If you are curious about my reasons for focusing on feedback rather than grades, I invite you to read (or watch) some of the following:
The Case Against Grades - Alfie Kohn (2011)
Why Grades Are Not Paramount to Achievement - Ashley Lamb-Sinclair (2017)
Aligning Assessment to Brain Science - Jo Boaler (2016)
How four simple words can solve education’s biggest problem. {10min video} - Mark Barnes (2014)
What I Learned from a Year of Going Gradeless - blog post by secondary biology teacher Paul K. Strode (2016)
From a Culture of Performance, to a Culture of Learning {18min video} - Alfie Kohn (2012)
Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently) - Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner (2014)
Seven Reasons for Standards Based Grading - Patricia L. Scriffiny (2008)
Book: Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School - Starr Sackstein (2015)
In our classroom we will use note-taking strategies to help us summarize our learning, share our thinking, and keep a record of important ideas/concepts that we are learning about.
RESEARCH:
GETTING STARTED WITH SKETCHNOTING
Even though we do not focus on grades/memorization/tests in our classroom, sometimes there is a benefit to learning new concepts (vocabulary, rules, etc.) and if so, retrieval practice is the way to go.