Grade Inflation
Grade Inflation

Author: Lester H. Hunt

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2008-07-22

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0791478009

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An authoritative and provocative discussion of the key issues surrounding grade inflation and its possible effects on academic excellence.

Grading for Growth
Grading for Growth

Author: David Clark

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-03

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000975436

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Are you satisfied with your current and traditional grading system? Does it accurately reflect your students’ learning and progress? Can it be gamed? Does it lead to grade-grubbing and friction with your students?The authors of this book – two professors of mathematics with input from colleagues across disciplines and institutions – offer readers a fundamentally more effective and authentic approach to grading that they have implemented for over a decade. Recognizing that traditional grading penalizes students in the learning process by depriving them of the formative feedback that is fundamental to improvement, the authors offer alternative strategies that encourage revision and growth.Alternative grading is concerned with students’ eventual level of understanding. This leads to big changes: Students take time to review past failures and learn from them. Conversations shift from “why did I lose a point for this” to productive discussions of content and process.Alternative grading can be used successfully at any level, in any situation, and any discipline, in classes that range from seminars to large multi-section lectures. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to alternative grading, beginning with a framework and rationale for implementation and evidence of its effectiveness. The heart of the book includes detailed examples – including variations on Standards-Based Grading, Specifications Grading, and ungrading -- of how alternative grading practices are used in all kinds of classroom environments, disciplines and institutions with a focus on first-hand accounts by faculty who share their practices and experience. The book includes a workbook chapter that takes readers through a step-by-step process for building a prototype of their own alternatively graded class and ends with concrete, practical, time-tested advice for new practitioners. The underlying principles of alternative grading involve·Evaluating student work using clearly defined and context-appropriate content standards.·Giving students helpful, actionable feedback.·Summarizing the feedback with marks that indicate progress rather than arbitrary numbers.·Allowing students to revise without penalty, using the feedback they receive, until the standards are met or exceeded. This book is intended for faculty interested in exploring alternative forms of learning assessment as well as those currently using alternative grading systems who are looking for ideas and options to refine practice.

Grading for Equity
Grading for Equity

Author: Joe Feldman

Publisher: Corwin Press

Published: 2023-08-26

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1071876570

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"For some time, traditional (A - F) grading practices have been under fire from a wide range of stakeholder. Grading policies are wildly inconsistent from classroom to classroom, frequently misguided, uninformed, and frequently based on subjective judgments. Of even more concern, our grading practices exacerbate the achievement gap. It is well-documented that African-American and Latino students, boys, as well as special education students, are disproportionately suspended and expelled, influenced by teachers' unconscious but biased judgments of student behavior. Virtually ignored is how teachers' incorporate subjective and non-academic criteria into their grades (through criteria such as student attitude, "participation", and "effort"), and how approach to grading contributes to these same students' disproportionately high course failure rates and disproportionately low placement in advanced academic tracks"--

The Evolution of College English
The Evolution of College English

Author: Thomas P. Miller

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 082297777X

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Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out "four corners" of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations. Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the "penny" press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy. In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today. For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature. According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.

Writing in the Academic Disciplines
Writing in the Academic Disciplines

Author: David R. Russell

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9780809324675

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"To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum," explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.