Scott: If you gave the kid a zero and then they got a perfect score on the next assignment, their average is still a failing average.

Rachael: The question is whether a zero feels deserved. It is whether the zero helps the grade tell the truth about what a student knows.

Scott: The concepts are not hard, but behavior is hard to change.

Rachael: Welcome to the Rachael Maves Show, where we explore the challenges, ideas, and conversations shaping education today. I'm your host, Rachael Maves, and today we bring Dr. Scott Marion onto the show. Dr. Marion is the principal learning associate at the National Center for Improvement of Educational Assessment and a nationally recognized expert in assessment and accountability. A member of the National Academy of Education and the National Assessment Governing Board, he works with states and districts to improve how assessment systems support meaningful teaching and learning. Scott, thank you for joining me today.

Scott: It's great to see you again, Rachael.

Rachael: Yeah, I'm I'm excited one to catch up and then two to continue the assessment conversations you and I have had over years of working together at CDE and TDOE. So thanks for jumping on and continuing just to push our thinking around assessments and grading and how we're thinking about serving students. So, Scott, you had posted something a little while ago around grading, and it was in reference to South Carolina's new law that prohibits public schools and districts from requiring teachers to assign a minimum grade above a student's actual performance. And then it also calls for a review of the strength's grading policy and the hundred point scale. Now, before we go into the conversation around zeros. Let's just back up and maybe set the stage for our listeners. What really should a grade communicate to the teacher, to the parents, to the student themselves?

Scott: Yeah, in my opinion, and that of many others who've written about grading, the the grade, if it's a grade in an academic class like math or science or social studies, should communicate the student's achievement of the expected knowledge and skills. the content of that course. That's it. It should say how well they're doing. It should be as clear as possible to the student and the parent about again, what that child knows and is able to do and really their likelihood of success perhaps in a next course, but really it's a point in time. How do they do on what they're expected to learn?

Rachael: Yeah. Simple. So with that lens, then maybe help our listeners understand how a zero then can outweigh that A and then what the measurement problem becomes with zeros in general.

Scott: Yeah. So I should say that zero is just a point on a number line, right? So those of us who are quantitatively inclined. And if our scale was let's say the grades I gave were a negative one, a zero, and a positive We would say, zero is right in the middle. That's okay. And it's just about the same distance from negative one to zero as there is from zero to positive one. And other than giving kids negative numbers, you would say, that that seems okay. But the zero that I have a problem with is the one that's a hundred miles from its nearest front. So if you think that you know the the grade to define an F is usually at sixty or sixty five, depending on the school district. All the way down to zero is a long way when you think going up the increments are generally ten points, right? Let's say it's sixty. So it's sixty to seventy, seventy to eighty, et cetera, et cetera. But those are all ten point chunks, and now we have a sixty point chunk. It just it it defies mathematical sensibility.

Rachael: Yeah. Yeah, and I I mean, for me as I'm listening to you say that, I put my former teacher hat on and I Think back to okay, where did I most often see the most zeros? It doesn't come from a student's lack of understanding or an expression of what it is that they're learning. It comes from missing assignments.

Scott: That's right.

Rachael: And and then it snowballs. So what you're and the what you're providing is a great example of the why of the snowball effect, because then if they have this backlog of zeros, And then they show you actually I know and I understand the content from the things I've turned in, it it doesn't matter. Now we have a disparity in what they're actually able to show with the learning versus what it is that they just decided to do or not do in the classroom.

Scott: That's a great way of putting it too, because there's very few kids who actually sit and take a test at least semi-seriously and get nothing right. I score. The zeros are always for these missing assignments or other penalties like that. And, you know, it's a little personal for me. And my oldest child, my son, very successful young man now, was was you know, I wouldn't say a typical boy, but he was a boy who just knew his stuff, but thought homework was a bother. And and even when he did it, he sometimes just left it in his backpack. And I would just try to explain to the teachers, okay, give him a fifty. I don't care. penaliz them, that's fine. Give them a fifty. But I would try to show that if you gave the kid a zero and then they got a perfect score on the next assignment, their average is still a failing average, a fifty. Even if they got two perfect scores, their average, maybe a sixty-six, depending on where the color is, that's really close to failure. Where if you took a s what I think would be a more sensible way of doing this for other reasons, if if the scale was One through four, one through five, or zero through four. There's again nothing magic about a zero, like we do with college courses. If you fail, you'd get a zero on your GPA. you'd get a D, you get a one, right? You get a C, you get a two, and so on. A zero I don't have a problem with a zero there, because it's it's on it's on a reasonable numeric scale.

Rachael: Yeah.

Scott: If in fact the kid earns zero four achievement.

