4 ms·

I think some feedback system is important, you need a mechanism to let the parents know Johnny is struggling and need something to help them. That said, letter

by Aloha 8y ago

I think some feedback system is important, you need a mechanism to let the parents know Johnny is struggling and need something to help them. That said, letter grades are useless to gradeschoolers (K-5).

notus 8y ago
I think if the feedback was more along the lines of the teacher getting in touch with the parent to discuss decline in performance or something it might go better for the child. There is something just really indifferent and also ambiguous about letter grades and more specifically the Unsatisfactory/Satisfactory/Outstanding rating system for younger children. I believe the age range they measured was children 5-11 so pretty young in this context.
jacobolus 8y ago
Letter grades are largely useless as an educational tool, even in high school – they provide delayed, coarse, not very actionable feedback, while inflicting a lot of unnecessary emotional stress/pain which directly interferes with learning. The real purpose of letter grades is largely bureaucratic and they are designed for the convenience of teachers and school administrators. What they are good for is sorting and labeling the students, though as a side effect they are also quite effective at directing student effort toward gaming them rather than caring about the quality of their work. My primary school eschewed grades in favor of detailed written progress reports. These took a whole lot more work for the teachers to prepare, but were much more valuable. (In particular, knowing that they would need to write them caused teachers to pay attention to the progress of every student and take notes about it on a regular basis.)
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  The argument for grades is "Well, I suffered through them, so should you". We can look at engineering disciplines, medical at all levels, and many more. "Since I suffered, you should have to as well." When we finally kill that idea, we can move forward with what real education is, and how to better measure it. Right now, we measure compliance and rule adherence, and we should instead be measuring understanding.
- freeopinion 8y ago
  Our school district administers SBAC tests. Students are given a general score, but nothing specific. Nobody is allowed to know which questions a student was given, let alone which ones they got right or wrong. The tests are completely adaptive, so every student gets a different set of questions. The school district uses cumulative results to assess students, teachers, and entire schools. But it's all meaningless. You don't know which areas a student struggles in. You don't know what topics a teacher doesn't explain well. You don't know where the specific holes are in a school's curriculum. You fire teachers, shuffle classes, and fund schools without useful information. There is no way to take a teacher and make them better. You can only replace them and hope for the best, shooting in the dark. You can make a student feel generally bad about themselves, or good about themselves, but not help them assess their specific strengths and weaknesses. It all seems so pointless to me that I specifically pull my children out of testing days. If an entire day or three has no educational value, there's no point in attending.
  - geomark 8y ago
    That sounds a bit like the InCAS assessment[1] used in the UK and some international schools that follow the British system. In my experience, the teachers are a bit reluctant to share the results because it takes some effort to get reports out that are parent-friendly, and it takes a bit of explaining what the reports mean. But I have been able to get them upon request. Perhaps it is the same issue with SBAC tests, too much effort for the teachers to provide meaningful reports. 1. https://www.cem.org/incas https://www.cem.org/incas
- throwaway-hn123 8y ago
  You millenials are utterly pathetic
- geomark 8y ago
  A lot of the schools where I live do the detailed progress reports. The thing is, the quality of the reports varies a lot from teacher to teacher. Some of us parents share the reports with each other and there are always lots of questions about what the heck the teacher is trying to say. Some teachers just are not good at writing assessments. Some reports are so weasel-worded you can't get to the real meaning of it. I used to write a lot of performance appraisals when I worked at a government contractor where we were strongly discouraged from directly criticizing certain classes of employees. So I got good at writing and decoding weasel-worded assessment. Fortunately we have one-on-one meetings with the teachers when the reports come out so we can get straight answers from them.

by Aloha 8y ago

notus 8y ago

I think if the feedback was more along the lines of the teacher getting in touch with the parent to discuss decline in performance or something it might go better for the child. There is something just really indifferent and also ambiguous about letter grades and more specifically the Unsatisfactory/Satisfactory/Outstanding rating system for younger children. I believe the age range they measured was children 5-11 so pretty young in this context.

jacobolus 8y ago

Letter grades are largely useless as an educational tool, even in high school – they provide delayed, coarse, not very actionable feedback, while inflicting a lot of unnecessary emotional stress/pain which directly interferes with learning. The real purpose of letter grades is largely bureaucratic and they are designed for the convenience of teachers and school administrators. What they are good for is sorting and labeling the students, though as a side effect they are also quite effective at directing student effort toward gaming them rather than caring about the quality of their work. My primary school eschewed grades in favor of detailed written progress reports. These took a whole lot more work for the teachers to prepare, but were much more valuable. (In particular, knowing that they would need to write them caused teachers to pay attention to the progress of every student and take notes about it on a regular basis.)

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
The argument for grades is "Well, I suffered through them, so should you". We can look at engineering disciplines, medical at all levels, and many more. "Since I suffered, you should have to as well." When we finally kill that idea, we can move forward with what real education is, and how to better measure it. Right now, we measure compliance and rule adherence, and we should instead be measuring understanding.
freeopinion 8y ago
Our school district administers SBAC tests. Students are given a general score, but nothing specific. Nobody is allowed to know which questions a student was given, let alone which ones they got right or wrong. The tests are completely adaptive, so every student gets a different set of questions. The school district uses cumulative results to assess students, teachers, and entire schools. But it's all meaningless. You don't know which areas a student struggles in. You don't know what topics a teacher doesn't explain well. You don't know where the specific holes are in a school's curriculum. You fire teachers, shuffle classes, and fund schools without useful information. There is no way to take a teacher and make them better. You can only replace them and hope for the best, shooting in the dark. You can make a student feel generally bad about themselves, or good about themselves, but not help them assess their specific strengths and weaknesses. It all seems so pointless to me that I specifically pull my children out of testing days. If an entire day or three has no educational value, there's no point in attending.
- geomark 8y ago
  That sounds a bit like the InCAS assessment[1] used in the UK and some international schools that follow the British system. In my experience, the teachers are a bit reluctant to share the results because it takes some effort to get reports out that are parent-friendly, and it takes a bit of explaining what the reports mean. But I have been able to get them upon request. Perhaps it is the same issue with SBAC tests, too much effort for the teachers to provide meaningful reports. 1. https://www.cem.org/incas https://www.cem.org/incas
throwaway-hn123 8y ago
You millenials are utterly pathetic
geomark 8y ago
A lot of the schools where I live do the detailed progress reports. The thing is, the quality of the reports varies a lot from teacher to teacher. Some of us parents share the reports with each other and there are always lots of questions about what the heck the teacher is trying to say. Some teachers just are not good at writing assessments. Some reports are so weasel-worded you can't get to the real meaning of it. I used to write a lot of performance appraisals when I worked at a government contractor where we were strongly discouraged from directly criticizing certain classes of employees. So I got good at writing and decoding weasel-worded assessment. Fortunately we have one-on-one meetings with the teachers when the reports come out so we can get straight answers from them.