In an effort to cure the ills of current grading and reporting systems, many schools and districts across the United States have attempted to implement a standards-based system. The authors recommend four best practices in this area: (1) Get rid of the omnibus grade, which tells teachers little about the content measured or the difficulty level of…

Students generally do better on outcome-based performance tasks than on domain-specific tasks. Results on performance tasks must be interpreted in the context of instruction or guidance provided before or during their administration. Reliability is sometimes questionable, since teachers are highly influenced by students' overall academic…

Public schools' lack of common curricular and teaching goals provided the rationale for the standards movement. However, too many state standards documents provide insufficient clarity for teachers and students. Educators must focus on standards already assessed, add judiciously to the current list of standards, and avoid topic overload. (MLH)