We’re Grading Students on Skills We Don’t Explicitly Teach
Report card day is rarely just about grades.
Parents study the numbers and comments for clues about how their child is doing. Children study them, too—and often draw conclusions not just about their performance, but about themselves.
Educational assessment researcher Christopher DeLuca recently described watching students receive their report cards. Some were proud and energized, their confidence boosted by strong grades. Others were deeply disappointed. Some seemed to take their grades as a message that learning simply wasn’t their strength. Still others had become disengaged enough that they barely paid attention to their reports at all.
His observation points to something easy to forget: A report card doesn’t simply record how a child performed. It can help shape how that child sees themselves as a learner.
DeLuca argues that report cards contribute to students’ developing identities, influencing what they see as their strengths and weaknesses and even what they believe may be possible for their future studies, careers, and lives.
Parents put enormous weight on report cards, too. In a nationally representative Gallup survey conducted for Learning Heroes, 64% of parents said report cards were an important measure they used to determine whether their child was performing at grade level. And parents overwhelmingly believed their children were doing well: 88% said their child was at or above grade level in reading and 89% said the same for math—even though other measures of student performance painted a very different picture.
The research points to an important disconnect: Parents may use the report card not simply as one source of information, but as a powerful signal that their child is—or isn’t—doing just fine.
So what appears on a report card matters in two directions. It helps shape how parents understand their child’s learning and can help shape how children understand themselves as learners.
And when you look closely at what schools actually report, something striking emerges.
Schools aren’t only evaluating reading, writing, math, science, and other academic subjects.
They’re also evaluating whether children follow directions, stay on task, organize their belongings, complete work on time, work independently, demonstrate self-control, pay attention, persevere, catch their mistakes, solve problems, listen actively, work productively with others, demonstrate accountability, and put forth their best effort.
Those aren’t simply behaviors.
Each depends, to varying degrees, on the underlying mental processes that enable us to learn and perform—cognitive skills such as attention, visual and auditory processing, reasoning, and, especially, executive functions (working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility).
Following directions, for example, requires a student to pay attention to what is being said, process the information, hold it in working memory, and carry it out. Catching a mistake requires attention, inhibitory control, and the ability to monitor one’s own performance. Working independently requires a student to remember what to do, get started, stay on track, and adjust when something isn’t working.
In other words, the behaviors we see on report cards are often the visible result of cognitive processes we can’t see.
And that raises a question we don’t ask nearly often enough:
If these skills matter enough to measure, report, and sometimes grade, what are we doing to help children develop them?
We’re Grading Students on Skills We Don’t Explicitly Teach
Schools devote enormous time and resources to teaching academic content and skills. Children are explicitly taught how to decode words, comprehend increasingly complex texts, perform mathematical operations, write an essay, understand scientific concepts, and interpret historical events.
But think about what a child must do simply to access all that instruction successfully.
A student has to focus while ignoring distractions. Remember directions long enough to carry them out. Figure out where to start. Hold several pieces of information in mind. Resist impulsive responses. Keep track of where they are in a task. Notice an error. Shift strategies when the first approach doesn’t work. Organize materials. Monitor progress. Finish within the allotted time.
These abilities aren’t incidental to learning.
They are part of the cognitive infrastructure that makes learning possible.
Teachers certainly model and reinforce many of these behaviors. They teach strategies, establish routines, provide prompts and reminders, and scaffold tasks to help students succeed.
But there is an important distinction between teaching a strategy and developing the cognitive capacity the strategy relies on.
A teacher can explain how to divide fractions. A student can be taught a process for identifying the main idea of a paragraph or a strategy for organizing an essay.
But you can’t simply explain to a child how to hold more information in working memory. You can’t tell someone how to process information more efficiently, inhibit an automatic response more effectively, or take in more visual information accurately at a glance.
These are capacities that need to be developed, not simply explained.
And yet, when students struggle with the behaviors that depend on those capacities, we often respond with instructions:
Pay attention.
Remember what I told you.
Get organized.
Check your work.
Stay on task.
Work independently.
Try harder.
Sometimes those reminders are exactly what a child needs. But often they aren’t
The Behavior Is a Symptom, Not the Reason
A report card can tell us that a student needs frequent reminders, has difficulty working independently, makes careless mistakes, or struggles to complete work on time.
What it can’t tell us is why.
A child who needs frequent reminders might have difficulty sustaining attention, holding information in working memory, getting started independently—or something else entirely.
A student who repeatedly makes “careless” mistakes might be rushing. But they might also be losing focus, responding impulsively, misremembering facts, or failing to notice when something doesn’t make sense.
