There’s considerable confusion around types of referencing... they’re very different and have very different implications for teaching and learning.

Norm-referencing compares a student to other students. There are definitely times when this is useful, like if you want to rank students for some kind of selection process, screen people, or monitor an entire system. All good if it’s used for those reasons. But we see it in education way too often. Why are we comparing people to other people who happen to have the same date of manufacture (age) as them?

Comparing yourself to other people can be motivating to some, but it’s very demotivating to a lot of other people, especially those being classified as “below expectations”, and those of high ability who start off well above the norm and so don’t see any reason to keep going, because that’s mostly what teachers and the education system care about.

It is far more powerful to compare yourself to an earlier point in time and see if you’re making progress against a curriculum, as opposed to other people.

The Australian school system is heavily skewed in favour of norm-referencing. A student with the exact same ability could get a different ATAR score depending on which year they sat the exams because they’d be compared to a different group of students.

Criterion-referencing is better if the goal is actually learning. Instead of comparing students to others, you’re comparing them to descriptions of performance. Rather than saying you are in the 50th percentile, you can tell people what a student can actually do.

Standards-referencing is similar to criterion-referencing, except the criteria are standards determined by some external agency rather than criteria determined by whatever the subject is.

The problem with norm-referencing, and to a lesser extent standards-referencing, is that the norms and standards can be somewhat arbitrary. For example, we see achievement standards listed in Australian curricula, but the achievement standards - expectations of what you should be able to do at a certain age - are not based on anything other than what the curriculum writer thought kids could do that day.

It could also be argued that most achievement standards are wildly ambitious, and there is room to wonder, without any research evidence, whether they are so high because curriculum writers are more likely to come from high-fee-paying schools where students are advantaged and thus have a leg up.

Rubrics written according to developmental principles are criterion-referenced. They tell you what a student can do, and therefore what they’re ready to learn next. They don’t just tell you whether a student compares well to others or measures up against some standard, they tell you where the student is on a progression of learning. This is much more useful for actual classroom teaching and for learning in general.

[Photo by Gabriel on Unsplash]