Rachael: Yeah. So you're you're bringing up an interesting kind of separation then because we have the instances where there truly is poor performance. There the student and I and I probably shouldn't even couch it as poor performance. I would say that the student hasn't mastered the concept. That's right. And a low score is something that they would deserve, and it's indicative of their performance and understanding. But that's different than behavior and habit.

Scott: That's right.

Rachael: And So when you're thinking about that, because what I've heard from teachers is that they're the habits are still really important. So when you think about policy, how should grading policy distinguish between those things? How should it separate the the student performance from the habit that they're seeing? And and should we be recording both and reporting out on it?

Scott: Well, I the the clearest case to me came when I was talking with teachers and I think some leaders and they said, Well, but employers care about these things like being on time and being responsible. I said, That's great. So how would the employer know if Scott got a B because he really knew all the stuff, but he was just lazy and, you know, missed class versus, you know, someone else who got a a B because they tried as hard as they could and a B was about all they could do, but they turned in all our assignments. They were always, they didn't lose any points. You have no way of distinguishing one B from another when there's other information. So if if that's important to you, if this responsibility score, if you will, is important to you, then give a responsibility score. Because if I'm an employer, trust me, I hire a lot of people. I would look at that responsibility score. And I would that would matter to me. So if that's important, grade the responsibility score. And have or or whatever you want to call it, right? And then have the academic score be different.

Rachael: Yeah. I I heard one of my former colleagues, Rich Stoole, I'm gonna give a shout out to him. He and I did some content coaching. We were early in our careers, and that was one of the things that they had set up in their district around math. They had said setting a goal that nobody gets less than a C, but we're not. Supplanting that for the expectation of academic rigor. And the way that they operationalized it was just that. They separated the habit and the responsibility piece from the grading piece. And then if a student's grade showed that they had not mastered the content yet, then they did very targeted reteaching for those students and then allowed them to retake the exam or the quiz, whatever assessment it was that they had. wasn't the exact same one, but the the work that they were doing was scaffolded to help build and make sure that they understood the concepts. And then they got another try because it wasn't meant to be a gotcha. It was meant to be around that learning piece. And I I think that sometimes we we miss that in the classroom of coming back to that piece of what is it really about.

Scott: And the one thing I'll raise on that though is I wonder to be fair to teachers, And I do think kids should have a chance to, you know, retry, but I I don't think they should have endless tap set. Yeah. It's you know, they need different kind of remediation now.

Rachael: That's right. Yeah. Well, and even being able to separate that. I mean, that's a good indicator of the tier one, I just didn't get it the first time and I need a little bit of extra support versus tier two. That's a different level of remediation. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So In the grading series, one of the things that we talked about is adjust this. And as a teacher, being able to sit with the information that you have and truly analyze and examine student performance for those reasons. If a student three students have a C, one may understand the content, may have a lack of understanding of content, one have may have some missing work, and the other maybe lost some point for lateness that day and it's impacting now their score and their grade. As a teacher, when I've had these conversations, similar to what you just said about the habits of the importance of the habits, some of the pushback I've gotten is around time. Like we are already pressed for time. We have a million things going on. What you're presenting actually requires us to have that space to dive in deep. So you've done a ton of work with districts and states. Scott, how would you support a leader or what recommendations would you give to ensure that teachers have that opportunity?

Scott: Yeah, I think there's gotta be support. Well, support to learn how to do things and then protection because oftentimes it especially at the high school level, parents are a tough audience. Anything that they're not used to is is gonna be a threat. And if they perceive it as a potential threat to their child getting into a college or getting a scholarship or whatever it might be, they they can't even listen to you. It's all bets are off. So you have to work with the parents likely first. I think the teachers are easier in this case to understand. Where where you have to work with the teachers is on the separation of behavior and achievement. And I think they could do that. I think one of the simplest ways for large scale tests, we write performance level descriptors for what does proficient mean, what does advanced mean. Yeah. As a school, they could write general performance level descriptors for what does an A mean? What does a B mean? What does a C mean? And then hopefully nowhere in those descriptors is where like behavior or attendance or turning assignments in on time. You could have certain rules. You know, I would think it'd be fair to say to a kid, You wanna turn this assignment in late, you could turn in late, but you're gonna lose some points. That's fair. Not get a zero, but lose some points because other kids, however they did it, they rearranged their schedules and they made sure they got it at times. They shouldn't get penalized in in in reverse by that. So I'm okay with little things like that. But we have to have some school wide agreements so it's not teacher to teacher. That's one thing. And then if you had general descriptions of what these generality scores mean. for instance, we look at it with performance level descriptors. If I said, mastery of challenging subject matter is a B. And you say in your class, you know, adequate performance of grade level knowledge and skills, well, those are two different things. So we have to come to some agreement at a general level. I think that would be a healthy school wide conversation. Is it gonna work perfectly? No. And and then honestly, what I think too, it's writing this and then seeing the reactions. And I would say let's get rid of the hundred quote unquote hundred point scale, because we can't even grade. Are you gonna tell me that we really have enough precision in our test to know there's an eighty-seven and eighty-eight? I don't think so. So I would say let's do it on a go back to A B C D. F or A B C D E or one zero one two three four five or or zero one two three four or one two three four five, doesn't matter, right? Let's go to that. And then you could give a a four minus, a four plus, and you have about as much enough gradations in there that our precision could handle. And yeah, I mean honestly, when my daughter went to a high school that had that system, so they did it with ABC, but they got B pluses and B minuses and When you think about you go from C minus C, C plus, B minus B, you have enough gradations in there for people to judge assignments well. And I I don't think you need more than that. In that case, if people feel like they like a zero, keep a zero because it's not it's not you know, it's not tilting the seesaws so that the little kid never gets down, right?

