Technolandy

Day 11 (of SOL 2025) Summer of Learning… Dear Dr  @chrkennedy  on report cards

In his annual year end blog, Chris had some good questions… here is question 

11. What should a report card really tell a parent?

1. How your kid is doing on the competencies, what they are independently reading and writing and mathing.

Ugh – report cards… they really should tell them their achievement on a course/class in comparison to a particular set standard. Good when personalization was tricker to coordinate and work with in education… but has really only created a false understanding of what those grades that are associated with report cards “mean”. Spoiler, they came from the meat industry and then fine tuned to make people believe that an A+ is ______ (I’d fill in the blank, but even a seemingly clear indication of an excellent/top grade isn’t clear if it is about:

– achievement

– knowledge already known

– attitude and aptitude

– behavioural compliance

– effort

– averages (mean, mode, median, and range – okay… just the ‘mean’ one…) of task completion

– projects made to meat a standard

– bonus marks from bonus work/questions

Ugh… this is why I have been an early adopter of portfolios and holistic assessment (when needed). Even two of my kids universities needed a portfolio to see what they had actually done, not their score from the game-of-school assignments – one for a fancy art school, the other for a fancy math/engineering program. Want to take on AI, do more Project Based Learning based around authentic descriptive feedback loops and archive the artifacts of learning for viewing and reflection through the course of a term… year… longer…?

I’ve got articles and articles (some from my dad when he did his masters) bringing up complaints about report cards as a very incomplete method – it reports achievement whereas we ought to be communicating about learning. Case in point: today’s question is a C+ (and seeing the James Gunn Superman – I give it an “A”). That’s a report card… wouldn’t some details make it make more sense rather than having to guess why the letter grade was assigned as such? That’s where an eportfolio with descriptive feedback (from teachers students AND guardians) can be so much lore powerful highlighting how it was done and what could be focused on to do better next time….

So a report card should tell parents to look at the link attached…