Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment A Review by David Adams (original) (raw)

-1 -Grading is a powerful tool faculty use to communicate with their students, colleagues, and institutions, as well as external entities. The authors, through their personal experiences in the classroom and from listening to faculty from myriad institutions at workshops around the country, have found that teachers have "spent nearly every day of *their+ teaching lives wrestling with the problems, the power, and the paradoxes of the grading system" (xv). "Effective Grading . . . presents suggestions for making classroom grading more fair, more time-efficient, and more conducive to learning" (xvi). In addition, the authors provide a number of means and examples for using grading as a way for faculty, departments, and institutions to assess learning outcomes -a process required by regional accreditation agencies and many state legislatures. Walvood and Anderson admit that their assessment model, or system, has tradeoffs. Essentially, the system "requires wide participation from faculty, and it requires faculty time to reevaluate their classroom practices, improve them as needed, and make them visible in new ways" (154). The benefit the authors purport is more faculty control over outcomes assessment in their own classroom by using the grading process, and the assessment conducted through grading can be integrated easily with assessment plans that already exist in departments and institutions. It is the authors' hope that faculty will be able to maintain maximum control over curricular content; "over the teaching, learning, and grading process in classrooms; and over the tests, assignment, criteria, and standards by which faculty assess student learning" (154). Through the use of case studies and examples, Woolvard and Anderson provide new ways to think about and conduct grading and the many ways this information can be used to assess learning outcomes.