Standards Based Grading, Year Two (Year-In-Review)

This was my second year using standards based grading with my classes. I wrote last year about how my first iteration went, and made some adjustments this year.

What did I do?

• I continued using my 1-5 standard scale and scale rubric that I developed last year. This is also described in the post above.
• As I wrote about in a previous post, I created an online reassessment organization tool that made it easier to have students sign up and organize their reassessments.
• The new requirement for students signing up for reassessments involved credits, which students earned through doing homework, seeing me for tutoring
• I included a number of projects that were assessed as project standards using the same 1-5 scale. the rubric for this scale was given to students along with the project description. Each project, like the regular course learning standards, could be resubmitted and reassessed after getting feedback and revising.

What worked:

• My rate of reassessment was substantially better in the second semester. I tweeted out this graph of my reassessments over the course of the semester: There was a huge rush at the end of the semester to reassess – that was nothing new – but the rate was significantly more consistent throughout. The volume of reassessments was substantially higher. There were also fewer students than in the first semester that did not take advantage of reassessment opportunities. Certain students did make up a large proportion of the total set of reassessments, but this was nowhere near as skewed a distribution as in the first semester.
• Students took advantage of the project standards to revise and resubmit their work. I gave a living proof project that required students to make a video in which they went through a geometric proof and explained the steps. Many students responded to my feedback about mathematical correctness, quality of their video, and re-recorded their video to receive a higher grade.
• Student attitude about SBG was positive at the end of the year. Students knew that they could do to improve their grade. While I did have blank questions on some unit assessments, students seemed to be more likely to try and solve questions more frequently than in the past. This is purely a qualitative observation, so take that for what it is.

What needs work:

• Students hoarded their reassessment credits. This is part of the reason the reassessment rush was so severe at the end of the semester. Students didn’t want to use their credits until they were sure they were ready, which meant that a number were unused by the end of the year. Even by the end of the year, more than a quarter of credits that had been earned weren’t used for reassessments. <p\> I don’t know if this means I need to make them expire, or that I need to be more aggressive in pursuing students to use the credits that they earned. I’m wrestling a lot with this as I reflect this summer.
• I need to improve the system for assessing during the class period. I had students sign up for reassessments knowing that the last 15 – 20 minutes of the class period would be available for it, but not many took advantage of this. Some preferred to do this before or after school, but some students couldn’t reassess then because of transportation issues. I don’t want to unfairly advantage those who live near the school by the system.
• I need to continue to improve my workflow for selecting and assigning reassessments. There is still some inefficiency in the time between seeing what students are assessing on and selecting a set of questions. I think part of this can be improved by asking students to report their current grade for a given standard when signing up. Some students want to demonstrate basic proficiency, while others are shooting for a 4 or 5, requiring questions that are a bit higher level. I also might combine my reassessment sign up web application and the quiz application so that I’m not switching between two browser windows in the process.
• Students want to be able to sign up to meet with me to review a specific standard, not just be assessed on it. If students know specifically what they want to go over, and want some one-on-one time on it since they know that works well for them, I’m all for making that happen. This is an easy change to my current system.
• Students should be able to provide feedback to me on how things are going for them. I want to create a simple system that lets students rate their comprehension on a scale of 1 – 5 for each class period. This lets students assess me and my teaching on a similar scale to what I use to assess them, and might yield good information to help me know how to plan for the next class.

I’ve had some great conversations with colleagues about the ways that standards based grading has changed my teaching for the better. I’m looking forward to continuing to refine my model next year. The hard part is deciding exactly what refinements to make. That’s what summer reflection and conversations with other teachers is all about, so let’s keep that going, folks.