Kate McDaniel

Professor Karen Rowe

EDUC 450

26 Oct 2022

Grading for Equity Reflection

The largest piece of this text that I will take away is the idea of grading for knowledge

rather than behavior. Throughout our discussions within the class and listening to our speakers, I

have noticed there are many people who have highlighted this idea and I think it’s the hardest

idea to incorporate into our classrooms as educators. We are still human, after all, and we won’t

get along with each one of our students which, of course, can reflect in our teaching and grading.

Reflection on how I’m managing my future classroom and why I am reacting in certain ways to

certain students is something that I want to do often. I am practicing that now in the class I’m in

at Rocky. I would like to practice it more with grading although I am not doing a lot of grading

yet. I appreciated several comments that were made about hiding the name of the student to be

able to grade with as little bias as possible, as we want to grade students on their knowledge and

not their behavior or how much we like them in the classroom.

Another bias-resistant topic within grading that the text discussed was extra-credit. I’ve

known teachers who have given extra credit in the past for bringing extra school supplies in

particular, which doesn’t allow for students who are from a lower-income background or who

don’t have access to reliable transportation to go to the store and get those supplies. I really like

the idea of having extra credit that relates to class knowledge to allow students to further show

their understanding of class content that they may have either not understood before or didn’t

show evidence of understanding according to assignment rubrics and test scores.

 I also thought making grading mathematically accurate was important and want to do

further research on different ways of grading to be able to play with those in my own classroom

and decide what may be best for my class. I’m curious to know what other kinds of grading there

is out there that were not touched on in this book although I think a lot of the ideas within this

book are great. I struggle with some of the ideas of having a 0-4 scale, as mentioned within our

class discussions, those grades are often just changed to grades within the 0-100 scale when

transferring to another school and may make things confusing for students as they begin college,

if that’s what they decide to do, as colleges often use the 0-100 scale.

One major topic that is discussed in many of my classes are rubrics. I think they add a lot

of transparency which I feel adds more transparency to how I am grading. In my Methods class,

We’ve discussed creating rubrics with students collaboratively which allows students a chance to

look at the rubric for assessments as a class, even if they don’t look at it after it is created. This

also allows for discussion as to what is achievable and equitable for students within the class. It

also allows me, the teacher, to learn what my students expect from me when I’m grading and

what may be important to them and their academic goals. I felt that rubrics and the cocreation of

rubrics was a really great idea to motivate students to do their best on an assignment. Overall, I

thought this book was a really great start that caused me to think about grading and begin

discussion on different ideas of how to make grading serve students in a system that was not

created with grading equity in mind.