| Alex Bowers
University of Texas at San Antonio
What do teacher assigned grades actually assess? Analyzing grades as informative academic and non-academic data for policy and school-level decision making
FINAL REPORT
Historically, teacher assigned grades have been seen as unreliable subjective measures of academic knowledge, since grades and standardized tests have traditionally correlated at about the 0.5 to 0.6 level, and thus explain about 25-35% of each other. Due to this small overlap, assessment researchers have continually urged teachers to reform their grading practices and align grades to standardized academic performance outcomes. However, while little is known about the connection between standardized test scores and overall student schooling and life outcomes, teacher assigned grades are known to be a strong predictor of students graduating or dropping out of high school. Teachers have historically resisted efforts to align grades with standardized assessments and continue to report awarding grades for a variety of student behaviors that includes academic knowledge, but also behavior, participation, attendance, and effort. If only about 25-35% of teacher assigned grades is related to academic knowledge assessed through standardized tests, then what is the remaining 65-75% of teacher assigned grades, and is it useful beyond teachers, students and parents for administration, data driven decision making and policymaking? This is the central question of this study.
Rather than a poor assessment of academic knowledge, emerging literature indicates that teacher assigned grades may be a multi-dimensional assessment of both student academic knowledge and a student’Äôs ability to negotiate the social processes of schooling, such as behavior, participation, attendance, and effort. This study analyzed the high school transcript component of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) to describe the relationships between core subject grades (such as mathematics, English, science and social studies), non-core subject grades (such as art, physical education, and foreign/non-English languages), and standardized test scores in mathematics and reading.
The results indicate that when accounting for the academic knowledge component assessed through standardized tests, teacher assigned grades may be a useful assessment of a student’Äôs ability at the non-cognitive aspects of school. While core subject grades aligned with standardized test scores in an academic knowledge dimension, core subject grades and non-core subject grades were distal to standardized tests in a different non-cognitive classroom engagement and behavior dimension. These results support the conclusion that grades represent a multi-dimensional assessment of both academic knowledge and non-cognitive behaviors. For policy and practice, the results suggest that low grades could indicate that students need tutoring in either the academic knowledge component of schooling or the social processes of schooling, such as behavior, participation, and effort, and thus could be put to better use for targeting the limited resources of a school district to the students most in need.
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