Parent and Teacher Perceptions of Gradeless Assessment and its Relationship with Education Commodification: A Case Study

This qualitative study explores and identifies how parents and teachers address implementation of a gradeless system for teaching primary students English (EFL) and its effects on their academic development as experienced in a private school in Chile. Analysis of interviews and a focus group serves as a basis for obtaining insight about parent and teacher perceptions regarding changing to a gradeless system and how it poses challenges to academic development conceptions and practices. The study specifically focuses on how assessment is linked to the idea of success and the commodification of education through different conceptual metaphors. The data was analysed in light of a Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, 2016) facilitated using corpus linguistics methods (concordance lines and frequency lists). Results indicate clear contradicting perspectives about implementing a gradeless system. On the one hand, parents and teachers alike are concerned about jeopardizing their children’s future academic prospects by depriving them of numerical assessments since they believe that it positively fosters competition among students. On the other hand, parents and teachers are relieved at how embracing a gradeless system has improved their children’s emotional wellbeing. Both stakeholders expressed the negative effects that numerical assessments had on their children and themselves since it led to student competition and, consequently, increased student stress, frustration, and anxiety. Overall, the study strengthens the need to conceptualize EFL education differently to prioritize academic and humanistic formation of individuals over standardized and marketed development.