The Perks of Using a Standard Based Grading System
Are you a school out there wondering how to get the best out of your students? Well, let me highlight a few things here that we can all relate with. As a teacher, I want you to cycle back to the days when you were on the other side of the desk as a student. I can bet that one of the most frustrating times was receiving a dismal grade in a subject (that you thought you knew) and failed to understand why. Often what happened was, the topics you understood were fewer than those that you didn’t understand, and ultimately this was your downfall. Therefore, you find that overall grading of a subject does little in enabling the student it improve on the weak points as they don’t even become apparent in the initial setup. Discover more on this link: https://otus.com/building-better-learners-through-classroom-culture.
This weakness here in traditional grading opened the door for standards-based grading. In this system, a subject is broken down into content standards or targets that hold a teachable concept that a student must grasp before the end of the course. They are then graded based on their performance in the standards in an entire subject. This way as a teacher you can measure the student’s progress by knowing whether they’ve understood basic concepts and are now ready to move up to the tougher stuff. So the grades, in this case, demonstrate an understanding of a specific idea. So being such a substantial educational innovation, what benefits lie in SBG?
One primary gain of SBG is that it inspires a growth mindset. Intelligence is dependent on the amount of effort you put in in the long-term as opposed to short term consistency. SBG reaffirms this thought by ensuring learners know their specific weak points and work towards fixing them. The policy of reteaching and reassessing, which is a hallmark of SBG, means that students are given a bigger room of improvement hence fostering a progressive mindset instead of a fixed one. Equally, the teaching staff becomes better at instruction delivery as they know what parts they didn’t teach well, and where they were solid. Learn more about formative assessment tool here.
SBG enables parents, and teachers alike, to figure out the particular problems facing their children academically. Teachers will note of times when parents visit them or call them up to ask why their children are not doing so well. Sometimes this question can be tricky and so, as a teacher you end up giving a general answer. With SBG, however, you will be able to tell the parent that their child doesn’t necessarily have a math problem but is facing specific challenges in algebra thus a need for extra effort in that area.
It equally enables the teacher to give differentiated instructions to students. You see with the concept standards in place, and consistent formative assessment, the teacher, can tell where every student is in terms of the targets. Based on this info, they can tailor their instructions based on the levels their different students are at and also give different assignments as per the student’s proficiency levels.
Finally, standards-based grading will aid in ensuring that the students have mastery of content and don’t just memorize stuff before exams. This way, the overall grade they get will be a reflection of the individual grades they got at each proficiency level. Click here to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classroom_management.
