AAC Communique is also on-line in the Newsletter Archive at www.aac.ab.ca/news.html

New Members
AAC is pleased to announce that the Tlicho Community Services Agency, Moberly Hall Charter School and Yellowknife Education District #1 are now members of the AAC.

Our membership currently stands at 71 educational jurisdictions.

Good assessment is like a photo album, not a snapshot. That's why one test score is not enough. Attributed to Jay McTighe

Determining a Grade

What body of evidence is needed for a teacher to make a reliable judgement about student performance to determine a grade?

From time to time the AAC receives requests similar to this: "As a school administrator I have concern about the lack of marks that are being used in evaluating student performance. I question whether a report card grade is valid when only 3 or 4 marks per term are used. My question is.....how many marks should a teacher use to determine a grade?"

Lets begin with a definition of terms:

Performance- how well a student demonstrates grade level learner outcomes

Grade (mark)- a letter, number or comment reported at the end of a period of time as a summary statement of student performance based on a variety of summative assessments

Here are views on this topic by assessment authorities (used with permission). See also the very informative link by Grant Wiggins, www.bigideas.org.

Todd Rogers (Centre for Applied Measurement and Evaluation, University of Alberta)

The most common minimum number is 7 to 10 assessments to be added to get an end of reporting period grade. This will yield a total score with reliability close to if not greater than 0.8. I also encourage teachers not to include formative assessment results in the final composite score. The intents of formative assessments are to inform decisions regarding daily learning by students and to inform or otherwise refine instruction. Other assessments are of a summative nature in which students are asked to demonstrate what they have learned at the end of an instructional sequence (e.g., end of chapter, end of unit). Put another way, formative assessment are for learning and summative assessments are of learning. However, many teachers do include the results of formative assessments in the term grade. If so, then the upper value of the range of the number of assessment results to be added to determine an end of reporting period grade should be adhered to.

Rich Shavelson at Stanford did a lot of work with performance assessments and found that generalization from one assessment to another was low. He, therefore, suggested 5 to 8.

An important consideration is to have teachers use a variety of assessment methods and see if the information collected converges. If it does, then the error of measurement is lower and the validity of the inferences drawn from the information is higher. (See Principles for Fair Student Assessment Practices in Education in Canada -Guideline IV in Part A - www.education.ualberta.ca/educ/psych/crame/research.htm. and Student Evaluation Standards, Corwin, 2003, 155-166.)

Tom Guskey (Professor, College of Education, University of Kentucky)

First, in the Handbook on Formative and Summative Evaluation of Student Learning, Bloom, Hastings, and Madaus (1971) argue that educators first must decide the purpose of the assessment. If truly formative (to check for understanding and to inform), then it should not be considered in determining students' grades. They stress that this would detract from the assessment's formative purposes and make it an evaluation device. Bloom and his colleagues then went on to outline a variety of strategies teachers could consider to motivate students to put forth their best effort on assessments that "did not count" for a grade.

Second, as I have argued in many forums, educators also must decide the purpose of the grade. If the grade is to reflect an accurate estimate of what students know and can do at a particular point in time, then only evidence that reflects this culmination of learning should be used in making that determination. Because any single source of such evidence can be tainted, it is best to use multiple sources, all of which the teacher can defend as accurate and unbiased. But without clear evidence on the reliability and validity of these evidence sources, there is no magic number that must be met. One or 2 good sources are better than 7 or 8 poor ones.

A critical aspect of this decision-making process, however, is that the teacher must clearly distinguish the final achievement or product from process elements; that is, distinguish what students know and can do from how students got there. Since formative assessments, as learning checks along the way, clearly mark "process" elements, their inclusion in determining a grade would be considered questionable at best. (See Developing Grading and Reporting Systems for Student Learning, T. Guskey & J. Bailey, Corwin: 2001 for further insights.)

Lorna Earl (OISE/University of Toronto)

I think it is fair to say that teachers' judgements have never been very reliable - that is, they are not consistent across classes and schools and there are rarely sufficient eyes or enough data, with clear reference points to allow real confidence in the judgements. This doesn't mean that they can't be, only that current practices make it hard for there to be any consistency across teachers or schools. The general rules for enhancing reliability are - clear reference points, multiple measures, and inter rater agreement.

Jay McTighe and Ken O'Connor ("Seven Practices of Effective Learning", Educational Leadership, Vol. 63, No. 3, Nov. 2005, 17. Alexandria, VA: ASCD)

… important principle in classroom assessment, grading and reporting: New evidence of achievement should replace old evidence. Classroom assessment should focus on how well -not on when-the student mastered the designated knowledge and skill.

Fall Conference 2006 - Call for Presenters

The Alberta Assessment Consortium is looking for presenters for the 12th Annual Fall Conference at Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton, Alberta - November 3 and 4, 2006. Our conference theme this year is ASSESSMENT: the Teaching - Learning Connection. We anticipate more than 1000 registrants.

Applications focused on effective research-based classroom assessment and communication practices that support student learning will be accepted. In the past we have received more applications than we have space to accommodate; therefore, not all submissions will be accepted.

In feedback from previous conferences, participants have indicated that they would like sessions that are

• Clearly focused on assessment, evaluation and/or communication of student learning
• Division and/or subject specific
• Practical in nature
• Informative with classroom/school/jurisdiction stories of how assessment practices enhance learning