standards based grading

Scaling up SBG for the New Year

In my new school, the mean size of my classes has doubled. The maximum size is now 22 students, a fact about which I am not complaining. I’ve missed the ease of getting students to interact with simple proximity as the major factor.

I have also been given the freedom to continue with the standards based grading system that I’ve used over the past four years. The reality of needing to adapt my systems of assessment to these larger sizes has required me to reflect upon which aspects of my system need to be scaled, and what (if anything) needs to change.

The end result of that reflection has identified these three elements that need to remain in my system:

Students need to be assessed frequently through quizzes relating to one to two standards maximum.
These quizzes need to be graded and returned within the class period to ensure a short feedback cycle.
There must still be a tie between work done preparing for a reassessment and signing up for one.

Including the first element requires planning ahead. If quizzes are going to take up fifteen to twenty minutes of a class block, the rest of the block needs to be appropriately planned to ensure a balance between activities that respond to student learning needs, encourage reinforcement of old concepts, and allow interaction with new material. The second element dictates that those activities need to provide me time to grade the quizzes and enter them as standards grades before returning them to students. The third happens a bit later in the cycle as students act on their individualized needs to reassess on individual standards.

The major realization this year has been a refined need for standards that can be assessed within a twenty minute block. In the past, I’ve believed that a quiz that hits one or two aspects of the topic is good enough, and that an end of unit assessment will allow complete assessment on the whole topic. Now I see that a standard that has needs to have one component assessed on a quiz, and another component assessed on a test, really should be broken up into multiple standards. This has also meant that single standard quizzes are the way to go. I gave one quiz this week that tested a previously assessed standard, and then also assessed two new ones. Given how frantic I was in assessing mastery levels on three standards, I won’t be doing that again.

The other part of this first element is the importance of writing efficiently targeted assessment questions. I need students to arrive at a right answer by applying their knowledge, not by accident or application of an algorithm. I need mistakes to be evidence of misunderstanding, not management of computational complexity. In short, I need assessment questions that assess what they are designed to assess. That takes time, but with my simplified schedule this year, I’m finding the time to do this important work.

My last post was about my excitement over using the Numbas web site to create and generate the quizzes. A major bottleneck in grading these quizzes quickly in the past has been not necessarily having answers to the questions I give. Numbas allows me to program and display calculated answers based on the randomized values used to generate the questions.

Numbas has a feature that allows students to take the exam entirely online and enter their answers to be graded automatically. In this situation, I have students pass in their work as well. While I like the speed this offers, that advantage primarily exists in cases where students answer questions correctly. If they make mistakes, I look at the written work and figure out what went wrong, and individual values require that I recalculate along the way. This isn’t a huge problem, but it brings into question the need for individualized values which are (as far as I know right now) the only option for the fully online assessment. The option I like more is the printed worksheet theme that allows generation of printable quizzes. I make four versions and pass these out, and then there are only four sets of answers to have to compare student work against.

With the answers, I can grade the quizzes and give feedback where needed on wrong answers in no more than ten or fifteen minutes total. This time is divided into short intervals throughout the class block while students are working individually. The lesson and class activities need to be designed to provide this time so I can focus on grading.

The third element is still under development, but my credit system from previous years is going to make an appearance. Construction is still underway on that one. Please pardon the dust.

P.S:

If you’re an ed-tech company that wants to impress me, make it easy for me to (a) generate different versions of good assessment questions with answers, (b) distribute those questions to students, (c) capture the student thinking and writing that goes with that question so that I can adjust my instruction accordingly, and (d) make it super easy to share that thinking in different ways.

That step of capturing student work is the roughest element of the UX experience of the four. At this time, nothing beats looking at a student’s paper for evidence of their thinking, and then deciding what comes next based on experience. Snapping a picture with a phone is the best I’ve got right now. Please don’t bring up using tablets and a stylus. We aren’t there yet.

Right now there are solutions that hit two or three, but I’m greedy. Let me know if you know about a tool that might be what I’m looking for.

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:

Standards Assessment – Unit 5 Exam

Another WeinbergCloud Update

I decided a full overview of my online WeinbergCloud application was in order, so I recorded a screencast of me going through how it currently works. It’s kind of neat that this has been a project under development for nearly two years. I’ve learned a lot about HTML, Javascript, the Meteor framework, and programming in general in the process, and it has been a lot of fun.

