First Thoughts on SBG

One of my big experiments this year was to implement Standards Based Grading for the first time. For anyone who hasn’t been following the discussion over many teaching blogs across the web, here’s a horribly simplified explanation (or at least a brief summary of my understanding) of what SBG is all about:

• Grades should reflect learning and nothing else. What we put on a student’s report card should indicate how well the students have mastered the material for the class rather than be a mishmash of snapshots of their understanding of various topics at specific points plus grades for homework, preparedness, attentiveness and other nonacademic issues.
• Course content should be organized as lists of standards, which are essentially the ideas a student should know and the skills a student should master as a result of the class. A teacher then assesses these standards in a variety of ways and grades a student’s mastery of each standard using a uniform rubric.
• Grades on individual standards should always be changeable as a student develops his or her understanding of the topic. One of the big ideas is that understanding a topic is what matters most, not the speed with which a student understands. Students should be given the opportunity to reassess individual standards if they did poorly on in-class assessments but have put forth the extra effort to get the material.

One of the best summaries is found here, at Think Thank Thunk, an excellent blog by a math and science teacher named Shawn Cornally. While he’s certainly not the first or only teacher blogging about SBG online, he’s a bit of an evangelist who has posted quite a lot worth reading on the topic.

My initial setup looks like this:

• Standards are graded on a 0-4 point rubric, and the grade on the last assessment counts towards the marking period grade. I assess each standard at least twice during class and student may see me outside of the normal school day to reassess individual standards. The average of the standards grades makes up roughly 75% of the report card grade (I say “roughly” because I have slightly different final grade setups for geometry and calculus).
• I give one test per marking period which covers all the material from the marking period and is worth a little under 25% of the grade. There are no makeups, bonus points, or curves.
• Each class is given one writing assignment per marking period because I believe that not only do students need to get as much practice with writing as they can, but they should get comfortable with the idea that writing is not a skillset reserved exclusively for English class. This counts as 5% of the report card grade.

Student reaction has been mixed. Some appreciate the fact that they get multiple opportunities to show me they understand the material and are not necessarily stuck with silly mistakes or delayed understanding factoring into their class grade. Many failed to actually read the syllabus or pay attention on the occasions when I detailed the grade breakdown and didn’t really get how important the standards are to their overall grade.

I find the actual grading process to be far more easy with SBG than with the general points approach. Judging the level of a student’s mastery is not too challenging, so I am able to go through a stack of quizzes in very little time. Of course, it still takes me just as long to grade papers as it did when I had to figure just how many points a student lost for various errors as I am much more inclined to write out commentary on a student’s work. I can’t tell how much of an impact this has had yet, but I do see students reading what I write, which is reassuring.

One thing I am not sure about is the process of keeping the most recent grade for each standard. I do like that this encourages retention and gives everyone at least two chances to demonstrate understanding. I do not like that it invites comments like what I heard in geometry class today, when one student’s reaction to doing poorly on today’s quiz led another student to say, “That’s ok, because this one didn’t count anyway!” I have two ideas for addressing this, which I’ll be thinking about as possible changes for a new marking period:

1. Switch to using the highest grade only, but make the first assessment worth a maximum of 3 out of 4 on the scoring rubric (i.e. make it an assessment that judges basic understanding only, not the ability to apply ideas to novel situations and make connections between different topics). Definitely easier to set up the grading system for this method, though I can foresee some challenges with explaining the 3/4 vs. 4/4 assessments to students.
2. Use a decaying average that makes all assessments count towards the final score, with more recent assessments carrying more weight. For example, a student who scored 1, 3, and 4 on the same standard may have the final score determined by something like (1 + 2(3) + 3(4))/6 = 3.2. I would definitely need to work out an appropriate, scalable method for averaging the individual assessment grades. The big challenges for this would be setting up my gradebook to compute these values for me (we have a web-based system at school) and explaining to my students how to compute their grades.

We shall see where this goes. I suppose that one of the advantages I have is I could experiment with both of these approaches in class this year, though I do not think it is very fair to the students to keep changing the grading system for the class, even if the fundamental principles and weighting structure stay the same.

My overall impression of SBG is quite positive. The emphasis on understanding is quite attractive. Figuring out how to best incorporate individual assessments into an overall grading scheme remains a tricky spot. However, no grading policy is perfect and I’m happy to work towards improving one that keeps student learning as the focus.