People Behind our Research: Thomas Guskey

I'm Tom Guskey. I'm professor of education psychology in the College of Education at
UK, and my research currently focuses on the way teachers grade -- how they gather information
from the students through assessments in their classrooms -- and then how they report that
information to parents and families. The grading practices used in most schools today are really
steeped in tradition. We continue to use these practices not because their effectiveness
has been investigated, but simply because we've always done it that way. As we learn
more about this, we find that there's probably no area in all of education where the gap
between a knowledge-base and practice is greater than in the area of grading. So that sort
of compels us to move ahead in this area and lessen that gap to make this knowledge-base
better known, and help practitioners improve their policies and practices to fall more
in line with what current evidence indicates can be beneficial for students. We know for
example that when teachers grade their students, that they need to grade them in terms of what
they’ve learned and what they're able to do. In other words, grades need to be based
on specific learning criteria and not based upon a child's relative standing among classmates.
We typically refer to that as norm-based or grading on the curve, and our evidence indicates
that has lots of negative consequences for students. That when students are graded on
the curve, everybody could have done miserably. It's just some that are less miserably than
others. And we also know that that actually is detrimental to relationships between students,
and detrimental to relationships of teachers to students. So one of the primary factors
that we find in this research is that grades should be really based on learning criteria,
which means teachers have to specify what it is that they want their students to learn,
and develop very good measures of student learning that they can use then to base those
grades upon. I think across the United States you see increasing emphasis on grading issues.
It's the one aspect that's kind of been miss-aligned. That we're trying to be clearer about our
standards for student learning -- what we want students to learn and be able to do.
We have made great progress in gathering information about how well students have learned those
things. The one remaining element and the biggest challenge before us is to clarify
how we communicate that information to students and to parents and to families, so they can
become more involved in the process. When we become better at communicating with parents
and guardians and families about what the students are doing in school -- opening up
those avenues of communication -- it just does remarkable things in a community. Where
you see parents feeling better about contacting teachers when good things and bad things happen.
Teachers being more open to relating to parents and being more specific in those communications,
so that they can target particular aspects of a child's learning experience. The other
thing that has really been encouraging to me, is that it allows us a framework for providing
collaboration between schools and education organizations. So here in Kentucky for example,
all of our schools are working with the same standards for student learning. They are all
working with the same assessment system, but each school is responsible to develop its
own grade and reporting system. Well, why couldn't we get some really smart people together
and think about these issues in some depth, and develop something that everybody could use?
We have a very large program going on where we're helping Kentucky school districts
revise their reporting strategies. We've been working very closely with some of the Fayette
County schools. Two high schools in particular are really changing drastically their grading
policies to bring them more in line with what we know is better practice. So that kind of
collaboration has been remarkable to see, and the strength of that in leading really
systematic change here in Kentucky and then across the nation. That's been wonderful.

People Behind our Research: Thomas Guskey

Latest Posts