Stay for as long as you like, and then let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Credit Expiration & Standards Based Grading

For the background on my reassessment system, check out this previous post.

Here’s the run down of my progression in using standards based grading over the past couple of years:

When students could reassess whenever they wanted, they often did so without preparation. They also rushed to do as many reassessments as possible at the end of a quarter or semester. I also needed a system to know who had signed up for a reassessment, for which standard they were assessing, and when they were coming in.
Solution: Students needed to complete a reassessment sign-up form through Google Forms that included reflection on work that was done to review a standard. In general though, the reflection on these forms wasn’t strong. I needed more, but didn’t get around to clearly defining what I meant by strong reflection.
The difficulty of scanning through a form and getting the information I needed prompted me to create an online site using the Meteor programming framework that lets students sign up for reassessments. In real-time, this sorts the reassessments for a given day and helps me stay organized. The problem was that I still wasn’t satisfied with what students needed to do to reassess. They needed to review their mistakes, talk to me, practice and get feedback, and then sign up. Having a way to manage that process was essential.
Solution: The introduction of credits. Students earned credits for working after school, showing me practice problems, and doing other work to support the deliberate practice and learning needed to get closer to mastery.
Many students hoarded their credits until the end of the semester. This prevented the cycle of feedback about learning from continuing, and caused the end of the semester to still be a mad rush to reassess whichever standards are lowest in the grade-book using a machine gun approach.

This brings me to what I wrote about in my year-end reflection about SBG at the end of last year. Hoarding credits and saving them until they want to use them causes less reassessment, and that’s not right. I want to nudge students to reassess more often and know that they should take opportunities as often as possible to show what they know. I’ve threatened to make credit expiration happen since August, and students have been asking when it would start.

No time like the present.

After working on this for a couple of days, I’ve activated a feature on my reassessment management app that allows credits to expire.

Right now, I will be expiring credits manually. I need to see how students respond to this change before the system does this automatically. I get a visual indication that a given credit has expired and click the ‘fire’ button to expire the credit. I can also restore the credit if I change my mind. The asterisk button lets me apply the credit lifetime in the input box to a specific credit and change the expiration.

For old credits, I applied a much longer lifetime, but as students learn to adjust their behavior, I’m starting with a ten day expiration lifetime. That seems to be just the right amount of time to get students assessing within a reasonable amount of time of doing work related to a standard. I don’t think this changes the time pressure to learn something within a given amount of time, which is one of the benefits of SBG. It does change the pressure to assess within a given amount of time, which I do want to happen.

I’m also adjusting some of my policies that cause the hoarding in the first place. Some of this tendency was a consequence of my system – I haven’t let students go from a 5 to a 10 (on a ten point scale) with one assessment session. Mastery is demonstrated over time. I typically had students go from a 5 to an 8 on a perfect first assessment, and then left it there until the unit exam, when students can demonstrate mastery of standards in the context of many other problems.

I’m planning to loosen this progression in light of the credit expiration changes here. If a student is able to demonstrate the ability to answer questions related to a standard, no matter what I throw at them, that’s a pretty good hint on their mastery level. It’s up to me to give reassessment questions that measure what I’m looking for though. That’s where the art of good assessment and experience comes in. I reserve the right to not raise the mastery level if I’m not convinced of a student’s level – students know that taking a reassessment does not automatically mean their level will be raised. As long as that understanding continues, I think these changes will lead to better learning.

As always, I’ll keep you all updated with how well this works in practice. I can always turn this feature off if it’s a disaster.

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!

Coding WeinbergCloud – An Update

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made some changes to my standards based grading system using the Meteor framework. These changes were made to address issues that students have brought up that they say get in the way of making progress. Whether you view these as excuses or valid points, it makes sense to change some of the features to match the students’ needs.

I don’t know what standard 6.2 means, Mr. Weinberg.

There are many places students could look to get this information. It does make sense, however, to have this information near where students sign up for reassessments.

When students select a standard, a link pops up (if the standard exists) with a description. This has made a big difference in students knowing whether the standard they sign up for is what they actually intend to assess.

