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New report cards aim to make mastery clear.
A few years ago, it occurred to Frank Noschese, a physics teacher at John Jay High School in Westchester County, NY, that some of his 11th graders were able to get A's in his class without mastering complex concepts. They could solve exam problems that required them to plug in the right numbers but routinely missed the few questions that tested their understanding of more advanced concepts. Because Noschese's grading system didn't differentiate between those levels of knowledge, there was little incentive for students to focus on harder material.
Noschese wanted a method that would encourage students to move from easy concepts to hard ones and reward them for ultimately obtaining knowledge, no matter how long it took. So he designed a new grading system, inspired by the work of Robert J. Marzano and Jane E. Pollock. Now, every time Noschese's students take a quiz, they don't see one grade but three or four, each indicating whether they have demonstrated their understanding of a pertinent idea. Students who fail to grasp a concept have second and third chances to show they have finally mastered it, by retaking a quiz, conducting a lab experiment, or simply sitting with Noschese at his desk and explaining it.
Noschese is part of a growing band of teachers, schools, and entire districts that have put their faith in standardsbased grading, an innovative, albeit complex and sometimes controversial, method that aims to make grades more meaningful. A standards-based report card contains an overall grade for each course but also indicates how well a student has mastered each of the class's several standards. As well, while traditional end-of-course grades are the final products of many factors, including quizzes, homework, behavior, and attendance, with standardsbased grading nothing but mastery matters. Standards-based grades account for nonacademic elements very minimally or not at all.
Even if those "process" factors are important aspects of student development, says Ken O'Connor, author of A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades, report cards need to separate them from academic attainment.
A Clearer Picture
Grading originally served to determine which students should be promoted to the next level, says Madhabi Chatterji, associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University....