Grading That Builds Hope

There have been times in the past when a student does so poorly on an assessment that I feel like I would be crushing him if I graded it true to how much the student wrote down that was actually of value.

Standing in Kids' Shoes

Imagine getting a paper or quiz back and seeing a huge 5/20 written on the top. Where do you start? You would feel so far behind it would seem to be hopeless. The truth is that there are likely a few concepts in there that you are actually handling at least moderately well, but they are buried in the overall score that comes out to 25% and sinks your grade in the class.

Finding the Silver Lining

In the roughly one month that I've been using learning targets to assess and give feedback to students, I have seen examples like this one multiple times. It is not uncommon to have a student with ratings like this:

Even if the ratings were 1, 1, 3, & 1, wouldn't you respond so much differently than seeing a "6/20" in total at the top of the page? I would. If the quiz in the picture was mine, I would be proud of my 5 and more inclined to focus in on the 1. 

I feel that I can be more accurate in my grading because I know that the grade is giving the student real feedback about what he or she knows well and doesn't know well. There's almost always something the student is doing right that the rating system points out, so I don't have to worry about crushing a student's spirit. Likewise, there's also almost always something the student needs more practice on, which grading-by-learning-target quickly points out. 

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Thank you for finding and reading my blog. One of my goals is to participate in the worldwide discussion of implementing Standards-Based Grading. If you have questions, thoughts, or insights, please leave a comment (click "Comments" below). If you want to receive new posts by email, enter your email address in the right sidebar near the top of this page.

Test Scores with SBG vs. Traditional

I recently graded the first unit test of the year. I was hesitant because of how we are changing things this year. We aren't doing anything so revolutionary or contrarian that I should think that students would do poorly in the new system, but I'm nonetheless cautious going into the first test.

The Changes

Last year was my first full year teaching and, of course, the first year going through the curriculum that we use at Wheaton North. I followed a pretty traditional method of scoring student work. Some completion with a lot of arbitrary points assigned to various problems, worksheets, quizzes, labs, and tests. 

This year, I'm starting a 2 Year Implementation of SBG, focusing more on the feedback component of it this year with the hopes that it'll be full-fledged next year. Because the emphasis is on the feedback, I'm not grading summative tests (unit tests) with an SBG model. However, what I have done, is add the learning targets to each of the student worksheets and labs and then actually used them to grade the students throughout the course of the unit. All of the learning experiences, for the most part, have remained the same - same notes, worksheets, labs, and activities. Most importantly (for this blog post), the tests are also largely the same.

The (Preliminary) Results

After grading my students' tests, I wanted to compare their results this year with what my last year's students got on the same test with the more traditional feedback system. Here they are:

• 2016 Unit 1 Test Average (SBG): 83.7%
• 2015 Unit 1 Test Average (Trad.): 74.4%

I could go on and on here about all the small differences and variables that are affecting the student's grades (there's a big difference between a first-year teacher and a second-year teacher). I'll go ahead and assume you don't want to hear about standard deviations, t-tests, and null hypotheses (and we'll also assume that those terms are about the extent of my statistical vocabulary). 

What the Results DON'T Mean

Some agenda-pushing, SBG-obsessed educators may take these numbers and declare from the rooftops that this is "proof'" that SBG is better than a more traditional grading system, that we all must immediately drop what we are doing and take the plunge into re-writing our assessments. I don't think this is necessarily strong evidence for such a conclusion, and certainly not "proof!" Test scores are helpful, but not the whole story.

  What the Results DO Mean

The test scores tell me a couple different things:

1. I'm not harming my kids. I've had thoughts that removing "points" from the lexicon of my classroom might cause my grading practices to become invalid, that is, not representative of what students know and can do. I arbitrarily assigned "B" as a grade to level 3 on my rating system. Would this skew student's grades up or down? Since the test is graded the same way it was last year, I think I can say that I'm not doing damage.
2. Detailed feedback is helpful. Seriously, who doesn't already know this? We've all heard feedback that is too vague to be helpful. "This doesn't seem to be a good "fit" for you." Thanks, I'll keep that in mind in the future. SBG gives students more detailed feedback. Instead of losing 2 points, you get a 3/5 in "drawing conclusions from a graph" and a 5/5 in "mathematically determining the density of an object."
3. My students learned more this year. For the myriad of explanations for why the scores are the way they are, and whether the difference is significant, let's remember that this is the important point: my students this year are doing better than my students last year. I'm not saying SBG is the whole reason for the difference from one year to the next, but I am pretty pleased that there is a 9.3% increase. Now that's something to write home (or a blog post) about!

