Grading

Abstract

The term grading refers to at least two categories of teacher tasks: evaluating the quality of individual examples of student work or performance with a grade, and reviewing student work to determine an overall grade for a course or part of a course. Not all student work or activities are destined to receive grades: some authors differentiate between formative assessment tasks (in which data are used by teachers and student to modify instruction, and are usually not graded) and summative assessment tasks (in which data are used for the purpose of evaluation, usually by grading). The process of grading examples of student work is highly contextual: the evaluation of ‘quality’ is dependent on the purpose of the task, the expected proficiency level of students, important differences between students, and multiple other factors. The process of combining evidence into an overall grade for a course (or part of a course) is even more complex because it requires teachers to determine how much ‘weight’ individual pieces of evidence should have within the calculation of the overall grade. Grading is a challenging and complex enough task to defy simple rules or easy answers, and this complexity needs to be attended to as students, teachers, and scholars think about how best to grade learning.