Chapter 7 FIAE: The Relative Nature of Grades and Their Definitions

This chapter focuses on grades, grading, and defining grading. The book points out to “avoid becoming complacent regarding the role of grading in teaching and learning” (94). Grading has become the “elephant in the room” that everyone has to do, but no one likes to talk about. I found two things to be very interesting from this chapter. The first one was that adjustments must be made to each student when it comes to grading their work. Many different factors take part in each assignment with each student. The quote “Students thrive because teachers bend a little here and there to teach in ways in which students can best learn and so remain hopeful about their prospects” (92), really called out to me. While I was a student in high school I had a teacher who did just that for me when it came to my math class. She recognized that if I were to orally do a math test, or have her handwriting on the test as opposed to a word processed test, I scored much higher. Her ability to recognize my style of learning, and then to “bend” to help me receive the best grade possible meant the world to me. The second thing that I found to be very interesting is that research finds that when a task is graded the quality of the work declines. It’s almost like because students know they’re going to be judged they worry too much about that, and lose focus on their premium work that they’re capable of. The thing that I really took from this chapter was that students need feedback, and that grades are not feedback. Grades are the final call...if we want students to learn, we need to always be discussing the content, and must always be giving feedback, without the grade.