Geoff Johnson: Phasing out letter grades for K-9 a good thing

As a longtime opponent of using letter grades to describe a student’s learning progress, I can only applaud the B.C. Education Ministry’s new policy of replacing letter grades with a more descriptive “proficiency scale” for kindergarten to Grade 9 students.

This school year, all students from kindergarten to Grade 9 in B.C. public schools will be assessed using the four stages of the proficiency scale — emerging, developing, proficient and extending — rather than letter grades. As just one example, the B.C. Grade 6 prescribed learning outcomes for reading are divided into two categories: reading literature and reading for information.

Students deemed to be in the “developing” stage are “demonstrating learning in relation to the learning standards with growing consistency.” So far so good, but some experienced teachers and administrators I spoke to about the new policy expressed the hope that parents will understand that the descriptors behind the four stages of the scale are not precise.Some school districts, like Mission School District in the Fraser Valley, have been piloting the move away from letter grades.

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Geoff Johnson: Phasing out letter grades for K-9 a good thingIt will be up to teachers to explain that the proficiency scale takes into account the fact that learning occurs in different ways for each learner and doesn’t always follow a nice, predictable linear pathway
Source: timescolonist - 🏆 15. / 75 Read more »

Geoff Johnson: Phasing out letter grades for K-9 a good thingIt will be up to teachers to explain that the proficiency scale takes into account the fact that learning occurs in different ways for each learner and doesn’t always follow a nice, predictable linear pathway
Source: PGCitizen - 🏆 65. / 51 Read more »