Rachael: Yeah. So do you think that moving towards standards based grading just inevitably helps resolve some of that issue. And maybe you could share just a little bit for anyone listening that doesn't know what standards based grading is and how it's a little bit different.

Scott: Yeah. So standards based grading is that we have a a class, let's call it fifth grade math. And right now, the way it typically works is you get quarterly grades and the grade is just You're great in math. Rachael got an A the first quarter, a B the second quarter, an A the third quarter. Now we we just globally know she's doing pretty well at fifth grade math. But what we don't know, and in this case for getting all A's, it's easy, but in general, you know, is she doing well in numbers and operations? She's doing well in data and statistics, she's doing well in geometry, she's doing well in algebraic reasoning. And we might find in let's say in a in a case where wasn't all A's, but you're getting a B. Well, what we might see is some variability that you're really nailing it in numbers and operations, but struggling in data and statistics. Because the grade is broken out by those subdomains. Now we can't have a million of them. Sometimes I see standard-based grading get a little too carried away and too microgram, and we don't really have enough information. But certainly in most of our math and science and social studies and winter classes, I would say almost all our classes, we could break things out and most of the content standards that guide our work are broken out into four or five subdomains. We could certainly provide that level of information back to parents. The thought was that parents would then act on it. I don't think the parents are really acting on it. I think it could be useful for the teachers to be able to say, wow Kids really struggled this quarter in statistics of probability. That's right. The parents a select few will act on that level of information. It's not really for parents, but you notice nowhere is no subdomaze that I say doesn't run while carrying scissors and comes to class on time and things like that, right? It's it's the behavior's like s out of there.

Rachael: Yeah. So Yeah, it is. And so I'm I'm curious. The if people went to more standards-based grading that was reasonable, do you think it just makes this whole debate and argument moot, like a moot point?

Scott: Yeah, I think it certainly helps. We've seen more uptake at the elementary level for sure. Yeah. They start getting into middle school and they feel like they have to prepare the kids for high school. Yes. High school thinks that by their grading system is sacrosanct. for college admissions and college scholarships. And actually the universities don't care because they just look at you can pick whatever grading scale you use. And they're not comparing this is something this is an illusion, appearance. That they're not comparing if you have a ninety seven average in your school and I have a ninety four average in my school, that you're three points better than me, because they're looking at that within school average. Yeah. And so I could be above average and you could be below average, even though you have a higher score, higher GPA. And so it's all done within school. So as long as the school is consistent within school, that's all the universities and colleges are looking at.

Rachael: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I I do feel like it solves the problems in two ways that we've talked about today. Not that I will say not that standard space grading is the silver bullet that's gonna remove every problem that everybody has, because it's not. Right. But I do think it's one step towards remediating some of what you're talking about. Yeah, because it does naturally just automatically separate the behavior from the grades like you mentioned. And then it gets really clear automatically where the support's needed. And for me, you had shared personally where the this came up for you. For me, my when my eldest, when we moved to a different state, it was right after the pandemic. It was in an advanced math class and the and she was really struggling. And the teacher's response initially was, she just needs to go to a standard math class. And I thought this something's not lining up here for me. This it's never been a problem. What's she missing? And we actually ended up Because we had the means to be able to do it, to get her a tutor. And the tutor said, This is the piece that she's missing. So it during the pandemic, she had taken geometry online. There were just some basic concepts that hadn't stuck. Now that she's an algebra two trig, there were some things that it built upon and she had a gap there. But if she wouldn't have identified that piece, then it would have continued to cause those problems. And as soon as she got that extra support, it was fine. And that's where I think in when we talk about teacher time, even aligning to standards-based grading can help accelerate being able to put your finger on where the issue is for the student to to address some of those things that you're seeing within the classroom. Have you seen places or do you know of any off the top of your head, Scott, in the work that you've been doing, either districts or states that you would say they have a really great model? This, this is working really well.

