Teachers Navigating Their Experiences of "Going Gradeless" in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of Ontario secondary school teachers, navigating conceptual, pedagogical, cultural and political challenges as they shifted their practice from marks to "gradeless". Twenty-eight teachers from fifteen schools in seven school districts in the province of Ontario in Canada participated in semi-structured, face-to-face interviews. The 28 teachers in this study shared complex journeys of growth and innovation, providing feedback and supporting student learning through use of clear goals, and explicit communication of success criteria. The study provides models of gradeless classroom assessment that range from hidden or deferred marks to four-level rubrics to single-point rubrics to rich descriptive feedback, and from task criteria to curriculum expectations to overarching learning goals. The interviewees described concepts of assessment that centre on the learner, and pedagogical approaches that support student voice and choice. They experienced challenges from the cultural expectations of students, parents and colleagues, but none of the interviewees were restricted by policy requirements from making the changes in assessment practice that they identified as "gradeless", and which serve to support the learning of their students. This study suggests that teachers' conceptual understanding begins with their personal experiences of assessment, is developed through the pedagogy they employ, the cultural influences on their professional and school community, and the policy that underpins their practice. The study demonstrates that when teachers discover processes that improve the achievement of their students, they will persist with the new process even if faced with strong cultural pressure. It suggests that greater communication to, and education of, the school community, parents and students is needed to shift cultural expectations of assessment. The study reveals that given clear policy, grounded in research, teachers can develop stronger conceptual understanding of assessment, and are empowered to move forward, even in the face of strong cultural pressures. Implications for future research in classroom assessment, teacher change, and 21st century learning are further discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".