Ännu icke godkänt: lärares sätt att erfara betygssystemet och dess tillämpning i yrkesutövningen

This thesis reports results from a study that focuses on how teachers experience the criterion-referenced grading system and how they say they use it in their professional work. The empirical study was carried out as semi-structured audiotaped interviews with thirty qualified teachers, in the subjects English, Maths and Swedish. The outcome of the qualitative analysis consists of four parts. In the first, the theme analysed was teachers' ways of experiencing the grading system as a phenomenon. This theme has an phenomenographic approach. The results are described in four hierarchically arranged categories. In the second theme, teachers' ways of using the grading system in their professional work was examined. Six situations were identified. In the third theme, teachers' experience of what aspects they discern in the student's grade, was in focus. Even here six categories were established. Finally, four different examples of attitudes towards the grading system and the grading process are presented as a fictional composite. The results show that the new criterion-referenced grading system in secondary schools in Sweden seems to funciton unsatisfactorily. Teachers seem not to have grasped the assumptions underlying the grading system. The change from grading based on quantitative aspects of knowledge to qualitative ones, was evidently too big a step. Instead teachers' assessment and grading follow ingrained habits.