How to grade effort?

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So now I am going to ask for assistance with grading and assessing effort in English lessons.
I decided to grade (report card grade at the end of the semester) my high school students according to two basic areas : performance in tests and effort. I hear this kind of grading is applied at modern prestigious high school in some European countries. It is something new even at the school where I teach but my bosses ok this attitude of mine and I have already been applying it for two years.

The problem is that effort is a kind of quality, not quantity and it is really difficult to transform into A, B,C, D and F. So I told my students at the beginning of the semester what I expect from them to meet the effort standards I set.

To make efforts mean to: communicate positively, participate in all activities during the lesson, speak to me in English, not in their native language everywhere they run into me, collaborate with other students, respect everyone in class, not only the teacher, but all other students and their rights to learn and receive quality lessons, learn - not only pretend learning but learn something and show it throughout the semester.

I soon came across lots of difficulties - how to evalutate those things with grades? So recently I decided to only take some kind of quick notes about their behaviour in class and gradually collect an overal impression about a student's effort throughout the semester. I gave up giving them grades for effort as that added too much mental tint to the whole thing. For example if a student felt she had been trying hard and didn't understand why I didn't give her a A for effort for a given month, she would feel negative and might have lost interest in trying. So now I wait until the end of the school term and I can explain why I chose a B and not A. For example, you often giggle in class working on exercises and when you are supposed to talk about something serious, you have difficulties to express yourself. So you should try harder. My best "effort making: students just work seriously most of the time and only giggle when it is appropriate and doesn't disturb others. They are very responsible for their own efforts and don't need a whip, they just work automatically and have professional attitude toward our class activities.

I will ask more specific questions later. If sozobe is reading, thanks so much, so much to you as the first day at school after your tips gave me a feeling like I am a brand new teacher - all the mental pressures some girls are trying to give me are now calmly observed and ignored, if you know what i mean and I feel much more confident about the whole class atmosphere. And I think the students will feel it sooner or later and their attempts to play mental games will stop.

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So specifially, I don't know much about how to look at this. When the students are required to discuss something quite difficult in a couple, for example the gap between rich and poor or globalization, if it is a topic they are too lazy to discuss because it is something they would not even like to discuss in their first language, they sometimes tend to reduce the discussion to something totally simple like :I don't care, who cares... I am using Opportunities textbooks and they provide a lot of articles that ask quite difficult questions about the world these days. I don't know how strict I should be when they don't try hard to discuss these matters. I remember myself when I was 25 and attended an American language school, it was a kind of culture shock. We were given topics never before openly discussed in our country and we were not used to discussing difficult issues as the country had been blocked in the Soviet block for years. So I remember I felt stupid and humiliated when I had to give intelligent comments to problems of the present world. So I can imagine even 15 years later, when the new generation of students is much more free and enjoy lving in a democratic environment and relaxed and can speak openly about anything with teachers, they are still not used to discussing controversial issues. So when I witness a student is trying to dodge a difficult topic reducing it to "who cares", I think I will just leave them alone, maybe saying, please, try a little bit harder next time, and if they do it on the regular basis, I will give them a B for effort at the end of semester, saying that I feel they should try a little bit harder and do their best in class. In the past, I either didn't comment on their lack of effort or gave them a kind of mark, like plus or minus, but I noticed all negative comments or marks only worsened the situation. Any ideas?

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The American practice is to issue a document called a rubric prior which states the general standards by which you will grade your students' work. You may have one overall rubric for the course and/or individual rubrics geared to the analysis of literature, writing research papers, writing opinion papers, etc.

In general, there are categories within the rubric, so that a research paper would be graded on how well the student answered the posed question; grammar; notation; style, and so on.

However, if you are looking for a way to grade effort alone, consider this: if a student turns in all assignments on time and the work is polished and competant, the student deserves an A for effort. A student who turns in everything on time but does a slapdash job might earn a C+ or a B-. A student who turns in more than 75% of the work but does careful and inspired work might also earn a B.

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Re: How to grade effort?
Hi stach, I'm glad that I could help.

stach wrote:

To make efforts mean to: communicate positively, participate in all activities during the lesson, speak to me in English, not in their native language everywhere they run into me, collaborate with other students, respect everyone in class, not only the teacher, but all other students and their rights to learn and receive quality lessons, learn - not only pretend learning but learn something and show it throughout the semester.

I think what you've run into is that many of these are way too subjective. How are these things demonstrated?

Any goals should be achievable, and there should be a way to demonstrate that the goals have been achieved.

Some are specific enough. I'll divide them.

Specific:

Speak to you in English
Participate in all activities during the lesson (could still be made more specific though)
Collaborate with other students (same)

Too general/ subjective:

Learn (oh?)
Respect everyone
Communicate positively

I think it might be easier if you took "effort" out of it and and instead graded on a combination of homework and in-class participation. Homework is simple enough. For in-class participation, you can take your concepts and focus them a bit more. Like, students are expected to:

- Speak in English at all times (do they know enough that it is reasonable? see my comment about achievable goals).

- Actively participate in class (raise hand, volunteer answers, etc.)

That really pretty much covers it. There should be a separate, presumably school-wide, behavior code -- what is allowed, what isn't.

I don't think you can base their grade on anything that happens outside of class.

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plainoldme wrote:

The American practice is to issue a document called a rubric prior which states the general standards by which you will grade your students' work. You may have one overall rubric for the course and/or individual rubrics geared to the analysis of literature, writing research papers, writing opinion papers, etc.

In general, there are categories within the rubric, so that a research paper would be graded on how well the student answered the posed question; grammar; notation; style, and so on.

However, if you are looking for a way to grade effort alone, consider this: if a student turns in all assignments on time and the work is polished and competant, the student deserves an A for effort. A student who turns in everything on time but does a slapdash job might earn a C+ or a B-. A student who turns in more than 75% of the work but does careful and inspired work might also earn a B.

Thank you for your tip. I could include the timing of doing work in my effort evaluation.