Chapter 13:  Assessment and Grading in the 
                         Differentiated Classroom 
                                      
                      Assessment as we used to know and loathe it 
               
                  In the 10th grade, Bill faced a major test in American History.  The teacher 
              had stressed how important the test was and how it was modeled on the kind of tests 
              that the students would encounter in university.  Bill spent hours studying in 
              preparation for the test as it represented a very significant portion of his grade in the 
              course. As he entered the classroom on the day of the test he felt fairly self-confident.  
              He had thoroughly reviewed the chapters in the text book and his class notes.  He felt 
              he was well-prepared for the test.  However, as he began to read through the question 
              paper, he realized that the test focused on content that he hadn’t studied at all.  It was 
              as though the test had come out of a different course altogether.  Panic and self-doubt 
              swept through him. 
                  Bill scored poorly on the test and the teacher wrote on his script: You must 
              learn to study harder.  This test does not represent what you are capable of. 
                  Thirty years later, Bill reflects that the test taught him several lessons about 
              life in schools that had nothing to do with American History.  First, despite all the 
              platitudes espoused by parents and teachers to the contrary, there wasn’t necessarily 
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            any relationship between effort and achievement.  Hard work didn’t necessarily pay 
            dividends.  In some classrooms, it still doesn’t.   Bill is confident that he could have 
            achieved the same dismal score without the hours of studying.  There is only a 
            correlation between hard work and accomplishment when the assessment is 
            reasonably predictable. 
                When teachers, however unwittingly, cause students to disassociate effort and 
            achievement, they do the learner a major disservice.  Madeline Hunter’s classic work 
            with Attribution Theory in schools (Hunter & Barker,1985) suggests that there are 
            aspects of causality that are perceived to be controllable (e.g. effort) and aspects that 
            are not controllable (e.g. ability, task difficulty and luck).  When the controllable 
            aspects of causality are perceived to be connected to achievement, individual potency 
            and efficacy are enhanced and the likelihood of future success is increased.  The 
            opposite is also, unfortunately, the case. 
                The second lesson Bill learned from the experience was that some teachers 
            couldn’t be trusted.  The test did not represent a fair assessment of the major ideas and 
            concepts of the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s response to it.  Instead, it was an 
            idiosyncratic collection of questions – some of which were tangential, some of which 
            were merely trivial.  The test was clearly a “gotcha assessment” in which the teacher 
            attempted, with considerable success, to uncover what the students didn’t know -- as 
            opposed to what they had actually learned.   
                Bill learned from this experience that school success was not so much about 
            learning or achievement as it was about being able to out-guess the teacher as to what 
            was going to be included on the test.  He learned to play the “guess what I’m thinking 
            game”. 
                This is not only bad assessment practice; it is malpractice.   
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                         Fortunately, standards-based curricula and common assessments have made 
                   these practices rarer today. 
                          
                         In this chapter, we will attempt to do three things.  First, we will look at some 
                   principles that international schools are using in the assessment of student learning.  
                   Secondly, we will examine a relatively new paradigm in assessment (Assessment for 
                   Learning) that appears to complement differentiation remarkably well.  Finally, we 
                   will look at the knotty issues surrounding grading student work.  Grading and 
                   assessment often become confused in teachers’ minds.  We perceive them as separate 
                   and different functions.  Assessment has to do with the analysis of student work and 
                   the formulation of useful feedback; whereas grading has to do with communicating 
                   student achievement and progress to valued stakeholders (parents, university 
                   admissions officers, etc.). We will examine why so many teachers feel conflicted 
                   about grading and suggest some principles that can be used for grading student 
                   achievement in the differentiated classroom.  
                      
                                         Assessment of Learning 
                                                     
                         The world of educational assessment is undergoing tectonic shifts that are 
                   literally moving the ground beneath the feet of the educational establishment.  We are 
                   not just looking at assessment practices and classroom strategies, but we are reflecting 
                   on and re-examining the very purposes of assessment. 
                         Consider that the traditional purpose of assessment in schools was to sort and 
                                                                                th
                   rank students.  Given the class hierarchies and the stratified job market of the 20  
                   century, it was imperative to have a means of funneling young people into productive 
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            employment.  When Bill grew up in Britain in the 1950’s, the Eleven Plus 
            Examination was still in effect.  Taken at the age of eleven, the results of this exam 
            determined whether a child would enter further academic study or be shunted into 
            vocational training.  The old British “O” Level Examinations further sorted and 
            ranked students at age 16.  The top 10% of candidates, irrespective of their actual 
            performance on the examination, received “A”s and the next 20% “B”s and so on.  
            These so-called norm referenced tests compared student performance against other 
            students sitting the same examination.   
                The SAT fulfills a similar sorting function in terms of university admission in 
            the United States.  The ranking and sorting of students continues to be a primary 
            purpose of educational assessment in highly competitive educational systems (e.g. 
            India, South Korea, etc.) around the world. 
                Teachers who grew up in norm-referenced systems often find it very difficult 
            to think about assessment without comparing students against each other even within 
            a relatively small classroom.  This comparison inevitably works to the detriment of all 
            students.  Students at the bottom of the teacher’s achievement hierarchy experience 
            lower expectations and achieve less.  Even those students “fortunate” enough to be 
            sorted and ranked at the top of the heap are not compared against their own potential 
            and are often under-challenged.  They become the victims of benign neglect since 
            “they will learn it anyway”.   
                Another traditional purpose of educational assessment was to dole out 
            punishments and rewards.  Students who did well received accolades, were placed on 
            the Honor Roll and received awards and prizes.  Students who didn’t do well were 
            also recognized, sometimes publicly, with scorn and ridicule. We can see the 
            Skinnerian hand of operant conditioning at work.  In the traditional perception of 
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