rank book, The

National Forum, Summer 2001 by Palardy, Terry

Forum on Education & Academics

Among all the new materials with which teachers begin each school year, none may be so individualized, as ambiguous, and so potent as the "rank book." On its pages we record our students' progress, and within its records we measure our own classroom goals as met or unmet. Whether it is a commercially-bound spiral ledger with embossed covers, or a set of lined or graph-paper sheets hole-- punched and stored in a binder, or a self-designed, formulated spreadsheet stored on a floppy disk or printed, stapled, and tucked into the back of a plan book, the rank book exists as a daily reminder that what we plan and what we teach we must also measure and report. Occasionally, what we report we must also defend, and the rank book then becomes part of our documentation, a critical piece of our school year, a journal of sorts, showing successes, failures, trends, and goals. What, then, goes into the rank book? How is it weighted, factored, recorded, and reported?

Ask a group of parents what they want to learn from their children's report cards, and they will tell you that they want to know that their children are progressing, that they are gaining in skills and knowledge, that they are learning and growing in ways that prepare them for success in life. Most parents of elementary-level children will say that they would prefer more narrative comments, but they recognize the difficulty and time involved in preparing such information for large classes and often are unwilling to lower the class size, lessen the frequency of reporting, or forfeit annual conferences to gain a more narrative reporting style. Parents of middle school students receiving the standard three or four report cards per year, often with progress reports midway between terms, do their best to interpret the numerical grades and brief comments, watch for trends term to term, and meet with teachers when the information seems misaligned with their perceptions of their child's progress. High school parents want to read information that tells them that their students are moving successfully toward college-- entrance requirements or work-related skills.

Ask a group of students what they want to see on a report card, and they will tell you that high grades and good comments about their behavior earn them rewards at home. Most students prefer a string of consistently high scores rather than a progression that shows unmet goals in the beginning versus met goals at the end. One of the greatest stressors in students' lives is reported test scores. "My parents want me to have a good report card," is often voiced. The announcement "Marks close Friday" always brings a tall stack of revised, resubmitted student work to my desk, an indicator that the impending grade is the significant motivational factor for students readdressing work. Seeking, improving, or extending knowledge sometimes takes a back seat to achieving a higher score.

Ask a group of teachers to deliberate the words 'assessment,' 'evaluation,' and 'measurement,' and how each of these translates into data for the rank book and the eventual report card grade, and you will hear myriad interpretations of terms we all believe we use fluently. Find those definitions in a dictionary, and you may see consternation on the faces of those who believe that assessing is more relevant, more authentic, and more comprehensive than measuring. Rubrics are the key, you will be told, and they are described by educators as assessment standards that evaluate a student's development along a continuum of skills, or within a range of a prescribed knowledge base, and are much more current, more definitive, than simply scored, right-or-wrong answers. Rubrics, though, can dictate conformity in the direction, the depth, and the breadth of a subject area. Rank books and report-card grades seem somehow dated, somehow distanced from this discussion, yet they loom large in every classroom. They are the existing vehicles for reporting.

In recent workshops, I have encountered several strategies for managing student assessment, all quite different from the statistically based teacher-preparatory undergraduate course once called Measurement and Evaluation. In that thirty-year-old course, I had learned to perform an item analysis after each test, to determine which lesson objectives were unmet and also to judge a test a failure if my students' scores did not at least approximate the bell curve. My students today are appalled by the notion that the majority of scores ought to fall within the average range. Grade inflation is very real and very acceptable to students and parents. Today's tests are much more subjective to grade, as they include more open-ended response questions, essay questions, and few if any multiplechoice or true/false items. They are labor-intensive to correct, with points given for style and structure as often as for content. Scores are very easily challenged and are often seen as negotiable, to be altered by rewrites and retakes.