Introduction to Standards-Based Grading in Dave Eckstroms Classes

Standards-Based Grading Philosophy In my classes, I am employing a grading method known in the education world as StandardsBased Grading (SBG). SBG is not a single method of grading, and there are as many different ways of practicing it as there are teachers who practice it. SBG is more a philosophy of grading that has these main tenets: Rather than a reward for doing school-like tasks, grades should be a measure of learning. Learning should be the constant and time the variable, rather than the other way around. An important goal of education is to help students move from a passive to an active state in their own education and grades should help that process. Lets look in more depth at each of these: Grades as a measure of learning In a traditional grading system, students are given tasks to do, which they complete and submit for approval. Each task is worth a certain number of points and when it is approved, the student is awarded points either equal to that number or proportional to the completeness of the task or the correctness or quality of the work. As the point total accumulates over the courses length, the students grade at any given time can be calculated by dividing his or her earned points by the total points he or she could have earned at that time. Sometimes scores on tests and quizzes are weighted to be worth more or less than daily work, but that is the basic idea. While this is easy for teachers and students, it has a two major problems: 1. Because the assignments have due dates and the stakes for not getting them right and on-time are high (theres no going back once the assignment is in the gradebook) teachers would be cruel if they gave assignments that were truly challenging. So most of these assignments are very clearly defined and an attentive student will have no difficulty in getting a very high percentage of the questions on an assignment right. This means that the assignment was really quite meaningless, since the student most likely understood how to do it before he or she began and therefore learned very little in doing it. So the points get accumulated, but knowledge does not. 2. A student that does homework problems on Unit 1 right may or may not remember even how to do these simple problems at the end of the course, or even by Unit 3. Because a large accumulation of points at the end of the course assures the student of a good grade regardless of the outcome of their final exam, there is no incentive for the student to review early material and make connections to the later material for a more comprehensive understanding of the subject taught in the class.

How SBG attempts to address these shortcomings:

1. Because they never assign a grade for doing assignments, SBG teachers can use assignments for useful learning purposes, such as exploring new ideas, extending existing knowledge to new contexts and doing creative, open-ended projects that help students build connections. During the middle of a unit of study, the SBG teacher monitors progress by using frequent formative assessments. Formative assessments are initial and intermediate looks at a students progress toward mastery of a concept or skill. They will often take the form of a quiz, but could also be a project or even a conversation with the teacher. The result of a formative assessment is feedback that allows a student to know where to focus their efforts. 2. When a student has come to the end of a unit of study, practice is over and its time for an official measure what has been learned. This is called a summative assessment, and usually takes the form of a unit test or a major project. Summative assessments should not only test current concepts and skills, but also test connections between concepts and skills mastered earlier. Only summative assessments should be used to build grades. Learning as the constant, time as the variable: In a traditional grading system, students are expected to do the tasks upon which their grades are based in lock-step with the teachers schedule. If Homework set 2-1 is due on Monday and the student has not really mastered the skills or concepts needed to do Homework Set 2-1 properly, he or she is faced with two choices: 1. Do the Homework Set 2-1 poorly, with little understanding and have his or her poor performance permanently enshrined in the gradebook for all time, or . . . 2. Shrewdly recognize that copying someone elses answers or using one of the many online cheat sites will get the desired good grade on time. No matter which choice the student makes, the result is that time marches on, while learning, in most cases, stops. The class will move on to Homework Set 2-2 the next day and the cycle of failure or cheating continues. The constant is time--everyone has to to perform by the due date. The variable is learning--some students will fully understand the concept by the due date, some will understand something, but have a ways to go and some will have very little understanding by the due date.

How SBG attempts to address this problem: When there is an established set of standards, or learning goals, that are available for all to see and which form the structure of the class, students begin to lose interest in cheating, because

getting work done by deadline is not the goal--learning is. When the daily assignments are never turned in and when their result is not a permanent grade, but rather feedback that lets students know where they stand with respect to the goals, students lose the sense of failure that comes with a permanent, unchangeable grade, locked in time, rather than in learning. With SBG, students have a strong incentive to truly learn and to keep developing their learning until the course is over. Different students may learn at different rates, but only the end of the course signals an end to learning in an SBG class. In fact, most SBG teachers I know would rather that courses didnt have abrupt ends. It makes more sense to us to have students stay in a class until they have mastered all the standards, then move on only when they are ready. Moving from passive to active Traditional grading systems were born out of necessity to a system that was established to condition children for an adult future in which passively following directions and doing simple, well-defined tasks would be a key to success. The world has changed dramatically since those days in several important ways, including these: There are now few desirable career paths that dont require critical thinking skills and creativity. Many futurists predict that many of the jobs our students will do during their working lives havent even been imagined yet. Our understanding of the world in which we live is now multiplying rapidly. This shifts the focus of what it means to be well-educated from knowing facts to knowing how to find facts and then analyze, synthesize and act on that information. The world has always been full of people who want to sell us something: products and services, ideas and philosophies, schemes and plans. Now, these people can harness powerful data-gathering tools to amplify and target their messages at us in increasingly complex ways. Our students very futures may depend on their ability to exercise critical judgement as citizens, consumers and community members.

Because of these changes, many teachers are changing the way they define learning and structure their classroom environments. The days of teacher as sage on the stage are quickly giving way to teacher as guide on the side, as the goal is less to transfer a body of knowledge as it is to teach young people how to be lifelong learners. This necessitates different ways of thinking about grades. It is less useful than ever to the users of grades to know how well a student can perform simple tasks. It is much more useful to know the extent to which a student has mastered learning objectives and learned how to learn. How SBG attempts to foster this change: SBG presents the student with a list of learning objectives (the standards) that are the goal for a unit or for the course. Of course, the class consists of more than the standards. There are

learning activities like there are in any other class: projects, experiments, instruction, assignments, etc. But the difference is that the only thing (or at least the primary thing) that comprises a students grade is their mastery of those standards. As a result, they begin to look at the learning activities for what they are--not as an end in themselves, but as support for learning. As this reality sets in, they will begin to realize that sometimes they need to do an activity more carefully, sometimes they will need to seek out more than the activity gave them, and sometimes they can be free to ignore the activity altogether. This is movement toward selfdirection. It is movement toward maturity. It is the goal we all have for our children. So SBG teachers have said, Why not use a grading system that fosters maturity, if maturity is the goal?