EDPY 303: Textbook Notes

Lecture 1: Chapter 1 Setting the Stage

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Educational Content Standards: public, published statements

of the expected outcomes of learning
o what the students are expected to know, understand, and
be able to do
Effective grades need to meet four overarching criteria for
success:
o Accurate
o Inaccurate grades most often result from teachers
determining them by:
Blending achievement with behaviours
Poor-quality assessment
Inappropriate use of the mean in combining data
o Meaningful
Communicate useful info to students and to
everyone interested in or needing to know about
their learning
Must directly reflect specified learning goals
o Consistent
Performance standards need to be the same from
teacher to teacher
o Must support learning
School is about learning, not numbers
Formative Assessments: designed to help students improve
and in most cases not be used to determine grades
Summative assessment: designed to measure student
achievement and are use to make statements of student
learning status at a point n time to those outside the classroom
Mark or score: the number (or letter) given to any student test
or performance that may contribute to the later determination of
a grade
Grade: the symbol (number or letter) reported at the end of a
period of time as a summary of student performance
the primary purpose of grades is to communicate student
achievement to students, parents school administrators, postsecondary institutions and employers Bailey and McTighe
(1996)
secondary purposes for grading include providing teachers with
information for instructional planning
o selection and placement of students
Underpinning Issues:
o Fairness:

fair does not mean equal; yet, when it comes to

grading, we insist that it does
equity of opportunity
adaptations should not be limited to students who
have specifically been identified as needing
o Motivation:
Grades are Extrinsic motivators
Works well for students that get good grades,
but not as much for students that do not
The primary reward for learning should be intrinsic
Success for each individual is seeing oneself get
better
Most effective ways to change behaviours:
Using non-coercion
Prompting the person to self-assess
If authority is necessary, having the student
own the consequence
o Objectivity and Professional Judgement
Real issues are accuracy and consistency, more than
objectivity versus subjectivity
Grading must not be a private practice, but a shared
practice

Lecture 2:
Chapter 5- Fixes to Support Learning
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Fix 13: Dont use information from formative assessments and

practice to determine grades; use only summative evidence
o Learning is a process in which students increase their
knowledge, skills, and understanding as a result of effort,
instruction, feedback from teachers and peers, and selfassessment and adjustment
o Learners must understand that it is acceptable to take
risks and make mistakes
o Diagnostic Assessment: takes place prior to instruction;
designed to determine a students attitude, skills, or
knowledge to identify student needs
o Formative Assessment: designed to provide direction for
improvement and/or adjustment to a program for individual
students or for a whole class, such as observation, quizzes,
homework, instructional questions, initial drafts/attempts
o Summative Assessment: designed to provide
information to be used in making judgements about a
students achievement at the end of a sequence of

instruction, such as final drafts/attempts, tests, exams,

assignments, projects, performances
o Key components of assessment for learning are:
Sharing the learning goal(s) with students from the
beginning of the learning
Making adjustments in teaching as a result of
formative assessment
Providing descriptive feedback to students from
assessment
Providing opportunities for students to self- and peerassess so that they understand their strengths and
what they need to do to improve
o Motivation for homework should come from students clear
understanding that it will contribute to their learning
o An assessment plan should start with the desired results,
then summative assessment, then diagnostic
assessment(s), and finally formative assessments
o Student Involvement:
Students who are involved in every aspect of
assessment are more able to distinguish between
practice and performance
Strategies to involve students:
Engage students in reviewing strong and weak
samples to determine attributes of a good
performance or product
Have students practise using criteria to
evaluate anonymous strong and weak work
Have students work in pars to revise an
anonymous weak work sample they have just
evaluated
Fix 14: Dont summarize evidence accumulated over time when
learning is developmental and will grow with time and repeated
opportunities; in those instances, emphasize more recent
achievement
o Allow new evidence to replace, not simply be added to, old
evidence
o Emphasize more recent achievement, with more recent
evidence replacing previous evidence
Fix 15: Dont leave students out of the grading process. Involve
students; they can- and should- play key roles in assessment and
grading that promote achievement
o Assessment process is done WITH them and not TO them
o Involve students in developing the rubrics
o Have students track their progress and achievement and
communicate about their learning with others

o This type of learning can attract better parent attendance

Chapter 6 Summary
- Two givens that cannot be questioned in any school
o Ensure that all assessments are of high quality
o Involve students in the assessment process
- Six musts that can be questioned with regard to
implementation, but nor in terms of basic principles:
o Use learning goals-based curriculum, instruction,
assessment, grading, and reporting with no single-subject
grades except for grades 11 and 12
o Use performance standards with clear descriptions of a
limited number of levels with no percentages
o Separate achievement from behaviours with no mark
penalties for late work, academic dishonesty, or
attendance
o Use summative assessments for (almost) all the evidence
for determining grades; use no-mark, comment-only
formative assessment
o Emphasize more recent evidence in the determination of
grades when learning is cumulative and developmental
o Use professional judgement that arises from careful and
limited number crunching with no zeros, and calculation of
the median and mode in addition to or in place of the mean