Customer Reviews

Transforming Classroom Grading

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I'm about to rave about this book, so let me say first that I'm not a friend of the author and I have no connection to the publisher. I'm a professor in a school of education with an interest in all sorts of assessment, but classroom assessment in particular. This is the best book on grading I've read yet.

Marzano first argues that grading is a very important matter, at the heart of the instructional process, but one that is also under-studied, generally poorly done, and very resistant to change.

Then he argues that grades should mainly reflect academic attainment of particular objectives, not the accumulation of points, and he proposes a gradebook organized as a table for each student, a matrix of objectives by demonstrations, scored through the use of rubrics. If teachers can get past the initial concern that this will require a lot of time up front to implement, the result could be a system that empowers students and focuses them on what they need to learn.

This book helps you come to grips with what you have been thinking and what you know. Introducing new concepts to children and then grading them immediately on their grasp of the concept doesn't work. Students need time to learn, apply, and then utilize the information across curriculum. Grades for new concepts should be harvested along with evidence at the end of the quarter/trimester rather than the beginning of the quarter/trimester. This book argues that we should be utilizing grades for effort along with knowledge grades. It further argues for informative report card comments rather than just a grade. Comments need to include what evidence we found to indicate that the student has a grasp on the concept.

A practical approach to moving to a system of assessment and evaluation without grades. I've always said that I'd love to eliminate grades from teaching, but this is the first time I've seen how it could be realistically done. Two concerns that Marzano didn't completely resolve for me: 1) convincing the community of teachers, parents, students, etc. to try it, and 2) making it manageable for teachers. He acknowledges both challenges, but I don't think he admits to just how significant they are. Nevertheless, he provides everything necessary to make the transformation happen.

This is a great book for anyone who is looking at ways to improve classroom grading practices. My son used it for a persausive paper he wrote for 10th grade English. I also read it and thought it had some great advice for classroom grading.