Should Grades Factor in Behavior?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the nuanced reality that almost everything in school involves behavior — so the question isn't whether grades include behavior, but which behaviors.
Key Takeaways
- Everything involves behavior - Turning in work, participating, and taking tests are all behaviors that grades already reflect
- The real question is which behaviors - Completion, effort, and participation are legitimate grade components because they're essential to learning
- Pure mastery grades are an illusion - Pretending grades can be completely behavior-free ignores how learning actually works
Transcript
Should grades factor in behavior?
One of the things standards-based grading advocates like to say is that too much of what we include in traditional grades is quote-unquote behavior and you might think that they mean things like tardies or talking back or getting into fights and like of course we shouldn't take off things like that we have separate procedures for dealing with unacceptable behavior like we don't need to affect students academic grades Because of their behavior, like those are separate things, but that's not what they're talking about.
Standards-based grading folks are talking about everything involved in learning other than knowledge itself and saying we should separate those quote unquote behaviors from, I guess, pure learning.
And that's the part that doesn't make any sense to me.
because any learning requires action on the student's part, right?
Like learning, I suppose you can learn a certain amount by sitting and doing nothing, but we certainly can't assess you when you just sit there and do nothing.
So they say that it's just a behavior when the student turns in their work.
It's a behavior when they participate in class.
It's a behavior when they participate in a discussion and ask a question and do their practice problems.
Like like everything is like breathing is a behavior you know in a sense but i think this is such a ridiculous distinction to make and such a ridiculous thing to try to split off from grades so that we have to have one grade that's like purely standards mastery do you understand the content like i don't know how you're supposed to assess that short of like an mri like are we doing fmris on our students to figure out what they know completely separate from their behavior like if you open your mouth then that's behavior and we're not allowed to assess like this is such a goofy distinction to me and like this paranoia that we might be including in the grade something that is a quote-unquote behavior who cares it is part of what people want to know and it's a distinction that is not worth making And, like, nobody means that that...
Like, when people talk about behavior, that's not what they mean.
Like, turning in your work, yes, is, like, in the strictest sense, a behavior.
But if you don't turn in your work, should that affect your grade?
Yes.
We're not doing brain scans on kids to figure out what they know.
What goes into your grade does depend on your work and what you turn in and what information is available to us to assess as educators.
So, like...
I just am tired of the intellectual dishonesty that always pops up in these discussions of standards-based grading.
I think there are a lot of good things about standards-based teaching and assessment, but when it comes to the grading, this artificial distinction between behaviors and knowledge and like mastery of the standards, like it just does not make a lot of sense to me.
Let me know what you think.