A student who appears not to be putting forth enough effort may indeed need to try harder. Or it may be that ordinary schoolwork requires an extraordinary amount of cognitive effort.
The behavior alone can’t tell us.
Help Students Understand How They Learn
This is where report cards could become the beginning of a much richer conversation.
DeLuca argues that students who understand their report cards, have a voice in assessment, and can discuss their achievement with parents and others are less surprised by their final grades and more inspired to act on the information. He connects greater student involvement in assessment with the development of self-regulation and metacognition.
But if we want students to understand themselves as learners, we can give them more than observations about their performance.
We can give them scientifically valid information about how they learn.
A well-designed cognitive assessment can identify a student’s pattern of strengths and weaknesses in areas such as attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, processing speed, reasoning and memory.
The goal isn’t to give children another set of labels.
It is to give them useful self-knowledge.
A student can begin to understand:
“I understand information better when it is visual-spatial, so pictures, models and diagrams can help me learn new concepts.”
Or:
“I remember information better when I read or hear it, so summarizing something in my own words and repeating important information out loud can help me learn it and remember it later.”
Or:
“It’s harder for me to hold several pieces of information in mind at once, so I can write down the steps of a complicated assignment instead of trying to remember all of them.”
Or:
“I have trouble shifting my thinking once I’ve started down one path, so when I get stuck, I can deliberately stop and ask myself, ‘What’s another way I could approach this?’”
That is very different from a child concluding:
I’m disorganized.
I’m slow.
I’m careless.
I’m bad at following directions.
I’m not good at school.
Cognitive assessment can replace vague judgments with specific information a student can use.
A cognitive weakness doesn’t tell a student what they can’t do. It can help explain why some kinds of learning require more effort—and suggest what they can do differently.
That is real learner agency.
Understanding a Weakness Isn’t the Same as Developing It
Understanding a student’s cognitive profile gives us two opportunities.
The first is to help students work more effectively with the profile they currently have. The strategies described above are examples and they are essential in empowering each learner to make the most of their cognitive strengths.
But there is another possibility.
We can strengthen the underlying cognitive skills themselves.
Research on neuroplasticity has changed our understanding of cognitive development. Cognitive skills are not simply fixed traits that students bring to the classroom; nor are they abilities that always track physical growth and maturity. With the right kind and intensity of experience, cognitive functioning can change.
That is the purpose of Comprehensive Integrated Cognitive Training (CICT®).
Rather than teaching students about attention, working memory, reasoning, processing, or executive functions, CICT engages those skills directly through increasingly challenging, integrated cognitive exercises.
This distinction matters.
Assessment helps students understand how they learn.
Strategies help them leverage their strengths and manage their weaknesses.
Comprehensive Integrated Cognitive Training helps develop the underlying cognitive capacity itself.
Those are three different tools—and students can benefit from all three.
From Report Card to Road Map
Seen this way, a report card can become more than a verdict on the previous nine weeks.
It can be the beginning of a process:
Observe. Understand. Strategize. Develop.
The report card provides the observation:
This student has difficulty working independently.
Cognitive assessment helps us understand the learner:
What does this student’s pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses tell us about why independent work may be difficult?
Strategies turn that knowledge into action:
How can this student use their strengths and reduce the demands on weaker skills to learn more effectively right now?
And when underlying cognitive weaknesses are interfering with learning, comprehensive cognitive training provides an opportunity to strengthen the capacity itself.
Now “needs to work more independently” doesn’t have to remain an observation repeated from one report card to the next.
It becomes a question we can investigate and something we can potentially change.
Report Cards Are Telling Us Something Important
There is a certain irony in all of this.
Our educational system is organized primarily around curriculum. We specify what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. We teach it. We assess it. We report the results.
But look closely at a report card and another set of requirements appears.
Students are expected to pay attention, remember, organize, plan, reason, monitor themselves, control impulses, shift strategies, solve problems, manage time, work with others, and increasingly take responsibility for their own learning.
Schools report on these abilities because teachers know how profoundly they affect learning.
Parents respond to them.
And children may incorporate those messages into their understanding of who they are as learners.
So perhaps the next step isn’t simply to tell students to be more attentive, organized, independent, careful, or persistent.
We can help them understand how they learn.
We can give them specific strategies for leveraging their strengths.
And when cognitive weaknesses are getting in the way, we can help them develop greater capacity.
We know far more today about how to assess and develop cognitive skills than we did when many of our educational practices were established. It’s time to put that knowledge to work.
Because if a skill matters enough to measure, report, and sometimes grade, it ought to matter enough to develop.
