Pedagogy Welcome

Sustainable Grading Practices

red pencils for gradingAccording to Glen Pearsall in a recent article published in Educational Leadership, teachers work on average teachers work 14 more hours per week than they are paid for due to issues related to preparation, planning, and grading. Many teachers reported they often stay late at work or take mounds of student work home to be graded. While such dedication is noble, it is not sustainable.

Pearsall recommends the following strategies for managing grading and marking student work:

  1. Minimalist Marking. Practice error flagging (place a dot or dash at the line where errors appear and then have your students correct the mistake), error counting (divide the work into subsections and give a subtotal for each section, then students have to find their errors and correct them), student-generated comments (you identify errors and have students write general comments summing up the advice), and model correcting (select a portion of the work to mark-up and then have students complete the remaining sections).
  2. Alternative Grades. Rather than use traditional letter grades, employ a system that has a mark for equal to prior work, better standard than prior work, or lower standard than prior work.
  3. Annotating Feedback. Provide students with oral feedback regarding their work and have them summarize the feedback in writing.
  4. Identifying Patterns of Error. Teachers provide students feedback by creating a table of common errors and train students to recognize those errors themselves. Over time, students will start to recognized their common patterns and work to correct them independently.

Pearsall’s article provides more detail about these types of strategies and may be accessed here: Keep these strategies in mind as you plan for student assessment next week. You may be able to reduce the amount of material you collect and take home for grading, and your students may be more engaged in their own assessment.

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