More Thoughts on Standards Tracking

Published: 2024-03-05 9:05 PM

Category: Assessment | Tags: teaching, sbg, standards based grading, skills, methods

Another test day down and another evening of wrestling with how I track student skill grown and report that through grades. I'm currently giving students feedback on a four-point scale:

1. Does not meet expectations: the student's evidence is not aligned to the skill or lacks detail to show skill.
2. Approaches expectations: The work demonstrates the skill, but there are conceptual or procedural mistakes that still need to be addressed.
3. Meets expectations: The evidence demonstrates coherent understanding of the main ideas.
4. Exceeds expectations: The student's demonstration shows deep knowledge of the concept and connects to other related ideas.

Proficiency on a standard is a mark of 3. The 4 mark is an indicator of exceptional skill or depth of application. Students are given the numeric feedback and several comments about how to improve on each evidence to promote growth. The actual student score is calculated by averaging the highest attempt at any point with the most recent. The intent is to have students continue to focus on improvement without having to constantly dig out of lower-scored evidences (which naturally occur at the start of units before we've developed skills fully).

The Reality of a Four Point System

This looks great on paper, but it's still a grading game. Students are more focused on showing proficiency, but as evidence suggests, they tend to look at the score without reading and reflecting on feedback. The number doesn't carry any information about improvement.

I'm also feeling a little more "icky" about the "Exceeds expectations" label. Thomas Guskey notes that the "exceeds" label moves the target for students. Is the goal to meet the goal? Or to exceed the goal?

From a practical perspective, “Exceeds Standard” presents additional difficulties. In most standards-based environments, mastering a standard means hitting the target. It signifies achieving the goal and learning what was expected. Olympic archers who place their arrows in the center of the bulls-eye from a distance of 70 meters, for example, have “hit the target.” They have achieved the goal and accomplished precisely what was expected.

How then could an Olympic archer ever “exceed” the standard? How would the archer achieve at a more advanced or higher level? Maybe we could make the bulls-eye smaller or move the target further away from the archer, making it more difficult to hit the bulls-eye.

The problem with that, however, is it changes the standard. As soon as you make the task more difficult or move the learning expectation to a higher and more advanced level, you have changed the standard and altered the goal.

I'm wondering how I can adjust my methods to both keep track of student progress over time and drive back toward feedback over scores day to day.

Adjusting My Feedback Methods

This is made a little more complex becuase I want to be able to use technology to track and defend skill development, especially when it does come to grades. Simplifying student feedback protocols will make that easier.

I'm a fan of the single-point rubric as a way to facilitate feedback to students. It provides more structure than comments all over the page while giving me the freedom to call out specific skills or indicators of skills against a learning standard. The actionability of this feedback will improve the quality and usability overall.

I also need to help students self-reflect more regularly. I ended up dropping my simple feedback tracking because it was too focused on the score and not enough on the comments. My colleagues use an end-of-unit logging activity where students go back through their resources and identify strengths and weaknesses in a lite journal template. This helps students see the consequentiality of the work they've done and the benefits of participating in the process.

As far as technical work, the student tracking app shows their calculated score on a four point scale for each assessment on a given skill. This might stick around, but then I'm in the situation of having to explain what the numbers mean again, which kind of defeats the purpose. Part of the technical problem for me is that I like being able to see progress - it helps tell the story of student growth over time.

A sample from a student report showing growth on a skill over time. This is my view, students see the skill and the calculated score. This student has a 3/3.

Anticipated Changes

In the short term, I'm going to start delaying specific grades or standard marks and really focus on feedback - getting students to solicit feedback from others, give their own feedback, and reflect on my feedback toward their growth.

In the long term, I'm going to finish this year with my four-point scale. At this point in the year, it's too late to change something this significant. With the feedback shift, I'm going to move toward using single-point rubrics on assignments to deliver feedback and push growth while still keeping private notes on their performance on assignments.

I'm also going to slowly phase out the "Exceeds expectations" tier. If a student can do the thing, they should always receive the highest mark noting that they're capable of the thing. Gusky notes that adding "Distinguised" or "Exemplary" as some kind of indicator does a better job of communicating the intent, so maybe I'll grab a pack of stickers and start adding those to papers...some kind of small recognition for exceptional work as a morale boost mroe than anything else.

If you're still here, thanks for sticking with me. This is definitely a niche topic, but if you have experience with standards based grading (teachers, students, and parents are all welcome) and want to leave a comment, you can do that in the form below.