Connections to Social Justice Standards: Identity, Diversity, Justice
Strategies:
1. Student Self-Assessments
2. Scoring Guides and Rubrics
3. Assessment of Process and Product
4. Allowing Multiple Ways for Students to Show Understanding
5. Centering Student Well-Being While Grading Culture and Climate
Assessment and grading are among the most direct ways educators let students know what they value. Thoughtful assessment and grading policies can mitigate academic differences based on gender, home language, experience, socio-economic status or ability. For example, teachers who value equal opportunity for all students can support multilingual learners by distinguishing their assessment of analytical skills from their assessment of language proficiency. This may mean differentiating the student work product or adjusting assessment methods to focus more on content rather than on language proficiency.
Assessment systems can promote success for all, or they can foster competition. Ask yourself: Does your grading policy prioritize the skills students need to collaborate across differences? Or does it privilege individual achievement and label collaboration as “cheating”?
The strategies in this section emphasize and encourage collaboration, authentic engagement and equal opportunity for all students.
Student Self-Assessments
Giving students the opportunity to assess their own work builds their metacognitive skills and facilitates independent learning. In addition, self-assessments have the added benefit of asking students to reflect on their journey of learning rather than focus on their grades.
Teachers can support students by facilitating discussions in which students determine what questions to ask about their learning and how to self-assess their work. Educators and other students can also provide regular feedback to their classmates to help them continually evaluate and reflect on their work.
Scoring Guides and Rubrics
Rubrics and scoring guides that define performance at all levels support student learning by making performance expectations clear and reducing subjectivity in grading practices. They can also be used to describe social justice-based expectations for students, such as working respectfully with peers or including multiple points of view in their writing. In addition, using a rubric or other scoring method that evaluates each student’s performance individually helps educators “lose the curve” and move away from comparing students to one another.
Assessment of Process and Product
The purpose of assessments is to help educators understand what students have learned. However, as the ASCD article “Confronting Inequity/Assessment for Equity” indicates, assessments are often used to track and sort students, replicating inequities. Expanding assessments to include an evaluation of both what and how students learn can counter the harmful effects of assessments and tracking. In addition, Edutopia’s “How to Help Students Focus on What They’re Learning, Not the Grade” reveals that this practice emphasizes that learning, rather than grades, is the relevant outcome of completing a lesson plan.
For example, to assess the skills and knowledge students are learning in addition to the final graded outcome, teachers could ask students to turn in an end-of-unit reflection on how they applied their learning in the performance task. Students could write a response to a reflective question, engage in a one-on-one conversation with the teacher, or even record their reaction through a free program like Flip (formerly Flipgrid), which allows students to share reflections and respond to classmates in video or writing.
Allowing Multiple Ways for Students to Show Understanding
When educators provide students with multiple options to demonstrate their understanding of the content, they honor the diverse strengths and interests represented in their classrooms.
While it is common to use practice versions of standardized tests as assessments, remember that standardized testing contains rampant examples of bias. Providing other ways for students to show mastery can mitigate these biases while allowing students to showcase their strengths and interests in other formats.
Providing student choice through different approaches to assessment might look like:
- Doing informal checks for understanding by asking students to write in a group chat, annotate a text or verbally respond to a question.
- Creating opportunities to respond to essential questions through writing, oral presentations or student-created art.
- Assigning a menu of end-of-unit performance tasks, such as writing poetry, performing a song, recording a podcast, writing an essay or preparing a presentation.
Centering Student Well-Being While Grading
When external factors disrupt students’ learning or add undue stress to their emotional well-being (for example, extreme weather events, pandemics, or violence or hate incidents in the community), approach grading with flexibility. Traditional grading practices can exacerbate inequities and ignore disruptive circumstances, as explained by Education Week in the article “Should Schools Be Giving So Many Failing Grades This Year?” which addressed the effects of remote learning in 2020 prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Focusing on providing feedback rather than grades and allowing students multiple ways to show their understanding of a topic can help counter grading inequity.
