When teacher Joe Bower sits down this month to write up the report cards for his Grade 6 class in Red Deer, Alta., he will first put this question to his students: What do they think their marks should be? He does not always agree, but they usually come pretty close, and they learn how to assess their own efforts. He then adds his observations from class and studies the portfolio of their class work – though there is not a single grade on any essay or project.
Five years ago, Mr. Bower took the controversial step of tossing out regular grades. No longer would his students get their tests back and obsess over where they ranked in the class, ignoring the long hours he spent on comments. What were grades anyway, he thought, but an arbitrary way to sort students and make life simpler for teachers?
He feels the same about report cards: Students would take them home, he says, “thinking about their own hides” or expecting bribes for doing well. He issues marks because he is required to give them. But grades are only “autopsies,” he argues – a good report card should be a forward-looking “physical” that tells students where and how they can learn more.
Grades aren’t likely to vanish, strong as the arguments may be against them. But thinking like Mr. Bower’s is part of a growing debate over how to create the perfect report card, which would communicate properly to parents, allow for proper assessment and still motivate students. Often packed with “edu-babble,” as one expert calls it, the cards have increasingly become a source of confusion for parents, who have to interpret marks represented by numbers or letters or percentages, depending on the province or school board.
“Parents just want to know where their kids are,” says Michael Zwaagstra
Prompted by growing complaints from parents and concerns from teachers, several provinces and individual school boards – as well as school districts in the United States – are in the process of reviewing their report cards, or introducing new ones. Education reform, and in particular how to assess students and teachers, is a general trend – so report cards, which vary widely across the country, are a natural target.
Quebec will introduce a new format next September. In October, Manitoba announced a consultation process, and the Saskatoon public school board is piloting a new version. In Ontario, parents are receiving a “progress report” in place of the fall report card after teachers complained that November did not give them enough time to fully assess students with grades. It will note whether students are “progressing well, very well or with difficulty.”
And, after more than a decade, Ontario has reversed the guideline (implemented inconsistently by schools anyway) that late assignments should not be marked down – and teachers could not give zeroes. Manitoba is expected to make the same announcement in two weeks, and Saskatchewan is also reviewing the issue.
Not marking down for late assignments – a guideline that directly affects report cards – was an example, educators say, of a well-meaning approach that failed. The theory was that teachers should mark students only on the substance of their work, not the behaviour around it, to encourage and motivate them better.
But, once deadlines didn’t matter, some students felt no incentive to meet them. Others complained about a double standard. “There were some habitual abusers of timelines,” says Ken Coran, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. “And other students were saying, ‘What’s up with this? Is there a deadline, or isn’t there?’ ”
