Chapter 14

This chapter went it depth about what really goes into report cards. For many students it is what can make or break a semester. Grades are also supposed to be a measure of how well a student has mastered material. Is there any real way tell students in what areas they have progressed in mastery, what areas they are lacking, how much of the material they have learned as well as their own personal progress, all in one letter? One tactic to make the grading a little more meaningful is to attach a number to it. The letter will show the level of mastery, but the number will show the amount of personal progress the student has made. This way they have some notion of how they're doing, even if they mess up some of the projects.
This chapter seems big into moving away from the standard approach to reporting grades. For all of us going through school we were most likely given report cards with the standard A-F grades and maybe if we were lucky we got a computer generated comment along the lines of "works well with others". We have to really think about it and see how much the grades did for us. Did they help us at all in our learning? As teachers we need to think about what it means to fully differentiate the classroom. That would mean differentiating the grades as well. We need to think about how to go about maknig the grades as beneficial as possible to our students.