GAP
Grade Abatement Profiles as Testimonials
Embedded Files
Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant. Nor are grades a necessary part of schooling, any more than paddling or taking extended dictation could be described that way. Still, it takes courage to do right by kids in an era when the quantitative matters more than the qualitative, when meeting (someone else’s) standards counts for more than exploring ideas, and when anything “rigorous” is automatically assumed to be valuable. We have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which in this case means asking not how to improve grades but how to jettison them once and for all.
~Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Grades
~Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Grades
These grade abatement profiles, abbreviated often as GAP reports, have gone through many iterations over the years. The basic idea is to invite students into the evaluation process -- to give them a role in what Tony Wagner calls "collective human judgment informed by evidence."
To Alfie Kohn's point, there is no practical way to eliminate grades in a public high school. Grades are the currency of public education; we can't eliminate them any more than we can eliminate violence in prison.
But we can abate their effects. We can strip the gears, take away almost everything toxic, inflated, etc., and build different machinery inside the numbers. We can change the process and invite stakeholders to change their mindsets.
The two-page handout here contains the profiles, skills, and traits at the heart of this evaluation process. There are dozens of scaffolded, interlocking mechanisms beyond that, all of which deepen our understanding of this kind of assessment, none of which are absolutely necessary for student's to be partners in the process. The system is modular and responsive.
Two helpful explanatory essays:
Neither is required reading to understand the student testimonials below. The current instructional website is organized fairly well for those interested in more context:
Profiles, Skills, & TraitsFrom the GAP Report: Testimonials
From the GAP Report: Testimonials
These are collected from the most recent iteration of the self-assessment process. The set includes responses from April, May, and June of 2018.
On Focus
On Focus
Students are asked to assess and analyze their daily productivity, including the progress made toward specific learning goals. This is the ability to stay demonstrably on-task for the class period. It’s about the patterns created — the habitual organization of the workspace, the investment in collaborative efforts, the evident diligence and attentiveness, and so on.
On Feedback
On Feedback
This is the reciprocal connection a student forges with the vast resources that provide feedback in this course. Students are asked to consider the extent to which they’ve read each instructional post carefully; asked insightful questions, in person and online, about their work; conferenced with the teacher or a proxy; reflected and written metacognitively about feedback; and so on.
External Artifact Analysis
External Artifact Analysis
This is an analysis of the skills and traits that often produce external artifacts, such as essays and test scores. Students are asked to consider what they have created in this regard, and then to analyze the extent to which the required skills and traits are evident in that body of evidence.
Internal Artifact Analysis
Internal Artifact Analysis
This is an analysis primarily of the four interconnected skills and traits that most often impact us internally: amenability, self-awareness, assiduousness, and self-efficacy. Students are asked to consider their progress in developing these four, and then to analyze their progress toward specific learning goals.
GAP Tier Analysis
GAP Tier Analysis
The grade abatement profiles can be split into tiers, which often helps students visualize and even weaponize the thresholds for success. The most recent iterations of these GAP scoring reports asks students to analyze their work in terms of a particular tier before selecting a specific profile. This spreadsheet contains a copy of each tier’s total responses.
Of note is that this is based on the student's assumed profile score. It is the starting point for collective evaluation. That is why so many more responses fall in the fourth tier: Students are as vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger effect as anyone.
Digital Records
Digital Records
The spreadsheet embedded here is an anonymized copy of one three-week period of digital records for student assessment. These are used to generate discussion and evidence-based evaluation.
These notes use shorthand and various internal systems to organize individual feedback. For the first time, I made these internal systems transparent; see these notes and this instructional post for more.
Physical Records
Physical Records
The other part of any assessment is, of course, face-to-face conferencing. Here is an example of what that looks like -- one glimpse of the many notes used to guide teacher and student through the evaluation process.
Report abuse