Organized Chaos

One of my first blog posts was titled "Self-Paced Learning." At the time, it was just an idea, inspired by the book Flip Your Classroom. One of my colleagues, Rachelle Terada, could be described as a "go-getter." I admire her willingness to dive into an idea that she believes in. She will see something that another teacher is doing, or she'll get an idea in her head, mentally chew on it for a bit to decide if it's worthwhile. If it is, watch out! She's all in. She read Flip Your Classroom over the summer, where the authors describe how they moved to a flipped model in their chemistry classrooms, and within a few years, were encouraging students to work through the curriculum at their own pace. Rachelle has done all of that in a few months. She recently took a video of her classroom. We turned it into a GIF for the purposes of social media and this blog (unfortunately, the translation made it a bit blurry):

Well-Oiled Machine

At the beginning of the loop, you see a few students taking quizzes in the front of the room. As the camera pans to the right, there are four separate tables of students doing labs. Among the four groups, there are actually three different labs going at once. In the back corners of the room students are working on worksheets in small groups or watching lecture videos on Chromebooks.  Between the windows, you can see a group of three boys working on a worksheet together. Oh, and this is a general level chemistry class, not Honor's or AP.

Everyone's Learning

Of course, there are a few students that are already behind. They haven't planned out their work well and haven't gotten much done in class. Overall, though, students have signed up to take quizzes or do labs a day ahead of time so Rachelle knows what she needs to have ready. They've clustered into groups and are working together for the entire period. They are getting one-on-one feedback from Rachelle as she works her way around the room, pushing them toward higher levels of understanding and competency. 

Rachelle, too, is learning. She's learned about her students as she checks in with each student and as they've rated themselves in various skills or conceptual understanding. She's learned more about how to structure the system for efficiency. By no means would she say that she's already got the system to a truly "well-oiled machine" status, but it's impressive how quickly she was able to get the system to a point where it's working well. She mentioned the other day that the labs she's getting are some of the most high-quality she has ever received. 

Grade Comprehension, Not Compliance

In my most recent post, I was wrestling with how to assess student homework and what to include in their homework grade. I want to hold students accountable for doing their work, but I don't want to make their grade an indication of how compliant they are with completing homework. Completing the homework isn't the same thing as understanding the homework, especially when the homework, as it often is in our case, is taking notes from a video.

Connect the Dots

My students, in general, often don't see the connection between good study habits like completing homework and their performance in the class. As we drop the level of accountability with completing homework, I think it's important to talk about this with the students. Showing them the connection between homework (practice) and the test (game) in explicit ways is helpful. 

The language you choose here is important, too. I've often held the test over my students' heads as motivation for doing homework, almost as if the test is a threat. "If you don't do your homework, you'll get a bad grade on the test!" communicates that the test is where I'm going to catch you. I've started shifting more to an emphasis on learning and understanding the material, so it becomes an easier transition to show students the connection between the practice, or homework, and the summative assessment. Since we aren't going to hold them accountable to doing their notes directly, via gradebook credit for completion, it important to point out often and show them that that doesn't mean it's not important. 

Checking for Understanding

If you want the grade to represent what the student knows, you have to actually check what the student knows. This means that instead of checking for completion of homework, we have to check for specific answers or responses on homework, worksheets, or labs. As I mentioned in the previous post, we don't have the time to collect and check every assignment. So we have to take a "sample" from an assignment and check that. We still are walking around checking in with students each day or several times per week, but instead of checking for completion of homework, we're checking two or three specific answers for correctness on a lab or worksheet, circling it on the student's paper, marking it down on a sheet, and moving on to the next student. This gives the student a small amount of feedback and encourages him to check his work again and find his mistake. It also gives us a more accurate measurement of what each student knows and how they are doing than just simply checking for completion of notes. We enter the grade according to this rating scale.

This method does take a few extra minutes of time, so it's helpful if the students are working on something while your checking. However, a few extra minutes of time to check in with each student and ID the ones that are struggling early is well worth it. 

Standardize the Format

Doug Lemov, in his book, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 describes several techniques to increase rigor and efficiency. One of them, he calls, "Standardize the Format," which entails making worksheets and training students in a way that increases the speed at which you can check for understanding. An extra few seconds searching for an answer for each student x30 students x5 classes costs you several minutes of instructional time. Ideally, you get in, give the feedback, and get out quickly so you can move onto the rest of your lesson plan.

I want to be able to look quickly at a student's worksheet, knowing the answer to a few questions, and easily identify if the student knows what she's doing, so here's how we have "Standardized the Format:"

I can quickly scan down the page and tell the student to "circle and double check your answer to number 5, but 4 and 6 are good" as I go around the room. 

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Thank you for finding and reading my blog. One of my goals is to participate in the worldwide discussion of implementing Standards-Based Grading. If you have questions, thoughts, or insights, please leave a comment (click "Comments" below). If you want to receive new posts by email, enter your email address in the right sidebar near the top of this page.