SBG 2: Online reports

Last year I started to use Easy Grade Pro as my electronic gradebook, and part of the reason I chose Easy Grade Pro is because it allows me to easily upload a progress report to my school's network that my students can access anytime they are on campus and thus get a real-time view of their grade. This successfully helped prevent surprises about missing work and low grades - most students made use of the online report, and even for those who didn't, I could explain to their parents how accessible my gradebook is.

Yet this year the SBG component has made this process a bit more complicated for my freshmen class. I'm not the first to run into a conundrum with releasing frequent progress reports (see here); the SBG inherently disapproves of the idea of focusing on results, but instead emphasizes process, so telling a student that they can always find their cumulative grade in a class that wants to promote formative learning is somewhat counter-intuitive. So I've spent the last few days playing around with Easy Grade Pro and trying to decide what would be the best way to show students their progress.

Ideally I would like for them to have access to a graph that would show them how they are doing on standards. I tried a quick draft in Excel and it came out something like this:

The top graph shows their abilities in using evidence, and the bottom in writing skills. In this way of visualizing the student's process, for example, it's easy to spot that he/she improved in standard ES 2.3. My freshmen could easily keep track of their standards in such a way, but Easy Grade Pro does not make for internet reports that are graphic. So this isn't really an option unless I want to make a separate report card through Excel instead, but I am not sure how I would securely get such a report on the network for my students, and I haven't spent enough time considering Excel as my ultimate Gradebook.

Fortunately Easy Grade Pro does allow for showing the proficiency on each standard per assignment, so this is a snapshot of ultimately what my students would see:

The only slight problem is that this report shows a 'cumulative' standard grade (see "Succeeds" for ES 1.3), which is really an average of all of the scores per standard. I think this is ok for the purposes of progress reports, since the students should understand that their standards grades are meant to be in flux until the end of the term, but at the end I will have to calculate their final grade differently because I plan to weigh the scores at the end of a term more heavily than those at the start of the term (i.e. I'm not averaging the scores).

I have also decided that I will not show their current overall grade on this progress report - really the purpose of this online report will be for students to examine closely where they are 'beginning', 'developing', 'succeeding', and 'mastering' in the Essential Skills standards, and where they need to reassess for the Unit Goals standards. 

I will also take some time at the mid-term to have them reflect on their own progress - they'll get a physical copy of their standards scores and complete a reflection something like given here. The point of SBG is to get students to reflect on their learning process, so I want my online gradebook to show the least number of final results as possible, while still giving them a good idea of what assignments they are missing and what skills/content material they need to focus on. 

Standards Based Grading: The Starting Line

I started wrestling with how to use Standards Based Grading a month ago, and although the time I spent researching its potential applications left me with my eyes crossed, it also gave me a lot of good ideas to consider. So when I returned to it this week and tried to foresee how I wanted to design my freshmen world history class, here is what I have discovered/created/need to consider further:

WHAT I'VE FIGURED OUT

• First, my overall grading scale.
• Unit Goals – 35%
• Essential/Transferable Skills – 35%
• Portfolio Upkeep – 10%
• Citizenship – 10%
• Final Exam – 10%

This grading scale allows for my standards to fall into four categories. My list of standards and their indicators are below.

Stephen Lazar's reflections on his own experience with SBG  have been incredibly helpful in  my own crafting of the above list and grading scale. I'd like to note that he has 'Citizenship' as a part of his SBG, and I agree with him that some students need feedback regarding certain aspects of their behavior, which is why I have included it for my freshmen. I'm not sure I would do this for my AP class.

• I have decided that I will set aside formal time for reassessments, but seeing as how this is the first year I'm doing SBG, I don't want to force myself into something weekly; I am thinking of something more bi-weekly...? I've decided this for two reasons: first, while Shawn Cornally has some good suggestions for reassessments that are not cookie-cutter retests, it would take me some time to consider how to reassess students for certain objectives in a way that forces them to apply the essentials without simply re-doing a different version of an original assignment. Since this essentially means coming up with an alternative activity for the student to do to show proficiency, until I am confident that I can do this easily enough, I want to make sure I have everything else figured out before assuming I can easily create reassessments. Second, I am considering reassessing students based more on their ability to reflect & articulate why they did not meet a standard. A colleague of mine used 'text corrections' (below) for his class last year, and he had  positive responses from it, so I may consider revamping his sheets for a reflection reassessment tailored to my class. But how can I 'objectively' raise a student's standard based on such a test correction?

• Furthermore, with regards to reassessment, I have included a 'Growth' strand in my 'Citizenship' standard to help those students who may not be as proactive about showing up for a formal reassessment. In other words, if students show improvement over the course of a term in assigned material, then they will have met a goal of working towards longer retention and mastery of skills. So the idea would be to consciously give students opportunities to reassess as the term goes on in other assignments. Example: if they do an assignment in my Roman unit that is well-written (meets standard E/T 2.1 of my list) but is factually wrong (fails in standards UG 1.1 and E/T 2.2), maybe in my Han China unit they can re-assess by making a logical connection/comparison between the empires in a given assignment. I could then increase their earlier poor scores in the other standards. Yet I would have to make continual reminders to my students that this is a possibility in order to ensure that they are conscious that answering a question can take many forms & should make connections to past material, as long as the answer is relevant, logical, and precise.

CHALLENGES STILL TO FACE

• My biggest worry with all of this, however, is what SBG will do to my gradebook. I use EasyGradePro for my grades, and while it is great in its ability to add standards, I am a bit confused as to what will be the best way to generate reports for my students. Here is a screen shot of a sample progress report I made-up - while it makes sense to me, I can imagine how ridiculous it would look to one of my students, let alone a parent who may not have the fortitude to try and figure it out. Now a progress report like this is not what my school sends home - this is what my students and their parents could access online just for my class - so it is nothing official, but I still wish it could be less complicated looking.

• I'm also concerned about how exactly I will grade assignments. In EasyGradePro I can very easily assign standards/indicators to an assignment, but how can I most effectively give my students feedback that they can easily grasp? As I wrote in an earlier post, I plan to introduce the interactive notebook (=portfolio) to my class, so here is a potential problem. If they do a simple 5-10 minute reflection on a topic we discussed, how can I grade according to the 6 or 7 indicators of my writing standard? I will have to discuss this with the teachers at my school who have used SBG to consider how they handle rubrics.

• As most teachers who use SBG realize, there is a problem if your school hands out grades as a percentage and final letter grade. How can you convert the results of your SBG to the traditional grading scale? I found this site which, I think, has a good justification for a mathematical formula used to calculate final grades. Would it make sense if I use this formula for my standards to calculate my final grade?

LAST THOUGHT

Shawn Cornally has a great analysis of the benefits of summative assessments, even in a class that uses the SBG. And in fact his justification for using summative assignments is, I think, the best way of explaining to my students why they have finals anyway. And fundamentally discussing the point of a final exam will also provide just one more opportunity to get them to think throughout the year how they learn.

As of right now I'll be honest and admit I am feeling like I may be taking on a lot of unknowns here for my freshmen class, with both the interactive notebook and this whole new way of doing my grades, but hopefully all of this pre-planning will help limit the problems as well as provide enough background for me to fix any pitfalls.