What is Standards Based Assessment and Grading?
Academic standards have two components. 1) content students need to know and 2) practices or what we want students to be able to do with the content. Each subject or course has different standards that are determined to be mastered by students. However, most report cards offer a single overall grade for performance on all standards within that subject or course. Standards based grading allows teachers to evaluate student performance on the different standards separately, which provides a clear picture of which standards students have mastered or are still working on.
Each school building is at different phases of implementation. This year the elementary school will have a new grading scale. Instead of having 4 grading marks (Below, Approaching, Meets, Exceeds) we are transitioning to 3 levels being 1, 2, 3. The image below defines the grading scale in more detail.
Middle and High School will start the Standards Based Grading journey by separating Work Habits (behaviors) from the academic grade. If we incorporate behavior, attendance, and effort in the grade, we no longer consider grades accurate indicators of mastery of written standards. The grade should reflect what the student knows and is able to do (Wormeli, 2006). Teachers will be giving students a grade that reflects what they know and are able to do with the content they are learning and a separate grade for their Work Habits. See the rubric below for details.
HIGH SCHOOL WORK HABITS RUBRIC
MIDDLE SCHOOL WORK HABITS RUBRIC
More information will be provided about each of these components of Standards Based Grading as the year progresses. Carmen Lee Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment