Standards Based Grading & Streamlining Assessments
I give quizzes at the beginning of most of my classes. These quizzes are usually on a single standard for the course, and are predictably on whatever we worked on two classes before. I also give unit exams as ways to assess student mastery of the standards all together. Giving grades after exams usually consists of me looking at a single student’s exam, going standard by standard through the entire paper, and then adjusting their standards grades accordingly. There’s nothing groundbreaking happening here.
The two downsides to this process are that it is (a) tedious and (b) is subject to my discretion at a given time. I’m not confident that I’m consistent between students. While I do go back and check myself when I’m not sure, I decided to try a better way. If you’re a frequent reader of my blog, you know that either a spreadsheet or programming is involved. This time, it’s the former.
One sheet contains what I’m calling a standards map, and you can see this above. This relates a given question to the different standards on an exam. You can see above that question 1 is on only standard 1, while question 4 spans both standards 2 and 3.
The other sheet contains test results, and looks a lot like what I used to do when I was grading on percentages, with one key difference. You can see this below:
Rather than writing in the number of points for each question, I simply rate a student’s performance on that question as a 1, 2, or 3. The columns S1 through S5 then tally up those performance levels according to the standards that are associated with each question, and then scale those values to be a value from zero to one.
This information was really useful when going through the last exam with my ninth graders. The spreadsheet does the association between questions and standards through the standards map, so I can focus my time going through each exam and deciding how well a student completed a given question rather than remembering which standard I’m considering. I also found it much easier to make decisions on what to do with a student’s standard level. Student 2 is an 8 on standard 1 before the exam, so it was easy to justify raising her to a 10 after the exam. Student 12 was a 7 on standard 4, and I left him right where he was.
I realize that there’s a subtlety here that needs to be mentioned – some questions that are based on two or three standards might not communicate effectively a student’s level with a single 1, 2, or 3. If a question is on solving systems graphically, a student might graph the lines correctly, but completely forget to identify the intersection. This situation is easy to address though – questions like this can be broken down into multiple entries on the standards map. I could give a student a 3 on the entry for this question on the standard for graphing lines, and a 1 for the entry related to solving systems. Not a big deal.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what information I need in order to justify raising a student’s mastery level. Having the sort of information that is generated in this spreadsheet makes it much clearer what my next steps might be.
You can check out the live spreadsheet here:
I like how you combine all the assessment information into one sheet. Two questions come to mind:
1. Are the questions across the top all on the same test/quiz? Or is this an aggregation of all of the quizzes you’ve given?
2. Are your quizzes open-ended (solution/process based)? Or does it depend on the day?
I’m curious because I’m doing something similar, but only for my summative assessments right now which are a blend of MC and short answer. I’d like to keep more longitudinal information this way to match it up with their performance at the end.
Hi Brian,
This is a single assessment on all of the standards of a unit. I’ll occasionally throw on some questions that tap standards from previous units as well, which is more important in the IB classes than with my ninth graders.
The questions I give are almost entirely short answer questions since these tend to be better for identifying difficulties. Multiple choice questions that do this, unless really well designed, are few and far between.