Individualized Grading Contracts: A Study of Implementation in Two Countries

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Challenging Preservice Teachers’ Conceptions and Practices of Student Assessment and Evaluation

Abstract

Alternatives to conventional grading practices are necessary for emphasizing assessment and evaluation over grading and preparing future teachers to be reflective practitioners. Few studies, however, provide specific insight into how grades are used in teacher education settings to help advance such aims while working within existing institutional grading requirements. The purpose of this study was to examine the implementation of an individualized contract approach to grading and assessment across teacher education courses in two countries. Insights into the process of determining students’ grades in diverse teacher education contexts can help inform efforts to reconfigure grades as instruments of control to seeds of democratic classrooms while promoting personally significant learning, reasoned judgment, and reconstructed pedagogies in teacher education settings.

Author

• Nathan D. Brubaker, Monash University