Grading in a Dilemmatic Space: An Analysis of Mathematics and Language Swiss Secondary Teachers

• In Event: More Than a Mark: Understanding The Social and Cultural Dimensions and Consequences of Grading

Abstract

Objectives: Previous research into grading has focused primarily on the reliability and composition of teachers’ grades and the predictive and concurrent validity of grades in relation to other achievement measures. Thanks to these studies, we know that grading is a complex context-dependent process that represents an area of challenge in teachers’ practice. In generating final grades for students, teachers need to often balance competing policies, tools, consequences, evidences, contextual and social conditions, subject traditions, and assessment theories. However, few studies have yet to examine teachers grading practices across teaching subjects. Moreover, little research has investigated how teachers negotiate grading dilemmas. This study therefore aimed to explore more deeply the dilemmatic space that characterizes mathematics and language teachers’ grading practices and decisions.

Perspective: Grading in this study is conceptualized through the emerging theory of dilemmatic space (Fransson & Grannäs, 2013; Turner, 2016). The concept of dilemmatic space is rooted in conceptualizing dilemmas within their social-cultural and political spaces. Space adds the relational aspect in which teachers are forced to both consider the various actors and contexts as they work through dilemmas but also the consequential outcomes that result to others based on their decisions.

Methods: Data were derived from 4 mathematics and 4 French secondary teachers in the state of Vaud, Switzerland. The sample was formed in order to interview different, non-exhaustive profiles of teachers. Qualitative data (interviews and writing tales) were collected through an inductive approach. More specifically, we followed Archer’s (2007, 2012) three-dimensional framework for teacher reflexivity that considers teachers’ work in relation to their personal and contextual conditions, and includes an analysis of teachers’ discernments, deliberations, and dedications. This framework enabled us to consider the conditions that characterize the dimensions of the dilemmatic space of teachers’ grading work.

Results: Five overarching spaces emerged from our analysis: justifying criteria and scale sufficiency; inconsistencies across teaching contexts; committed to student learning; grading in a multicultural and multilingual context; grading in relation to future goals, destinations, and consequences. They present areas of discernment for mathematics and language teachers’ grading work and the related deliberations and dedications that were considered by these teachers. Combined, these dilemmatic spaces offer evidence of the complex context of grading, a context characterized by multiple traditions, epistemologies, stakeholders, and power relationships.

Significance: Each space represented a complexity of negotiation, suggesting that grading is indeed emblematic of a dilemmatic space regardless of subject. Derived from each space, we offer four dimensions to begin to characterize the dilemmatic space of grading based on our sample: temporal dimension, epistemological dimension, social-political dimension and adaptive dimension. The central tension that inevitably arises from such a space is the necessity to arrive at grading decisions - dedications - embedded in specific disciplinary epistemologies, and despite the unsettled ground in which these dedications are situated. Hence, we argue that there is an inherent difficulty of dedication because grading is situated in a dilemmatic space that involves continuous negotiation of temporal, epistemological, social-political, and adaptive dimensions.

Author

• Raphaël Pasquini, University of Teacher Education - Lausanne