Scott: I I would have to get back to you on that. I think that there's a few, a couple in your former state in California that we've been working with. But there are there's places around the country. Again, you see it way more at the elementary middle school. And actually, though I will say in some of the independent, you know, some of the private schools is where you see it in interesting in in not so much a standards based way, but going with this simple one, two, three, four, or zero, one, two, three, four approach, or or A B C D approach. And, you know, that that could work. I'll tell you a funny story. I was on the school board here for nine years and there was this big issue with the high school I had to actually Google these terms. I you know have a PhD in measurement. I didn't know what this meant. They were they were using the school was using a seven point scale and the parents wanted them to go to a ten point scale. And I thought I I've been in this field a long time. I had no idea what I was talking about. I had to Google it. So seven point scale is means that an A starts at ninety-three, you know, and so and then a B goes 85 to 92, right? And the parents were convinced that their kids were getting denied opportunities because neighboring schools use the 10 point scale, and so they had more, they saw they had more A's. First thing I did is I asked the assistant superintendent for the data and I I ran the data and I said found that eighty five percent of the grades awarded to ninth graders were A's and B's. So I don't know what we were leaving on the table. So there's not like a lot of room, right? 'Cause you know T B teachers adjust, right, to the scale. And so I gave this, you know, I got up and I gave this whole reasoned argument and Yeah, show the data and blah blah why it doesn't matter. You could stick with the seven point go to a ten who cares? People adjust to it. And as soon as I got down, his parent got up and said, Yeah, but we should go to a ten point scale, so our kids are are not held, you know, 'cause they thought that the kids in Portsmouth, New Hampshire were being compared numerically to the kids in Exeter, New Hampshire. And they had no idea that that was not the case. But it's all based all these admissions officers, when they ask for your grades, they're also getting the average grades for the school. Yeah. And the distribution. So 'cause they know that you can't compare a ninety five in one school to a ninety five in another school. Barely compare it within school.

Rachael: Yeah. Yeah. I would say I don't think most people know that caveat to the admissions. Right. So this is our final question for our time together, Scott. We wanna be able to leave with something really tangible and practical. So if I was a district leader and I wanna change policy, I wanna think differently about grading, what is the first thing that they should do?

Scott: Yeah, I think the first thing is you have to involve parents and teachers and probably the kids, especially the high school kids. Yeah. And sit down and have conversations and lay out some of these issues, show them little teeter totter that I use in my in my blog and other things like that. Say it's these are some of the problems. And and there's some, I think, very simple proposals to change like move away from the zero hundred altogether. Separate behavior and academics. If we just start with those two things, I I I don't think again, because it's grading and people think they know what they're talking about with this because they've all received grades, it takes longer than you think. But I've seen people try to do this and running too fast ahead of the parents and the teachers. And you might start by trying to get your teachers on board, but I wouldn't spend too much time there because word gets out and then it becomes soccer field sideline chatter that will kill you. And then what I would likely do at the high school level, because the elementary and middle school is relatively easy. elementary is easy.

Rachael: Yeah.

Scott: But at the high school level, I would start by making friends with some admissions officers and bringing them in. that's a great idea. Because if if they could explain, we don't care your score compares to a score in a neighboring high school. We compare to where your kid lines up within this high school. And so that would actually probably ease parents because they think the scholarships award based on GPA. We know GPA is important. But it's it's GPA plus class rank that's important, right? And so I I would bring in those kind of folks who could dispel some of the myths. And then I I think it would take a minimum of a year and maybe get some grades and subjects that would be willing to pilot this, do stuff like that, and and probably need to start at the elementary school because it's easier and people get used to it. But then you have to keep it moving. You can't like stop it. at at middle and high school. Yeah. So again, it's the concepts are not hard. That's why it's that's why it's so frustrating to me. The concepts are not hard, but behavior is hard to change.

Rachael: Yeah, that is 100% true. Well on that note, perfect, Scott. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your knowledge with us. I really appreciate your time and it's so good to reconnect with you.

Scott: It's been fun. Yeah. Talk to you anytime.

Rachael: And before we wrap up, where can our listeners find you and keep up with your work? is and the work that you're doing.

Scott: Yeah, it's the Center for Assessment isn't just Google Center for Assessment. And you know, it's N C I E A dot org, but if you Google Center for Assessment that comes up. And we have a blog series that is generally blog published every week or so. I I people write for different reasons. I write when I something's really bugging me. Others write when they feel like they need to teach people about a particular concept. So There's lots of itch lots of diversity blogs and lots of interesting blogs. Yeah.

Rachael: It is. I'm an ardent follower. So I would highly recommend that people go and subscribe. Well, thank you, Scott, for joining me.

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