This is the second in a series of four articles by James on the SBG thread; the other two will appear tomorrow:
Ben asked to establish the problem that standards-based grading solves. Why all the bother to change stuff? Good question; I’ll give some thoughts here.
(I’ll try to keep it brief. Of course this is all my opinion. I don’t have it in mind to convert everyone on the PLC to SBG. I have just seen it come up a few times now and thought I would offer my limited experience in the area to those of you with questions, etc.)
First, traditional grading doesn’t make very much sense if you look at it closely. By “traditional grading” I mean the system in which students earn points throughout a grading period and are given a letter grade depending on the percentage of points earned. The grade supposedly represents what the students has learned and now knows. The problem is that “B level knowledge” is in no way logically connected to 85% of the points available. Why that particular pecentage? Standards-based grading solves this problem because it specifically links the letter grade with performance outcomes by means of the task descriptors for the levels of the standards.
Second, assinging a particular point value to an individual assignment or test is pointless and unfair to the students. If you have three assignments during a quarter which all try to assess reading ability, and if they are all worth the same amount, why does a student who gets 50/100 on the first two and a 100/100 on the last one earn a D+ overall? Averaging all the points together like that is just silly. Clearly the student has developed the ability to read well by the end of the grading period, so why would the earlier, lower marks weigh down the overall grade? Traditional grading makes it all about points and deadlines. But the point of school is learning. Standards-based grading respects this 1) by replacing points with specific learning targets and performance descriptors and 2) by allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge and improve their grades throughout a grading period. No more early Fs destroying motivation late in the quarter!
Third, traditional grading is really bad at giving useful feedback to students. What does that 76/100 on Quiz 2 really mean? What didn’t I know? What about that 58/100 on that first exam? I really messed that one up, I guess. Standards-based grading solves this problem by giving feedback based on the performance descriptors for the various tasks. For example: “Well, you did well on reading level 2 (unscrambling a passage), so you obviously have a sense of the basic flow of events and how the sentences should fit together. But you struggled with level 3 (answering comprehension questions). That tells me you got the basics of what happened but could not read and understand carefully enough to get specific details from the text. Until you show me you can do that consistently, you will stay on level 2 for reading and your grade will stay where it is.” Even better, when the parents look in the grade book they can theoretically (I say “theoretically” because training parents to understand this type of grading can be troublesome) see that their children are good in this area but weak in that one. It just gives something more substantial to say than “You didn’t get as many points as you needed for a B, that’s why.”
In the end, a grade should communicate what the students know and are able to do against the standards for the class. For us, it should all be about whether the students can understand L2. Forget points. Forget averages. Come up with tasks for levels 1-4 (unsatisfactory-advanced) which will show you how well the students can read, listen, write, communicate interpersonally, or whatever you want to call the different standards. Let the students give evidence of their ability for each task. Then let the letter grade communicate that.
James