Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Puzzled about elementary school reports

We recently moved to California and find the public school reports puzzling. They range scores from 1-Beginning, 2- Developing, 3- Proficient, 4- Exemplary. But almost everyone in the class seems to be at 3 across all subjects. This includes kids who I know have placed honors in AMC8 in elementary school and have maxed out in other standardized tests the school carries out.

Is this just a mode of avoiding competitive behavior? While I have no complaints I do not find the reports particularly useful.

My experience is that no one gets a 4, because the schools don't administer any assessments that test beyond grade-level skills, and they don't look at things like the AMC8 in grading.

I agree that they are not very useful.

It is early in the year. If they give 4s now they can't show evidence of improvement at the end of the year. And like the PP said they can't grade them above level if they don't test above level. If they only check whether a kid can count to 10 them that they can count to 1000 doesn't show up. Ours are under standard (more than a year below), at standard (within a year) or above standard (more than a year above). It makes no difference if you are one or 4 years above as far as reporting goes.

In our California school we do not have that experience.

There are two ratings bars, one for Achievement, and one for Effort. You can score 1-4 in these, depending on the subject (Art, Science, Math, English, etc.)

I am only going to list what our Achievement rating scores say on my child's report card:

4=Advanced
3=Proficient
2=Mostly Proficient
1=Not Proficient

Most kids get Proficient or Advanced at our school, but our school is considered one of the best in the district. Proficient means they fulfill the requirements and show that they understand the subject. Advanced means they are doing above level work. Based on what I've seen many of the children at our school are working above grade level, and 75% scored in the Standards Exceeded category for both English and Math on the CAASPP last year. There are children who are rated with a 4 in the first report card of the year, so it is not based on state testing at our school.

There are also similar ratings for Work and Study Habits and Learning and Social Skills.

In case it may be of help in shedding light on grading practices, here is a post on an old thread: How to deal with grade report.

It may be important for parents to realize that there is data collection to create a permanent record of student grades.

In our school district, I know the teachers were encouraged not to give out any 4's the first 3 marking periods. Partly this was because they had to have actual evidence of being above grade level, but I think part of it was so they could give a 4 the last marking period and it helped their teacher evaluation.

So does this practice change in middle school? I would be concerned if the same non-differentiated grading continues into higher grades?

LAF I do not think this correlates to CAASPP. Our school had 80% exceeds with several kids maxing out entirely on the tests.

This was our experience in elementary school too. We aren't in California, but our school used the 1-4 scale with 4 representing "all the curriculum has been mastered". We were told that "none of the students can have a 4 before the 4th quarter, because that would look like they don't have anything left to learn." And thanks to the level of the curriculum expectations in our early elementary school classrooms, there were quite a few students in my children's classes who really didn't have "anything left to learn" early on in the year. When we questioned our ds' teacher about specifics, in a subject that it was clear he'd achieved end-of-year levels, her reply was "I still can't give him a 4 until 4th quarter, it would look like he hadn't learned anything for the rest of the year."

While that sounds utterly dire and ridiculous, it was also just the grading system. While it wasn't an ideal academic situation, ds did continue to progress in his academics and the teacher didn't hold him back because of the number marked o his report card - it simply became a meaningless marking system that no one really paid any attention to - for most of the children, not just the high ability kids. While those grades may still exist in a file somewhere they were never mentioned or looked at again as far as we can tell once our children moved on into upper elementary and middle school. State testing scores, however, stayed with them.

polarbear

Our elementary grading is also standards based -- Beginning, Progressing, Meeting, Exceeding. If they don't do assessing above grade or provide a matrix for exceeding, then it's hard to get an E on the card. They also can get an E for reading level, and then are rated beneath that based on that higher level.