Fall 2021: More on Standards Based Grading
I'm in a book club with some colleagues this summer, and we are reading Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. I've been meaning to write summaries of my thoughts after our assigned readings, but may wait to do a full book review. We're at Chapter 10 and it feels a bit of a cliff hanger; including any assignments or activities in a student's grade other than assessments of their understanding is inequitable. Our (seemingly) natural response has been to reject this as we have learned that high stakes assessments likely do more harm than good, especially for BIPOC students. The author has alluded to some solutions, which we will dive into in Chapters 11 (Practices that support hope and a growth mindset) and 12 (Practices that 'life the veil').
During our last meeting standards based grading came up, and most people seemed interested but intimated. In previous posts I've mentioned how I am balancing flipping my classroom and creating a standards based grading scheme that I'll test out behind the scenes for AY 21-22. Two concerns people had were creating the standards and levels, and the logistics of both recording student's progress and allowing for retakes of assessments.
Creating the standards can absolutely be a difficult task, but for most textbooks there are standards available. This is absolutely becoming a requirement of the job for many faculty, the ability to create and align standards, and it would be nice to see more institutional and department support be the norm for those efforts. It can take quite a while to do this for any course, especially for courses that have more than five faculty teaching those courses.
For corequisite courses this is a bit trickier as you have to identify prerequisite topics that support the course-level standards. This took our department many, many months (if not years) and not something to be taken lightly. If you are thinking of doing something similar the Dana Center has great resources and tools to support faculty in this effort.
I'm finding that the levels for standards isn't as difficult, mostly because I know the course material, and have experience teaching so I know what areas most students struggle with. For example, to create the following levels I started with the Proficient level as meeting the Learning Objective (LO). From there I went up to Expert and included an additional aspect of this LO that I like students to be able to do, but it isn't necessary. After that I went to Developing, knowing that students struggle with the idea that a function can be defined only by a set of points, and that verbal descriptions of functions can be challenging. Lastly for Novice I knew that students struggle with functions that are not continuous, but I couldn't use that word so I decided on "for functions that are defined for all x."
One thing that is really helping me get through writing these LOs and levels is the fact that I'm not going to be using them for grading this year, and I'll have time to refine them. I plan on using these LOs and standards to create my flipped materials and activities, but for AY 21-22 I won't use them for grades but will still record student progress as if I did. This would (hopefully) provide me feedback as to what standards should be adjusted or removed. I could also test sharing these levels with students, possibly using them for review exercises, editing any that students struggle with reading and understanding... In fact, creating a card sort from these would be pretty easy, save me time, provide good feedback, AND might help students review and understand terminology.
The logistics aspect is absolutely a little difficult, and I plan on going back to the initial presentation I saw for ideas about how to share information about grades using these LOs and levels. One idea is to create a Canvas Group for each student. This way Canvas will generate a page for that group/student, and I can post their progress.
Another idea is to put it on the student. Give them a chart at the start of the term, explain how to fill it out, and make them responsible for them telling me what they need. Granted I'd have a spreadsheet of my own, but I would hope that by giving them the responsibility of maintaining a record of their progress AND grade the student would see how they are connected.
In terms of assessments, my first thought is to copy Lewis and Ramos' plan; have a quiz where students can make their first attempt at showing mastery of the LOs for the week. After that have students try again. I'm resistant to using class time as I'll be flipping the course material and will likely need that time to help students. Using office hours sounds good, but maybe doing so in the classroom after class might be a better idea. (A colleague (Hi Hannah!) has been talking about having faculty volunteer time in a classroom to make a grassroots testing center. I like the idea but need to figure out the COVID-related logistics. It would certainly help me!)
I feel like I'm making good progress, but August is already here and I don't have ANY videos or activities made, and am only half-way through completing the LOs and levels. I feel like I have to make a solid effort towards flipping my class soon and get at least 50% of the videos and activities done in August or I might have to scrap it. I have previous homework assignments and materials I can use, but it'd be nice to have most of the course developed by then.
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