I also added the entry for the current mastery level, because this is important in selecting appropriate assessments. The extra step looking it up in the online gradebook isn’t worth it to me, and asking students to look it up makes it their responsibility. That’s probably where it belongs.

Can you post example problems for each standard?

The biggest issue students have in searching for online resources for a specific standard is not knowing the vocabulary that will get the best resources. There’s lots of stuff out there, but it isn’t all great.

I post links to class handouts and notes on a school blog, so the information is already online. Collecting it in one place, and organizing it according to the standards hasn’t been something I’ve put time into.

Students can now see the standards for a given course, listed in order. If students are interested, they can look at other courses, just to see what they are learning. I have no idea if this has actually happened.

Selecting a standard brings a student to see the full text and description of the standard. I can post links to the course notes and handout, along with online resources that meet my standards for being appropriately leveled and well written.

At the moment, I’m the only one that can add resources. I’ve written much of the structure to ultimately allow students to submit sites, up-vote ones that are useful to them, and give me click data on whether or not students are actually using this, but I’m waiting until I can tweak some UI details to make that work just the way I want it.

Mr. Weinberg, I signed up for an assessment, but it’s not showing up.

The already flaky internet in China has really gotten flakier as of late. Students are signing up for reassessments, but because of the way I implemented these requests being inserted into the database, these requests weren’t actually making it to the server. I’ve learned a lot more about Meteor since I wrote this a year ago, so I’ve been able to make this more robust. The sign-up window doesn’t disappear until the server actually responds and says that the insert was successful. Most importantly, students know to look for this helper in the upper left hand side of the screen:

If it glows red, students know to reload the page and reconnect. Under normal Meteor usage conditions, this isn’t a problem because Meteor takes care of the connection process automatically. China issues being what they are, this feature is a necessity.

I’ve written before about how good it feels to build tools that benefit my students, so I won’t lecture you, dear reader, about that again. In the year since first making this site happen though, I’ve learned a lot more about how to build a tool like this with Meteor. The ease with which I can take an idea from prototype to production is a really great thing.

The next step is taking a concept like this site and abstracting it into a tool that works for anyone that wants to use it. That is a big scale project for another day.

Releasing my IB Physics & IB Mathematics Standards

Our school is in its first year of official IB DP accreditation. This happened after a year of intense preparation and a school visit last March. In preparation for this, all of us planning to teach IB courses the next year had to create a full course outline with details of how we would work through the full curriculum over the two years prior to students taking IB exams.

One of the difficulties I had in piecing together my official course outline for my IB mathematics and IB physics courses was a lack of examples. There are outlines out there, but they were either for the old version of the course (pre-2012) or from before the new style of IB visitation. The IB course documents do have a good amount of detail on what will be assessed, but not the extent to which it will be assessed. The math outline has example problems in the outline which are helpful, but this does not exist for every course objective. The physics outline also has some helpful details, but it is incomplete.

The only way I’ve found to fill in the missing elements is to communicate directly with other teachers with more experience and understanding of IB assessment items. While some of this has been through official channels (i.e. the OCC forums), most has been through my email and Twitter contacts. Their help has been incredible, and I appreciate it immensely.

At the end of the first semester for Mathematics SL, Mathematics HL (one combined class for both), and Physics SL/HL (currently only SL topics for the first semester), I now have the full set of standards that I’ve used for these courses in my standards based grading (SBG) implementation. I hope these get shared and accessed as a starting point for other teachers that might find them useful.

For my combined Mathematics SL/HL class:
Topics 1 – 2, IB Mathematics SL/HL

For my combined Physics SL/HL class:
Topics 1 – 2, IB Physics SL/HL

The third column in these spreadsheets has the heading ‘IB XXXX Learning Objective’ – these indicate the connection between the unit standard (e.g. Standard 3.1 is standard 1 of unit 3) to the IB Curriculum Standard (e.g. 2.3 is Topic 2, content item #3). Some of these have sub-indices that correspond with the item in the list of understandings in the IB document. IB Mathematics SL objective 1.3.2 refers to IB Topic 1, content item #3, sub-topic item #2.

If you need more guidance there, please let me know.

If you are a new IB Mathematics/Physics teacher accessing these…

…please understand that this is my first year doing the IB curriculum. There will be mistakes here. In some cases, I also know that I’ll be doing things differently in the future. If these are helpful, great. If not, check the OCC forums or teacher provided resources for more materials that might be helpful.

