Assessment Grading Tool
A new Assessment Grading feature is now available for Desmos Math 6–A1 curriculum users!
Over the years, we’ve made many decisions in the design of our lessons and our platform to make good teaching easier. We’ve heard many requests to make good grading easier, too. Grading philosophies are complex, context specific, and hugely impactful on every student’s life. We don’t take this complexity lightly, and we’ve thought deeply about how our grading philosophy and yours might show up at every level of the experience. We’re excited to share the first iteration with you.
Read more about how to use the Desmos Math 6–A1 Assessment Grading tool, or watch a video demonstration to the right.
In designing Assessment Grading, we leaned heavily on principles synthesized from Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman, which suggests equitable grades are mathematically accurate, resist bias, and support students’ intrinsic motivation. We want to support you in grading activities equitably, so we developed rubrics to encourage these grading practices. Assessment Grading is only available on Desmos Math 6–A1 activities with those rubrics, which currently include quizzes and end-of-unit assessments. We don’t want to interrupt a student’s ability to explore, practice, and learn by grading a lesson. Find out more about assessments and assessment rubrics in Desmos Math 6–A1.
To support equitable, mathematically accurate scoring, we designed the scoring options in the Assessment Grading feature to match our rubrics. The four scores are levels that reflect different stages of learning, with a focus on progress towards mastery. They are not point values, so we don’t treat them as though they are. We don’t total them, average them, or convert them to a percentage that might misrepresent what a student knows.
To resist bias in grading, we encourage evaluating students based on their knowledge—not their environment, history or behavior—by anonymizing and shuffling your class roster when you enter “Grading Mode.” As you grade, you're focused on and evaluating only the student's knowledge.
To support intrinsic motivation, we've started by only automatically scoring responses that are unambiguously correct. Our correctness features can easily determine which student responses are right or wrong. We can't (yet) determine how a student was wrong, and we felt it critical to leave room for students to be wrong in different, interesting ways, even when grading.
Thank you to all the Desmos Math 6–A1 users who tried the Beta release of Assessment Grading in Desmos Labs last school year. We’ve heard so much great feedback already, and we hope you’ll continue to share your thoughts with us as we develop it further for future products. We hope that this feature will make your life a bit easier, and inspire you and your team to reflect on your own grading practices as you use it.
