Grading Assessments

It is good practice to grade assessments and return them to students as soon as possible after they take the assessment. Students benefit most from feedback that is received while they can still recall why they chose their responses to the assessment items. Whenever possible, schedule assessments when you will be able to complete grading and share the results with students soon after they take it.

As you grade, refer to the keys and rubrics you developed when you wrote the assessment. Grading selected-response items — true-false, matching, and multiple-choice – can generally be done quickly because there is one correct response. Grading constructed response items — sentence-completion and essays — requires more time because there may be a range of correct responses. Use your key for these items, but also be open to other correct responses you may not have considered when you wrote the key.

When reviewing the constructed-response items, it is important to use a grading process that will ensure you are applying the same standards to all students. Along with using keys and rubrics, there are a few other strategies you can use to maintain consistent grading:

• If possible, grade the assessment without knowing students’ names to prevent expectations about any student’s performance from biasing your grading. To accomplish this, you can ask them to write their names on the back of a page in the assessment or on a blank cover sheet. You can also have them write a numeric code instead of their name on the assessment, and then match that assessment to the student only after you complete grading.
• Grade one section of the assessment at a time for the entire class before moving to the next section. This is especially helpful for maintaining consistent grading for a long assessment or for a large class.
• Try to keep the same level of alertness while grading. If you find you are getting distracted or growing tired, take a break from grading until you can focus on the task consistently.

Conducting Item Analysis

As you grade an assessment, you may notice patterns in the items students completed successfully and those which multiple students had incorrect. There may also be a pattern in the type of errors they made. In addition to taking note of these patterns, there are psychometric analyses of the student responses you can conduct after grading to determine the effectiveness of the items on the assessment. Psychometric analyses provide a means to interpret the quantitative results of tests. Three types of analysis that are useful with items from a classroom assessment are item difficulty, item discrimination, and distractor analysis.

Item difficulty is the proportion of students who answered an assessment item correctly. It is calculated as:

Item discrimination provides information about whether assessment items were more likely to be answered correctly by the students with the highest overall grades or by those with the lowest grades on the assessment. Items that are more likely to be answered correctly by the students with the highest grades are said to discriminate well.

To determine the discrimination of items, gather the assessments of the 20-25% of the class who had the highest overall grades and the 20-25% of the class who had the lowest grades. To analyze the discrimination of an item, first record whether each of those students had the item correct or incorrect. Then use the following formula to calculate the item’s ability to discriminate:

The result is the difference between the proportion of students with higher test grades who had the item correct and the proportion of students with lower grades who had it correct. Item discrimination values range from -1.0 to +1.0. A positive value indicates that more of the students with high test scores than those with low test scores answered the item correctly. This is what one would expect to find. If there is a negative value for an item’s discrimination, this indicates that students who had lower grades on the assessment were more likely to answer the item correctly. Because this would be unusual, if this occurs you should check the item and your grading key to determine why it may have occurred. If you find you graded the item correctly, consider whether the way the item is worded may have confused the higher-scoring students even though they know the material well. You may need to rewrite the item to improve its discrimination when you use the assessment in the future.

Distractor analysis allows you to evaluate the quality of the distractors in multiple-choice assessment items. Recall that the distractors are the response choices that are not the correct answer. Their purpose is to distract students who do not have a thorough understanding of the material from selecting the correct response choice. You conduct distractor analysis by determining the percentage of students who selected each of the distractors as well as the correct response.  Optimally, at least 70-90% of the students should have selected the correct response. If there are any distractors that were not chosen by any student, it may be that the distractor is too obviously not the correct answer. In that case, you can improve that item by rewriting the distractor. If most of the students chose a distractor instead of the correct response, consider whether you need to improve instruction about that material or if the item needs to be rewritten.

Using Assessment Results  

Once you have completed the grading and item analysis for an assessment, think about the assessment results overall and consider the possible reasons for common student errors. These may include:

• instruction was insufficient for some students to learn the material,
• study strategies used by some students were ineffective,
• students did not understand some of the directions on the assessment,
• some assessment items were not written clearly,
• there was noise or other distractions in the classroom where the assessment was completed, or
• some students performed poorly due to illness or another personal reason.

There are actions you can take based on the most likely reasons for the errors. If you suspect that some of the common errors were made because students did not learn the material sufficiently well, plan to reteach that material. If it is a small number of students, you can conduct small group instruction or give them an assignment that allows for relearning of the material. If a substantial number of the students had errors on certain items, conduct instruction about that material again for the whole class. In all cases, it is good practice to have students write corrections to their errors on an assessment or take the assessment a second time. In this way, relearning and reassessment allow students to master the course content from a particular unit of study before moving on, better preparing them for successful learning of future course content. This is particularly important if the material on the assessment is prerequisite knowledge for material they will learn in the future.

Students may also need instruction about effective study strategies. It is not uncommon for students to underestimate the time they need to spend studying for an assessment or to use ineffective study strategies. Taking the time to instruct students about strategies for studying for an assessment will benefit them throughout their years of education. [this will link to the section of the neuroscience chapter about strategies for learning and recalling information from memory]

If common errors were due to confusion about the assessment directions or the wording of items, consider excluding those items or sections from the calculation of final grades. Plan to rewrite them before you use the assessment again in the future.

If disruptions in the classroom setting or personal issues prevented any students from doing their best work on the assessment, a follow-up assignment or assessment to improve their grade should be considered.

Giving Feedback to Students

When you meet with students to review the assessment, start with a positive message about their effort. Then focus discussion on the items which were most often answered incorrectly.

If you plan to allow the students to complete the same assessment again to show mastery of the material and to improve their grade, discuss the material on the assessment in general terms rather than giving the class the answer to specific assessment items.

It is not necessary to give students specific information about class grades or the overall range of grades on an assessment. It can encourage competition among students, foster a performance rather than mastery orientation, and discourage those who performed poorly. [this will link to section from motivation chapter about this topic]  

As you give the class feedback about the assessment, note students’ reactions to their performance. Encourage them to view their successes and failures with favorable attributions: [this will link to the discussion of attributions in the motivation chapter]

• Internal: a result of their actions
• Unstable: changeable over time
• Controllable: they can bring about the change

Meet separately with students who seem particularly discouraged or who need individual support to improve their learning, study strategies, or test-taking skills. Help them plan goals for improvement and specific steps they can take to reach them. Afterwards, check in with them periodically to help them evaluate the progress they are making toward their goals.

Some students who perform poorly on an assessment may be experiencing test anxiety. Test anxiety is an uneasiness some students experience around assessments that affects their ability to recall information, preventing the student from demonstrating their true ability. It may have started before they were a student in your class and depending on the severity of the anxiety, you may need to seek help from a professional who has been trained to support students with test anxiety.

In general, students who experience test anxiety can benefit from having the opportunity to complete assessments successfully, increasing their confidence. Consider, for example, giving a student a series of brief assessments of gradually increasing difficulty, starting from the point in their zone of proximal development where they can do the work independently – material they know well. Assessments that allow them to practice test-taking skills can be helpful too, especially in early grades when they may have little experience taking assessments. Another strategy is to help the student master the material during instruction and then study until they are over-prepared for the assessment, leading to better performance.

In order to prevent anxiety from developing in students, do not try to motivate students to prepare for an assessment by over-emphasizing its importance. Also, fully explain the components of each assessment to students before they study so they know what to expect. Students should know the types and number of items on the test. Finally, consider permitting some students to use alternative methods of assessment to show you what they have learned if they would benefit from doing that. For example, a student may be better able to discuss the content learned in your class with you than complete a traditional exam.