Reporting on student learning is not just reporting what has been achieved – but also, what areas can student work on to improve. 

Standards Based Grading tells a more complete story because – on a good rubric – students are told where their performance sits right now and how students can also see what they can do to get to the next level.

When it comes to our science curriculum, do we want students to have a deep understanding of something or just passable knowledge? Ideally, we’d like a deep understanding.

if you’re using standards-based grading, where students are assessed on how well they perform specific science skills, you’ll use different parts of each topic to teach and assess certain skills. And if you’re able to assess all the skills effectively and comprehensively using a handful of topics, then there’s not a huge need to add more topics and more tests.

Going forward, when you start your year, start thinking about the topics and, more importantly, what you want to do in each unit to bring out each standard. One way to do this is to look back at last year’s assessment to see what was done. See handouts for sample

A Standards-Based Grading marks book has categories that would reflect learning standards (ie. skills). This provides a better picture of what a student can or cannot do – but it can be time consuming to assess and report on each competency regularly throughout the term.

Standards that overlap significantly or are similar could be combined to form larger categories in a grade book. For example, we initially combined two skills – (1) evaluating with (2) applying and innovating – under one category in our grade book. Both skills we combined under one category we felt were considered higher order skills that would be easier to develop assessments for together.

However, do not combine too many standards together. Categories that are too broade doesn’t give much information as to what students are good at and what they are weak at.

As imperfect as a rubric in SBG may appear, rubrics do a fairly accurate job at assessing standards – if the rubric is defined well. The key thing, always, is to define our rubrics in a detailed and fair way: “detailed”, so we can distinguish each level clearly, and “fair” in that our expectations at each level matches the grade level.

On a rubric (ie. proficiency scale), a proficient is considered a “low A” while an extending is considered a “high A”. Both are A’s.

If we tried to score a standard using traditional grading, how many points would we assign? We could assign 4 points – similar to a 4 level rubric – but the problem there is that a student who got proficient would be getting a 75% (3 out of 4) – a low B in our system, which doesn’t quite denotes a “complete understanding” that is associated with Proficient.

If we decide to assign more points to assess standards via Traditional Grading – for example, make the question out of 10 marks -then we’d have to distinguish between a 6 and a 7 and a 7 and an 8 and an 8 and etc. This becomes more of a headache.

Wordles – like word scrambles – are great at getting students to review key terms. But, with wordles, there’s the added layer of difficulty where students need to switch out and rearrange letters in the wordle by following the colored clues.

Instead of using colors to give wordle clues, use the following black-and-white clues: for white letters in black boxes, this means the letter is not present in the word; for black letters in white boxes, this means the letter is present in the word and is in the correct position; for black letters in grey boxes, this means the letter is present but is in the wrong position.

To help students focus on science related words and not just any random words, my wordles all come with a hint. 

Finally, there are 3 variations to my wordle exercise. In variation 1, I give students a wordle and I ask for the Word and the definition. In variation 2, I give the word and have students write the definition AND come up with a wordle of their creation – but no inappropriate words and the words need to be real. In variation 3, I give them the definition and ask students to come up with the word and the wordle – using the rules I mentioned before. See handouts for examples.