• earn higher grades an test scores, and enroll in higher-level programs.
• be promoted, pass their classes, and earn credits.
• attend school regularly
• have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school.
• graduate and go on to postsecondary education.”

–A New Wave of Evidence SEDL study by Anne T. Henderson and Karen L. Mapp

Sample ELA gr 2 (pdf)

There are also some short and thought-provoking presentations online to prompt discussion on this important topic. Two of our favourites include Dylan Wiliam, who speaks on assessment-for-learning strategies and Carol Dweck, who speaks about growth and fixed mindsets, giving key insights into motivation of our learners.

The leaders we have worked with who surround staff with both expectation and invitation create an environment that encourages thinking, questioning, and debating. They focus on creating a safe space for talk and inquiry to happen.

• We include the specific support or adaptation that students receive on the Learning Map.
• We focus the evidence of learning on talking with and observing learners rather than always requiring a product, such as a written task or an assignment.
• We reduce the number of Big Ideas that the student is focussing on.

For those students who have an iep and have a modified program (not working on the prescribed learning standards of the curriculum and so do not receive letter grades), we make the following changes:

We make the IEP goals students’ Big Ideas.

We omit step 5, as students who have an iep with a modified program do not receive letter grades. Instead, we describe growth and progress for each of the iep goals/individual Big Ideas on the Learning Map.

The most important point for us is that our students who have ieps also have Learning Maps – just like everyone else.

We find that, when we use Learning Maps along with specific samples of work, the picture of what students are expected to learn and are able to do is more concrete. As a result, our struggling students start to see where their letter grade came from. Before we used Learning Maps, some students found it hard to see that they had made any progress at all. The Learning Map can show them where they did improve in some of the learning standards in a subject, even though the overall grade may have stayed the same. For example, in mathematics, an individual might have improved in computation, but his or her problem-solving is weak because the reading of the question is often confusing. So, rather than having a student think, “I am stupid in math,” we point out on the Learning Map where he or she did improve in one aspect and where skills still need to be strengthened.

The issue is one of motivation. Some resources worth reading and talking about include
those by Carol Dweck (2007), Daniel Pink (2009 ted Talk), and Alfie Kohn (2011). The growing awareness of the connection between motivation and letter grades gives us hope that this area of motivational research will help change the whole approach to how schools report on student progress.

Although effort is not a component of arriving at letter grades, it is definitely something we report on. In fact, some schools make sure that this important aspect has a prominent spot on their report cards.

A reference worth reading related to your question is Carol Dweck’s research. In her book Mindset, Dweck emphasizes the importance of effort and its effect on learning. Another book, Drive, by Daniel Pink, looks at the importance of effort in everything we do in our lives.

Using a Learning Map as the basis for determining a letter grade helps students see the learning that underlies their grade. We’ve seen many of our learners move beyond being interested only in their marks and begin to pay attention to and talk about the link between what they are supposed to learn (Big Ideas), how they are actually doing (evidence and highlighted descriptions of learning), and what they need to work on next.

However, we do use technology to track each student’s overall collection of evidence, which we organize under each of the Big Ideas headings rather than under assignments and tests.

In our experience, technology such as electronic grade books are good at keeping track of numbers but do not keep track of the wide variety of evidence that is needed to assess twenty-first century learning standards.

However, new assessment applications such as quio Learning Map have the capability of reflecting the ongoing changes that are taking place in assessment practices today.

The Learning Map also allows us to show parents and guardians how certain prescribed learning standards require teachers to use evidence other than a number. We talk about various ways of collecting data by showing examples of our observation notes: a scale of 1 – 2 – 3 on a rubric; an interview with a student to hear his or her explanation or to evaluate oral language skills.

We’ve prepared a brochure that we use to help parents and guardians understand how schools need more than numbers to communicate a student’s learning in the twenty-first century.