In a school that continues to employ traditional grading as the mode, using a standards-based grading system can present some substantial challenges.
Since the dawn of humankind, we have relied on 5 capitalized, English letters as the only way possible to capture how well we are doing stuff—at least, that’s how it seems sometimes when I see the degree of attachment students, families, staff and administrators have to letter grades. We often use these 5 letters to communicate the degree to which work has met some standard of perfection with the pinnacle—A—suggesting that a given piece of student work is anywhere from 90% to 100% mistake free. In such a system, we tend to use graded pieces of student work as the unit of grading, which gets averaged every so often to report back a single letter grade as a way to communicate how well scholars are doing in a given class. But where does mastery of what was to be learned fit into all of this? Is the absence of mistakes in student work the entirety of a scholar’s demonstrated mastery of targets of learning? Let us explore how problems can arise for educators that work in seas of traditional grading that dare question whether it is the best way to assess learning.
For those of us that find our traditional system of grading ill fit for capturing and communicating student learning, we have been increasingly shifting towards grading systems that use the learning standards themselves as the unit of grading. This gives us the opportunity to show a given scholar’s progress toward mastery of the thing they were supposed to learn without requiring folks to try and intuit the degree of mastery by looking at percentages of perfection of assignments – assignments that do not necessarily map onto what was supposed to be learned. Another benefit is that the focus on mastery of learning standards facilitates removal of factors unrelated to learning given content from the grading process. Factors like test anxiety and punctuality are easier to discount when you are holistically looking at standard mastery as opposed to scores on tests and papers. My favorite feature is that my grades reflect mastery developed over time that can be updated as more evidence of higher mastery is achieved. This is in stark contrast to traditional grading which takes a snapshot of a specific point in a scholar’s development, then enshrines any mistakes that may have been made. My system of grading looks towards mistakes as opportunities for improvement and higher levels of mastery, not as dispositive evidence of a lack of mastery.
Teachers at a school built on a standards-based grading system, the aforementioned features tend to work well. But within a school that continues to employ traditional grading as the mode, using a standards-based grading system can present some substantial challenges.
My school district requires a constantly updated summative grade for each class throughout the year with at least two graded assignments per week. This often forces me to choose between putting in grades for standards where mastery has not yet been achieved and not fulfilling my requirement for weekly grades. The development of mastery for given learning objectives is typically an ongoing matter without a convenient end point for reporting, as the level of mastery often goes up after a given time where I decide to report. This has resulted in a general lack of understanding of where students stand in their development when students and parents view grades from my class in the system. Because of district reporting requirements, I often report mastery levels that are still in process, leading families to believe that there are failed assignments in a traditional sense, as opposed to learning objectives where mastery has not yet been obtained.
Causing more confusion, parents have come to expect that units of grading are assignments that are being graded by assessing the typical percentage of perfection. When they see grades for my classes on their dashboard, they presume that they are looking at such assignments as opposed to an indication of a level of mastery of a learning objective. For example, a 6 out of 10 on a given learning objective signifies that a scholar is working towards but has not yet achieved mastery. But if a parent sees 6 out of 10, they typically view it as a poorly done assignment that is already past.
Traditional systems were simply not built to accommodate standards-based approaches. But that has to change. How can parents keep track of their kids’ progress in standards-based systems in a world of traditional reporting?