence.

However, even in these cases, they are given a time restraint and very fixed criteria, often stifling creativity rather than supporting research sources and providing a more comprehensive response graded according to learner talents. 

Can one teach without grades?
Transitioning to teaching without grades is no small task, requiring rejecting an established model that has dominated education since its inception.

The long-standing policy binds most teachers and depends on grades. 

Students still have the mindset grades demonstrate learning.

Parents operate under this same delusion, and they struggle to comprehend a class that is not graded.

Colleges and universities still expect grades for admissions even though the profession agrees to help students grow to value learning for the sake of learning are more important than a grade.  

Some teachers are beginning to use digital portfolio tools, collecting student evidence of learning; however, much of their enthusiasm disappears when there is a demand for grading.  

The paradigm of removing grading must be based on clear objectives and visible evidence.   

"I hope none of you ever goes to a professional learning session to learn about another app, resource, or teaching method. I could not care less about how you teach! I care about the impact of your teaching and about how you think about your teaching."

Watch the video to learn how John Hattie and his team help teachers use the evidence in their schools.

There is an argument, perhaps, that students are motivated to work for grades, but most are motivated by fear of a bad grade.

If they receive a low mark, their parents will punish them, the  y won't be allowed to play football, or they might not be admitted to the ideal university.  

When students are curious about a new concept or skill and see activities as enjoyable, they'll always participate.

The mindset is that I will only do it if I get a good grade. 

When moving away from traditional grades, assessment becomes different. 

Benefits
● You'll begin conversing with students about their strategies, successes, and failures.
● You develop meaningful narrative feedback.
● Observation, inspiration, critical thinking, and feedback take up most teachers' time.
● Students will use creativity, videos, and audio to create a personal learning portfolio.
● Students will also start to record their work and collaboration and add it to their individual portfolios.
● Students will have the ability to 'grade themselves.'
● In a successful no-grades classroom, they become the best judges of their learning.
You'll find that learners are typically much stricter critics of their learning than teachers against learning objectives.

What, no grades?
One of the most hotly debated questions in education is the role of grades and the fear of how teachers effectively assess student learning and how schools gauge progress fairly and adequately.  

Research has shown that grading is a solid predictor of student-success outcomes, but it is only sometimes an accurate representation of what students know.

Though educators have played with alternative forms of assessment for decades, schools, individual teachers, and students often focus on earning good grades at the expense of learning.

Competency-based learning, for which students earn credit for mastering learning at their speed, has also been gaining ground.  

No grades movement
​The no-grades movement aims to steer students away from passive learning and into a more active role in their schooling.

The focus is on the learning process rather than the score, and the pressure of performance is replaced by an environment where students feel free to make mistakes, continuously self-evaluate, and develop a deeper understanding.

It also champions increased parent involvement and teacher feedback. 

Way forward
The answer to the best route to assessment takes work. But the paradigm can change in the classroom...

As more schools and teachers think about assessment in broader terms, there's an explicit recognition that test scales used to measure learning are not the only way, or perhaps the best, to measure what students know. 

In the classroom, we can lead by inspiring real learning and authentic evidence rather than using the exam as a threat... to force learning.

I would be keen to hear your views or success stories.

Thanks for sharing the following inspirational TEDTalk - why the system fails a lot of our children.

​By Dr. Tassos Anastasiades