Grades 6 - 8 Math Teachers Grading for Equity

Grades 6 - 8 Math Teachers Grading for Equity

Grades 6 – 8 math teachers Mr. Mark Gearhart, Ms. Julia Robbins, and Mr. Terry Lippmann have all made changes to how and what they grade, and in addition to providing students the possibility of more personalized pacing it has increased the clarity of content mastery and mathematical ability in their grades. 

“I’ve moved away from grading behaviors and towards grading content mastery,” explained Robbins. “This system is supposed to be more bias-resistant, fairer, and more motivational to the students.”

Robbins began examining her grading processes after reading Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity. Often a system such as this is known as “standards-based grading.” The book inspired her to make notable changes, for example no longer attaching a grade to behaviors such as completing homework (now called “practice”) and class participation. Instead she has created a model in which content mastery is key, and so now assesses students on a 5 – 10 scale, allows students the chance to re-take assessments after a reflection period, and encourages students to return to material throughout the year rather than pacing the class as a whole. 

“When kids take a quiz now, even if they get every question wrong, I still assign a five,” says Robbins. “This is because they’ve certainly learned something. They may not be able to do the problems that I’m giving them yet, but I don’t want to disregard all the work that they’ve done to get to where they are right now. Not to mention giving a kid a zero on a quiz is really de-motivating, and it’s really hard to overcome . . . when you factor in a zero to an average there’s not going to be much coming back from that. So, why don’t we make it possible for them to ‘stay in the game’ longer?”

In sixth grade, the last year of Singapore Math in the K – 6 math curriculum, Gearhart found that the principles of Grading for Equity were a natural fit to areas he had found challenging in grading in the past.

“Two areas of grading that I’ve always struggled with were class participation, which was always subjective, and collaborative project work,” he said. “After reading Grading for Equity I found myself agreeing with the philosophy, and so I got rid of class participation, I got rid of grading collaborative projects, and I got rid of homework as well. I moved to ‘trackers,’ for example notes about the amount of homework students did. Later in the year after an assessment they’ll be able to look at how they did and then go back and see how much homework they completed and we can have a conversation about the relationship and the correlation rather than it being a part of their mathematical ability grade.”

In eighth grade, Lippmann is now teaching those students who were in Robbins’ class last year and so are familiar with the move away from grading behaviors and towards grading content mastery. 

“We have very similar ways of scoring to communicate how much a student has mastered,” explained Lippmann of the Grades 6 – 8 teachers. “We work with ‘beginning,’ ‘exploring,’ ‘proficient,’ ‘advanced,’ and ‘mastery.’ We don’t allow students to be satisfied with less than ‘proficient,’ we don’t want them to settle like that. So proficient is our minimum for students to move on, but they are encouraged to reflect and retake and go further in terms of the standards-based assessments if they want to.”

For Lippmann, allowing assessment re-takes has been a part of his classroom grading for a number of years but it was after reading Grading for Equity that he saw clearly how grading behaviors was against his mathematical education philosophy.

“The grade on a report card should reflect what a student knows in math, not how well they sit in a classroom or how much homework they do,” he said.

Students Angel Hasley ’24 and Lellie King ’24 are both in Lippmann’s eighth grade math class and are familiar with the philosophy of Grading for Equity from Robbins’ seventh grade class.

“The reflections were great!” said Hasley. “If we got something wrong on a quiz we’d write about why we got it wrong and we’d make up our own problem that was similar to the problem we got wrong and then we’d solve it ourselves . . . she gave us the opportunity, we just had to take it.”

King took advantage of these opportunities knowing that concepts and skills were building blocks, and that incomplete mastery in one area might well lead to incomplete mastery in others.

“I felt like if I got below an eight on a quiz that I needed to retake it until I got to a nine or ten,” she explained. “I just felt like the information was important, like later on I wouldn’t understand things as well if I just let one quiz slide. I felt like if I went back and learned the information again then I would understand what we learn later much better because later units would involve the things that I was being quizzed on all along.”

As Hasley and King both experienced, standards-based grading affords students the opportunity to go back and improve on past content as their mastery of that content grows. Given the cumulative nature of math, consistent building on fundamental skills is imperative. Gearhart, Robbins, and Lippmann agree, standards-based grading or grading for equity promotes just that. 

NAIS Independent School magazine covered this topic in its spring 2020 issue in Putting Grading for Equity into Action. The Daily Progress also covered it in February, 2020 in Area Schools Work to Make Grades More Meaningful


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