2014-2015 Year-In-Review: Standards Based Grading

This was my third year using standards based grading with my classes. I wrote last year and the year before about my implementation.

What did I do differently?

• I had my WeinbergCloud implementation working from the beginning of the year, so it was part of the expectations I introduced on day one.
• I also adjusted this system a bit to make it easier to link the reassessments and the content of the standards. There seemed to be too much uncertainty about what each standard represented, which translated into more confusion when signing up for reassessments than I wanted. Creating a list of standards and resources associated with each standard shrank this gap.
• I did not limit the number of reassessments per day explicitly. I expected that students would not sign up for a ridiculous number given the limitations on their credits, which students earned by doing homework or coming to tutoring.
• I included time within at least one class a week per student during which students could do reassessments without having to come in outside of class time.
• Unit exams continued to be assessed purely on course standards, not points. Semester final exams were percentage based.
• I scaled all of my standards levels from 1 – 5 to be from 6 – 10 to make it easier to communicate the levels to parents and be consistent with our school grading policy of not giving numerical grades below 50%. No student actually received lower grades due to my system of adding a base grade to each standard, but the process of explaining to students and parents that a 1 was really a 60% (5 for the base grade + 1 for the standard level) was clearly more complex than it needed to be.
• For my combined IB HL/SL class, the HL students had standards that only they were responsible for learning, while also being responsible for the SL standards. More on this later.

What worked:

• Students seemed to have a better understanding from the beginning of the year of what standards based grading and assessment was all about. I did a bit more deliberate instruction on the ideas behind it at the beginning of the year. I also had smaller classes than before, so I was better able to have individual conversations about signing up for reassessments and talking about the process.
• A small proportion of students were fully sold on the idea of reassessment as a learning tool. Some students reassessed at least twice a week throughout the semester, and these students had strong performances on the cumulative final exams.
• By the second unit exam, students were generally not leaving questions blank on assessments. They were trying their best to do some amount of work on each question.
• As with last year, I gave more challenging questions to assess the range of student ability. Most of these involved either multiple standards combined in one, more open ended responses, or questions requiring explanation. Assessing at the higher levels of mastery became strongly subjective, and students accepted this, though they occasionally advocated for themselves as to why they deserved to be marked higher. They generally felt that it was fair when arithmetic errors kept them in the 8/10 range.
• Having students report their mastery level when signing up for a reassessment made it much easier for me to know what problem type or category to give them. Furthermore, this made it easier to justify changing the mastery level higher after a successful reassessment, but not making it the highest level on the scale. A student that was a 6 and answered a couple of questions correctly might move to an 8, whereas a student that was previously an 8 would be given more challenging questions and some conversation explaining their understanding in order to move to a 10.
• It was my priority to get assessments back within the same period, and I estimate that I was able to do this more than 95% of the time. Simple, short, and carefully designed assessments can reveal quite a bit about what students do/don’t understand.

What needs work:

• Similar to previous semesters, I had high participation of a small group of students, with far too many students choosing not to reassess until the very end of each semester. Some students did not initiate their own reassessments at all.
• Students again hoarded their credits to the end of the semester. I flirted with the idea of adding an expiration date to credits to discourage holding on to credits for long periods of time, but time constraints kept me from implementing this.
• As a consequence of credit-hoarding, students near the end of the semester signed up for absurd numbers of reassessments in a day – I believe the largest quantity was nine. I shared with students that a good rule of thumb for planning purposes is 10 minutes per reassessment, so doing five reassessments before school isn’t practical, but that didn’t come across well. Students that couldn’t do all of their reassessments in the morning simply pushed them to later in the day. This was a problem for me because I never knew if students were going to show up according to their scheduled time, or just do everything after school. Canceling after no-shows at the end fixed this problem pretty efficiently, however.
• When a student would answer all questions correctly on an unannounced standards quiz, I generally assigned this a mastery level of 8 on a 6 – 10 scale. Students that had less than an 8 in this case usually had trouble with the same questions on a unit assessment or reassessment on the same standard later on. In other words, the students that had trouble initially learning a concept did not necessarily get the help they needed to make progress before the unit exam. This progress often happened after the exam, but this led to a lot of students falling behind pretty early on. I need to introduce interventions much earlier.

Under consideration for next year:

These are the ideas I am mulling over implementing before school gets started in a month, and I’d love to hear what you think.

• Make credit expiration happen. This has been an issue for the year and a half of WeinbergCloud’s existence. I threatened implementing this in speaking with students, and they were immediately asking me not to because it would prevent them from putting off reassessments as they preferred to do. This includes students that were doing the practice problems between classes anyway, so this wasn’t just about losing the credits. Adding a “why not just give a reassessment a try” argument worked in face-to-face conversation with students that were hoarding credits, so forcing the process might be worth the effort. I understand that learning takes time, but many of the students putting off reassessment weren’t actively reviewing the standards over time any way. I’d rather force the feedback cycle through more iterations since that is when students seem to learn the most.
• Introduce submitting work into the process of reassessment. This could be electronic (“To complete your sign up, submit a scan/photo of the work you have done to prepare”) or could just be shown before I give them a reassessment. This would reduce some of the sign-ups that happen only based on the mastery score rather than reviewing the concepts that come with it. Students earn credits by doing practice problems or coming to tutoring, and these let them sign up for reassessments – this won’t change. To actually go the final step and take the reassessment, I need to see what students have done to prepare. In some cases (students that see me the day before, for example) I may waive this requirement.
• Require X number of reassessments per two week cycle of the block schedule. This might be in lieu of the previous change, but I’m afraid this might encourage (rather than prevent) a rush of reassessments at the end of a two week period. On the other hand, if the goal is to increase opportunities for feedback, this might be more effective.
• Make it possible for students to sign-up for an appointment to go over (but not be assessed) material on a given standard. Reassessments are great opportunities for feedback, but sometimes students want to come in to go over material. I get emails from students asking this, but it might be easier to just include this within WeinbergCloud.
• Introduce skills/definition standards for each unit. This would be a standard for each unit that covers basic recall of information. I’ll discuss why I want these (particularly in physics) in more detail within a later post. The short story is that I want to specifically assess certain concepts that are fundamental to all of the standards of a unit with a single binary standard.
• Classify standards mastery levels in terms of ‘likelihood of success’. This is a lower priority, and when I tried to explain this to a colleague, she wasn’t convinced it would be worth the effort. If you have a 10, it means you have a 95% or higher likelihood of answering anything I give you correctly. The probabilities might not scale linearly – a 9 might mean between 90-95%, an 8 between 75% and 90, etc. I don’t know. The reason I want to do this is to justify giving a 10 to students that have demonstrated solid proficiency without requiring perfection, and have a better reason for only raising a student from a 6 to an 8 after answering a couple questions on a single reassessment.

  Right now the difference between an 8, 9, and 10 are defined (in order) by answering questions correctly on a single standard quiz, a comprehensive unit exam, and correctly answering stretch questions correctly. A student that gets an 8 on a standards quiz before an exam might then answers related questions incorrectly on the multi-standards exam and remains an 8. If this student then takes a quiz on a single standard and answers that question correctly, does it make sense to then raise their mastery level above 8? This is what I often do. I can also control for this by giving a more challenging question, but I’m not sure I need to.

  In short, something is fishy here, and I need to think it out more in order to properly communicate it to students. In my head, I understand what I want to communicate: “yes, you answered these questions correctly, but I’m still not convinced that you understand well enough to apply the concepts correctly next time.” This is not the highest priority out of the ones I’ve mentioned here.

As always, I appreciate your feedback. Thanks for reading!