The school year has ended! I spent the last quarter using standards based grading in my Integrated 2 classes. Before starting, I spent some time researching and coming up with a system that I felt would work for me. It wasn't perfect, but it was enough to get me to dive in and disrupt the grading system.
Below are a few things I did and my reflection on it:
1. Since I was changing this during the middle of the academic year, but at the start of a fresh grading period, I didn't want to make too radical of a change to the category percentages. So, standards/concepts were about 70% of the total grade (before quizzes were 20 and tests 50). The final was 15%, a concept extension was 5, and assignments were the remaining 10%. Reflection: Moving forward, I don't plan to count assignments, but instead have 10% or less for student reflections. Reflections on lessons and self-assessments on concepts. I also will not have the concept extension, so that makes a majority of the grade based on knowing and understanding the standards.
2. For skills, I went with a scale of 0-4, but students could earn a 5 by getting a 4 on two assessments in a row. 0 was for students leaving a skill completely blank. Students could also get a 3.5. Reflection: I'm dropping the 3.5. it was just too much and too confusing.
3. I associated each scale with a percentage in the gradebook. A 5=100%, 4=90%, 3.5=80%, 3=70%, 2=55%, 1=40%. I wanted students and parents to be able to see and understand what grade they had. Reflection: I'll be changing this aspect for next year. I'm going to go more to the idea that to have an A, you'd have to have no score below 3 and a certain percentage of the skills at 4/5. Then figure out B, C, and have no Ds. I'm not exact on this detail yet, but I'll post when I iron it out.
4. Students were assessed (at least) twice in class assessments, usually about a week apart, with highest grade being recorded. After that, students could then request to retake (copy of Form) a concept. I used Shawn Cornally's idea that students could come in once a day to reassess one concept. I was originally hoping I would do more problems on the fly and ask for more explanations, but this proved to be very difficult when I had multiple students coming in at lunch for different concepts. I had to create assessments and have them ready to go for students to take. Reflection: I will still only allow the once a day for one concept. My schedule is more limited in the upcoming school year, so students will only be able to retest at lunch. I'm hoping to make changes to the initial assessments, so those changes will then transfer to changes in reassessments. I still don't think I'll be able to do them on the fly, but I'm going to require some more explanations so I can see if students truly understand.
For the quarter, I had 169 requests to reassess! A few requests were duplicates, but this is pretty accurate. My frequent flyer had 15 (out of 30 skills) requested - I had to have a conversation with this student several times as they were not using class time wisely; this was frustrating. Other than that student, most students took the opportunity serious. I still feel it was a lot for already having a retest in class. It was also overwhelming with the difference between my two class periods - 3/4 of the requests were from my 2 period. Reflection: Rarely did students come see me to get help. They often got help from each other, which I love, but many looked at mistakes, tried to remember the procedure, then hoped for the best. In the fall, I plan to require a little more effort on their part to show they reworked problems and that they understood.
5. Tracking and recording scores become a lot of work! I really wanted students to be able to look up their performance on concepts, so I had them create a PIN (personal identification 'name') and then they used that to look up on the spreadsheet. Main issue was that I didn't alphabetize this since that would be too obvious when they looked at it. I had a paper sheet I recorded all attempts on, then I would type into the Sheet (I'll call it the Teacher Sheet) the score. Both of these were in the same order (not alpha). I then created another Sheet (Student Sheet) that imported whatever I typed. This only listed the students PIN, so this is the one they had access to and would view. Plus side with this sheet is that I didn't have to do anything with it as I was updating my teacher sheet (=Importrange). Here is what the students saw:
So after the second attempt, I then used my alphabetical sheet to record the best score for that skill. Finally, I recorded the score into the online gradebook, for us it is Aeries. In Aeries, I used the sayings not the number. As you can see, this was WAY more work I put on myself. Reflection: I like paper, so I still plan on keeping that since I don't grade in front of a screen. But, I'm only keeping one paper. I'm still going to have a Google Sheet, but this will be for me. I have plans to have a Sheet that I can use for conferencing with students that will bring over the concept scores automatically (more to come on a future post!). I am for sure going to have students keep track of their own scores. Sarah from Everybody is a Genius had a student tracking sheet that I liked. I'm going to modify it a bit, but it is a good starting point. I haven't figured out how to keep parents informed of student progress yet.
6. At the end of the quarter, I asked students their thoughts about this grading. The results are to the right. Most of the students that said they didn't like it gave reasons like it was confusing, they were used to the other way, and that the sayings ("not yet", "progress", "got it") felt less real than the points. It was confusing - even for me. I can understand being comfortable with the usual way too. But a lot of students preferred this since they knew exactly what they needed to work on. They mentioned they liked that they were assessed twice, knew exactly what they needed to study and improve on, and were able to reassesses as needed. Reflection: This is a WIN in my book. This comment sums it up "I feel like this is a good system because it encourages reflecting and improving on work." What teacher wouldn't want this!!!
Moving forward with this, I know I have things to improve on. I've spent the past month thinking about what needs to be fixed, looking at what others have done, and figuring out how to make this system work better. I'm excited about what I've read others have done and am looking forward to writing about my updates soon!
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