What My Grades Mean

I’m not sure if I interpreted this assignment correctly. I may be making more complicated that it needed to be. Hope it’s complicated enough.

Here goes…

I work for the Rochester City School District. The district uses a scale from 1-4 for report card grades. Each report card has a grading key that explains what each number means. The following break down is taken from the third grade report card.

4- Exceeds NYS and District Standards
The student consistently meets and often exceeds the Standard. The student, with relative ease, understands, applies, and extends the key concepts, processes, and skills for the grade level.

3- Meets NYS and District Standards
The student regularly meets the Standard. The student demonstrates proficiency in the vast majority of the grade-level key indicators. The student, with limited errors, understands and applies the key concepts, processes, and skills, for the grade level.

2- Partially Meets NYS and District Standards
The student is beginning to, and occasionally does meet the Standard. The student is beginning to understand and apply the key concepts, processes, and skills for grade level, but produces work that contains many errors.

1- Far below NYS and District Standards
The student is not meeting the Standard. The student is working on key concepts that are one or more years below grade level.

How does this system affect how I grade individual/ specific assignments?

A lot depends on the subject area.
I create rubrics for any assessment that will be used to generate a grade that I intend to use for summative purposes. In other words, if I am measuring how much of the standard or learning targets a student has achieved or the quality level a student has achieved.
A rubric that I create for a math assessment will usually be less complicated than a rubric I create or use for a writing assignment. On the third grade report card there are three sub categories for math and fourteen for writing. Whenever possible, I use a rubric that correlates strongly/directly with the report card categories.




How does this grading system fulfill the needs of…

(1) Students- Students are pretty aware of what their report card grades mean. I would say that the many sub categories/ standards can be somewhat confusing and are definitely not written in the most student friendly language. This in turn leaves it up to the teacher to make sure that students have an understanding of how they are doing in the classroom. I express this to my students in many ways. I conference with my students to discuss their performances on assessments, as often as possible. We discuss their performance based on standards as well as how their performance compares to what their peers are doing and compared to their past performance. I believe that it is of the utmost importance to look at all three conceptual frameworks.

(2) Parents- See above!

(3) I think that this grading system fulfills some of the needs of the school administrators because it is a criterion-referenced framework. It shows how students are performing in relation to both state and district standards. I think it would also be beneficial for school administrators to have access to more norm-referenced and growth-based grading. This is something that my grade level team has started to incorporate as part of an action plan to improve students reading scores.

My grading system does not meet the needs of everyone. I am always searching for ways to improve communication of students’ performance, to parents, especially. I feel that I have made some progress in this area, this year. I definitely see the benefit of the three conceptual frameworks mentioned in the book.