Not making the grade: rethinking student assessment

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This article was published 05/10/2023 (787 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As most students in B.C. began the new school year without traditional grades, a former Manitoba teacher living in that province is urging colleagues here to do their homework on modern assessment and experiment with marking.

Starting this year, public and private school teachers in British Columbia are assessing kindergarten through Grade 9 with a scale describing a student’s level of understanding — “emerging,” “developing,” “proficient” or “extending” — instead of letter grades.

Grade 10, 11 and 12 students will continue to receive traditional letter grades and percentages.

“What’s wrong with percentages? There’s nothing wrong with them. They are a wonderful little tool, as long as they stay in their lane,” said Myron Dueck, an education consultant who was born in Winnipeg, where he graduated from teachers’ college in 1994.

In Dueck’s experience, the traditional grading model is effective in measuring a student’s understanding of “low level verbs” that include memorizing, reciting or defining concepts, but far less so in reporting on the ability to create, evaluate and analyze.

Canadian curriculums are increasingly focused on equipping students with the latter group of skills, which are far more relevant to life after graduation, he noted.

Manitoba Education released a breakdown of its “global competencies” to help teachers build well-rounded graduates in April. The six competencies are creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, connection to self and citizenship.

Dueck, who currently lives in Summerland, B.C., has travelled the world to preach about holistic and student-centred evaluation, and what that looks like in practice, in line with local government guidelines.

The career teacher has met with educators from Steinbach and Landmark in recent years. This week, he brought his presentation to Dauphin.

Mountain View School Division in Manitoba’s Parkland region is focused on carrying out “outcome-based assessment” — or putting a renewed emphasis on clearly articulating what students are expected to know and be able to do, said Jamie Galbraith, co-ordinator of curriculum and assessment.

The goal is to ensure students feel “valued, nurtured, inspired, respected and safe,” throughout the evaluation process, said Galbraith, who oversees kindergarten-to-Grade 12 programming in Roblin, Winnipegosis and surrounding communities.

Unlike Winnipeg’s Glenlawn Collegiate, where “ungrading” is an established practice that sees teachers offer customized feedback on tests instead of numerical results, Dauphin schools continue using grades to communicate achievement related to learning outcomes.

Rural teachers are, however, learning how-to better communicate “descriptive feedback” to help students grow, she said.

The administrator added it was fitting to invite Dueck, whose second book is entitled Giving Students a Say: Smarter Assessment Practices to Empower and Engage and has Manitoba connections, to help the division further its ongoing mission.

It was around 2005 that Dueck reluctantly attended a renowned grading conference in Portland that he said changed his life and made him realize the importance of making classroom targets “really, really clear.”

Now, he shares those lessons via professional development sessions and in his administrative role in B.C. School District No. 67 (Okanagan Skaha).

“The research is clear: the more we involve students in their own goal-setting, in their own reporting, the more they’re going to engage with it,” said Dueck, who has been a vocal supporter of using assessment scales with descriptors instead of numbers in B.C. and beyond.

Among the challenges with traditional marking is students focus on percentages instead of the explanations behind them, while numerical ceilings suggest there is a finality to learning at the top, he said.

As far as Dueck is concerned, schools need to “catch up” with the real world, where homeowners pay contractors and refer them to friends if they do a good job rather than hand them a percentage.

Post-secondary institutions are paving the pathway for systemic change, he said, adding U.S. Ivy League schools, including Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have started doing away with percentages to encourage students to take risks.

In a statement Thursday, the office of premier-designate Wab Kinew said the NDP will meet with education partners after the new government is sworn in.

“We will work alongside educators to determine best practices for provincial testing,” the statement said.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca