By Sarah Peeden, Head of Middle School and Dr. John Stegeman, Head of Upper School

For more than twenty years, Eastside Preparatory School has strived to provide an innovative program that challenges students to think critically about the world around them and respond with compassion. From the beginning, remaining true to that mission has meant adapting to meet the needs of an ever-changing tomorrow. At the same time, it has meant reflecting on how our practices support the health and well-being of our students. To ensure our program remained aligned with our mission and program objectives, in the fall of 2023, Eastside Prep began an inquiry into the school’s grading and assessment practices and philosophy.

This project was initiated by the school’s 2023-2028 Strategic Priorities, specifically two distinct programmatic initiatives—section 2.4 “Reimagine student assessment practices to ensure mission alignment and promote student well-being;” and section 2.5 “Ensure the EPS curriculum remains modern and relevant in order to equip students to navigate the future with confidence.” Why might EPS’s assessment practices need examination to ensure alignment and promote well-being, you may ask? In recent years, we have observed students’ performance anxiety about grades and test scores increase, which often leads to what we perceive to be an unhealthy fixation on graded outcomes at the expense of holistic student health and concentration on authentic learning experiences. We undertook this project to try to understand the connection between grades and their impact on students. At the same time, we wondered if traditional grading practices were meeting our needs programmatically and in terms of how we best prepare students for life beyond 2024.

Grades play an integral role in schools, and because of their embedded power, have long been referred to as the “third rail” of American schools (Feldman, 2019). Nevertheless, nationally, institutions like Eastside Prep have been exploring similar questions about grading for the last decade; since the pandemic, though, these conversations have resulted in action with mixed results. For some schools, disparities in grades based on identity have been cause for implementing what educational researcher and consultant Joe Feldman describes as “equitable grading” practices that are built upon “three pillars: accuracy, bias-resistance, and intrinsic motivation” (Hough, 2019). For other schools, a mental health crisis among adolescents, especially in well-resourced and competitive environments, has fueled concern that the systems in place to assess and catalyze student learning may be negatively impacting their well-being (Gulla & Jorgenson, 2024). Regardless of the motivation for grading reform, many of these initiatives have failed to make lasting change because of poor implementation (Guskey, 2021). To make effective change, researcher Thomas Guskey noted in a recent review of ill-fated reform efforts, schools must commit to improvement processes built on transparency, direction, “why”-focused inquiry, and engagement with stakeholders on all sides of the issue (p. 197).

In light of these signposts for success, we have attempted a multi-stage action plan that began, first and foremost, with faculty members. In the past year, EPS faculty in both divisions conducted a deep inventory of our current practices to develop shared understanding of the methods being employed in classes and the ideas and beliefs underpinning them. Not content to simply look at grades, we dug deeper to uncover course goals and learning objectives, then explored the range of metrics being used to calculate course grades and what kinds of skills, content knowledge, and other student attributes were being measured by our assessments. Some of this work happened in combined division settings, while other parts of the project took place within the context of our academic discipline groups. By the conclusion of the year, we felt we had developed a good understanding of our practice and principles, and we began to look at a range of alternative assessment practices being used across the educational landscape.

Grades are important representations of student learning, but they are not the learning itself. They serve two primary functions. For students, grades serve as proxies for understanding how they’re doing in a course by categorizing performance. Grades provide basic feedback that lets students assess their skills, ability, or knowledge within a test or assignment. At the same time, grades act as a kind of shorthand that communicates to those outside of the classroom and student-teacher relationship a very general sense of performance in a given subject, in a given term. It is important that we be able to measure student learning and progress and communicate that to parents and other educators outside of the school, especially to colleges and universities as our students prepare for application in the twelfth grade. Because of the relative simplicity of the A-F letter grade system and the complexity and nuance of student learning at EPS, much detail is lost in translation. What ends up being communicated is a rough and general view of how the individual student compares to their EPS classmates, and not much else. Yet most alternative means of communication are less well understood in the broader educational system, and quite a bit more cumbersome to compile and implement.

This project is far from complete, and in the fall of 2024, we have picked up where we left off in the work with our faculty. We have continued to explore and refine the assessment tools, metrics, and goals that we use in the classroom, and we are in the process of furthering our shared understanding of ways that we might more fully, efficiently, and effectively capture and communicate student progress using grades and other tools. In particular, we are conducting an inquiry into a relatively new tool called the Mastery Transcript Learning Record, which functions as a kind of supplementary transcript and documents student progress toward mastering standards that are unique to each school but not tied to courses and credits in the way traditional grades are. We do not have immediate plans to implement such a system, but exploring how it works and how we might use it is a valuable learning and professional growth exercise for our faculty.

Meanwhile, we are furthering plans to seek feedback and input from students, parents, and our partners in the educational system outside of the school. We hope that this work will support our efforts on two fronts. First, it will allow us to more fully understand how students experience grades, what they mean to them, if and how assessments and grades lead to unnecessary stressors for students, and ultimately the impact on student well-being. We also hope to gain greater perspective from parents about what they need from our grading and reporting systems and how colleges use this information in the application process. Second, our engagement with parents, students, and educational partners offers us the opportunity to share our learning with those constituencies and communicate plans as they develop for any changes we may undertake in the future. We look forward to this dialogue with parents and guardians and hope you will join us in an upcoming listening session.

Ultimately, through this project, we aim to support students holistically as they learn, grow, and become the best versions of themselves. By helping students showcase their learning and engage in school with curiosity, we believe they will grow with health and sustainability as they expand academic performance and self-discovery. These are lofty goals, but we believe that, with our inclusive and intentional design, we will be able to stay true to what makes Eastside Prep the dynamic and futurefocused school that it is.

References

Feldman, J. (2019, Summer). Building More Inclusive Communities with Grading for Equity. NAIS.org. https://www.nais.org/magazine/ independent-school/summer-2019/grading-for-equity/

Gulla, J., & Jorgenson, O. (2024, May). How can schools combat the teen mental health crisis? NAIS.org. https:// www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/may-2024/ how-can-schools-combat-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/

Guskey, T. R. (2021). Learning from Failures: Lessons from unsuccessful grading reform initiatives. NASSP Bulletin, 105(3), 192–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/01926365211029375

Hough, L. (2019, May 28). Grade Expectations. Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ ed-magazine/19/05/grade-expectations