Standards Based Grading and Leveling Up

I’ve been really happy since joining the SBG fan club a few years ago.

As I’ve gained experience, I’ve been able to hone my definitions of what it means to be a six, eight, or ten. Much of what happens when students sign up to do a reassessment is based on applying my experience to evaluating individual students against these definitions. I give a student a problem or two, ask him or her to talk to me about it, and based on the overall interaction, I decide where students are on that scale.

And yet, with all of that experience, I still sometimes fear that I might not be as consistent as I think I am. I’ve wondered if my mood, fatigue level, the time of day affect my assessment of that level. From a more cynical perspective, I also really really hope that past experiences with a given student, gender, nationality, and other characteristics don’t enter into the process. I don’t know how I would measure the effect of all of these to confirm these are not significant effects, if they exist at all. I don’t think I fully trust myself to be truly unbiased, as well intentioned and unbiased as I might try to be or think I am.

Before the winter break, I came up with a new way to look at the problem. If I can define what demonstrated characteristics should matter for assessing a student’s level, and test myself to decide how I would respond to different arrangements of those characteristics, I might have a way to better define this for myself, and more importantly, communicate those to my students.

I determined the following to be the parameters I use to decide where a student is on my scale based on a given reassessment session:

1. A student’s previously assessed level. This is an indicator of past performance. With measurement error and a whole host of other factors affecting the connection between this level and where a student actually is at any given time, I don’t think this is necessarily the most important. It is, in reality, information that I use to decide what type of question to give a student, and as such, is usually my starting point.
2. The difficulty of the question(s). A student that really struggled on the first assessment is not going to get a high level synthesis question. A student at the upper end of the scale is going to get a question that requires transfer and understanding. I think this is probably the most obvious out of the factors I’m listing here.
3. Conceptual errors made by the student during the reassessment. In the context of the previous two, this is key in whether a student should (or should not) advance. Is a conceptual error in the context of basic skills the same as one of application of those skills? These apply differently at a level six versus a level eight. I know this effect when I see it and feel pretty confident in my ability to identify one or more of these errors.
4. Arithmetic/Sign errors and Algebraic errors. I consider these separately when I look at a student’s work. Using a calculator appropriately to check arithmetic is something students should be able to do. Deciding to do this when calculations don’t make sense is a sign of a more skilled student in comparison to one that does not. Observing these errors is routinely something I identify as a barrier to advancement, but not necessarily in decreasing a student’s level.

There are, of course, other factors to consider. I decided to settle on the ones mentioned above for the next steps of my winter break project.

I’ll share how I moved forward on this in my next post in the series.