Customer Reviews

Classroom Assessment & Grading That Work

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First of all, Marzano is NOT a K-12 teacher nor has he ever been (going by the About the Author section). He is a meta-researcher, which means he doesn't even do original research. He takes a load of research other groups have done, reanalyzes it, then gives his own take on it all. This book is something administrators will talk about because they too, are not in the classroom. It is not feasible for any working teacher to apply the principles that Marzano suggests. In theory - where Marzano lives - the stuff is great. But in practice, his suggestions border on the moronic. Some of his statements for evidence don't even make sense, and his use of numbers (I teach science and can read between the lines of data) are pathetic at times (good data, but lousy conclusion). Chapter 3 really outlines what he suggests so borrow a copy for 15 minutes, read chapter 3, and find another book. Kudos to you teachers trying to hone your craft though! I suggest "Test Better, Teach Better" by Popham.

Not to belabor the point: a portion of this book explains how a specific brand of software facilitates Robert Marzano's premise about standards reporting.

That notwithstanding, the substance of this book is classic Marzano...concise and worthy of consideration. In a nutshell: track learner performance over time and use a power formula to produce averaged "standards grades" that educational community stakeholders may find more accessible than page-after-page of excruciating standards-based reporting.

I have no argument with tracking individual student performance over time. I am less enthusiastic about the use of a power formula to produce a standards grade. Current assessment technology...both summative and formative...is rarely granular enough in discrimination resolution to produce anything more than a low resolution snapshot of a student's performance. When low-resolution assessment snapshots are averaged together...with or without a weighting scheme...and perhaps with an assortment of other kinds of scores (e.g. class participation rating, WOW gold, or whatever)...the resulting performance abstraction (whether called a letter grade or a standards grade) can be misunderstood and misused in spite of its familiarity. For example, please identify the fallacy in the following statement: "My kid must be doing better in Basketweaving 101 than she is doing in Basic Puddlejumping because she got an A- compared to a B+ but she at least gets to keep driving the SUV." Okay, maybe there's more than one fallacy in this statement (laugh).

This is not an indictment of Marzano's work, rather it is a criticism of the current educational milieu in which he and countless others work. Bottom line: a well-written position paper and a useful description of software development the author is associated with.

While I sometimes find Marzano's books a little heavy-handed on the research component, I did appreciate and use many portions of this book. In my work as an educational administrator supporting the development and implementation of a standards-based report card, I especially used the sections on Type I-III tasks and their alignment with scoring rubrics.

I got a great deal out of this book. Marzano's books are always very research based (a plus if you ask me) so they're nto exactly beach reading. This book, in particular, mostly describes a specific grading method that is similar to CBM, that needs to be implemented school wide. It also adresses several braod ideas that are important to authentic assessment that teachers can apply at a classroom level.

In a world where assessment is becoming more and more important, schools and teachers need to understand and manage it better. This book can help us do both.

I teach high school Spanish. Our principal makes frequent reference to Robert Marzano in faculty meetings. Apparently Marzano is very highly regarded among people with PhD in Education. Our principal especially recommended this book, so I bought it to read during the summer. I got half way thru it, dozed off many times, and put it down for good.