Going Gradeless

In his article on the widely popular Edutopia, Matt Weyer, a grade six teacher, explores the idea of going gradeless self-assessment. Weyer writes about Mark Barnes who "Barnes advocated using narrative feedback to enter a feedback loop that would culminate in the mastery of specific learning targets within the context of a larger project" (Weyer 2016). This large project consisted of teaching an entire school year and administering different forms of formative and summative evaluations without assigning a grade level on any of the assignments. The teacher and the student, according to the written feedback given in the duration of the school year, would arrive at the final grade, Weyer states. And what a fascinating idea this is. Reading Weyer's article, I was reminded of Dave Petro's talk about the importance of written feedback, because really what does a 77% mean, and what is the difference between a 3- and a 2+?

Often, teachers mark students' work through a rubric that has been written according to various learning goals and ministry standers. This rubric would have been communicated to the students (and I believe there is a great benefit in telling students what you will be looking for when marking an assignment), and the students then take the rubric and develop the assignment in order to "hit" all the rubric requirements. Later, teachers receive the assignments and match the assignment with the rubric, assigning a grade level. Without communicated this grade average, it really means nothing other than students knowing that he or she did well or not so well. Instead, Weyer started using Barnes' SE2R model to provide feedback.

It was very interesting to read Weyer's article, where he outlined his goals for this experiment. His main goal was to see how students apply themselves when grades are completely removed from the daily equation. Weyer found that students actually more interested and more invested in their learning process. Suddenly, students stopped asking about their grades and started asking about what they can do to improve.

Matt Weyer's Article Link: Going Gradeless: Student Self-Assessment

More about SE2R Model of Feedback: SE2R Feedback Model