If you are an experienced IB Mathematics/Physics teacher accessing these…

…I’d love to get your feedback given your experience. What am I missing? What do I emphasize that I shouldn’t? What are the unspoken elements of the curriculum that I might not be aware of as a first year? Let me know. I’d love it if you could give me the information you wish you had (or may have had) to be maximally successful.

I’ve benefited quite a bit from sharing my materials and getting feedback from people around the world. I’ve also gotten some great help from other teachers that have shared their resources. Consider this instance of sharing to be another attempt to pay that assistance forward.

Standards Based Grading(SBG) and The SUMPRODUCT Command

I could be very late to the party finding this out. If so, excuse my excitement.

I gave a multiple choice test for my IB Physics course last week. Since I am using standards based grading (SBG), I wanted a quick way to see how students did on each standard. I made a manually coded spreadsheet eight years or so ago to do this. It involved multiple columns comparing answers, multiple logical expressions, and then a final column that could be tallied for one standard. Multiply that by the total number of standards…you get the drill.

I was about to start piecing together an updated one together using that same exhausting methodology when I asked myself that same question that always gets me going: is there a better way?

Of course there is. There pretty much always is, folks.

For those of you that don’t know, the SUMPRODUCT command in Excel does exactly what I was looking for here. It allows you to add together quantities in one range that match a set of criteria in another. Check out the example below:

The column labeled ‘Response Code’ contains the formula ‘=1*(B6=E6)’, which tests to see if the answer is correct. I wanted to add together the cells in F6 to F25 that were correct (Response Code = 1) and had the same standard as the cell in H6. The command in cell I6 is ‘=SUMPRODUCT((F6:F25)*(E6:E25=H6))’. This command is equivalent to the sum F6*(E6=H6) + F7*(E7=H6)+F8*(E8=H6)+…and so on.

If I had known about this before, I would’ve been doing this in some way for all of my classes in some way since moving to standards based grading. I’ve evaluated students for SBG after unit exams in the past by looking at a student’s paper, and then one-by-one looking at questions related to each standard and evaluating them. The problem has been in communicating my rationale to students.

This doesn’t solve the problem for the really great problems that are combinations of different standards, but for students that need a bit more to go on, I think this is a nice tool that (now) doesn’t require much clerical work on my part. I gave a print out of this page (with column F hidden) to each student today.

Here is a sample spreadsheet with the formulas all built in so you can see how it works. Let me know what you think.
Exam Results Calculator

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.

Standards Based Grading & Unit Tests

I am gearing up for another year, and am sitting in my new classroom deciding the little details that need to be figured out now that it is the “later” that I knew would come eventually. Last year was the first time I used SBG to assess my students. One year in, I understand things much better than when I first introduced the concept to my students. By the end of the year, they were pretty enthusiastic about the system and appreciated that I had made the change.

I wonder now about the role of unit tests. Students did not get an individual grade for a test at the end of a unit – instead just a series of adjustments to their proficiency levels for the different standards of the related unit, and other units if there were questions that assessed them. While there were times for students to reassess during class and before and after school, a full period devoted to this purpose helped in a few unique ways that I really appreciate:

All students reassessing at the same time means no issues with scheduling time for retakes.
Students that have already demonstrated their ability to work independently to apply content standards are given an opportunity to do so in the context of all of the standards of the unit. They need to decide which standards apply in a given situation, which is a higher level rung of cognitive demand. This is why students that perform well on a unit exam usually move up to a 4 or 5 for the related standards.
Students that miss a full period assessment due to illness, school trips, etc. know that they must find another time to assess on the standards in order to raise their mastery level. It changes the conversation from ‘you missed the test, so here’s a zero’ to ‘you missed an opportunity to raise your mastery level, so your mastery levels are staying right where they are while we move on to new topics.’

I also like the unintended connection to the software term unit testing in which the different components of a piece of software are checked to see that they function independently and in concert with each other. This is what we are interested in seeing through reassessment, no?

My question to the blogosphere is to fill in the holes of my understanding here. What are the other reasons to have unit exams? Or should I get rid of them altogether and just have more scheduled extended times to reassess consistently, regardless of progress throughout the content of the semester?

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