By Molly Voit and Elisabeth Seiple
The 2019-2020 school year marks the first year all four grades in the high school will have experienced no other math and science grading system besides Standards Based Grading. As SBG is integrated into more of our classes, the Knightly News decided it was time for a refresher on the system’s principles. We interviewed six math and science teachers who use SBG in their classes, asking them about its role in their classes, its impact on both teachers and students, and what they feel could be done differently.
SBG’s goal is to grade students on mastery of content, prioritizing student understanding, rather than an overemphasizing arguably arbitrary classroom skills like participation and homework completion. Kelly O’Shea was one of the first teachers to push for SBG at LREI: “[It’s] how I had been grading for several years before I came here, and so that was what I wanted to keep doing because I found that it worked better for my students in terms of how they learned…I was able to use harder questions and students were able to work up to that level because they were getting more feedback and the stakes were a lot lower.” Kelly also talked about how other teachers at LREI embraced her implementation of SBG by “not just [supporting] it, but [being] like ‘oh that’s interesting I’ll try it too,’” even though it was such a foreign method.
Other teachers, who hadn’t used the system before, were not as comfortable in the initial stages of implementing the system. Manjula Nair had already a negative experience with SBG at her previous school: “It was really new [there] and a lot of people weren’t doing it, and there weren’t a lot of resources…it was one of the reasons I left…people didn’t understand it, and I didn’t understand it. I’d never thought about teaching or learning or grading in that way and I was like ‘I’m not doing this, no one seems to know [how to do it], they just want us to figure out how to do it.’” After coming to LREI and finally implementing the system into her classes, Manjula realized there were significant adaptations that would need to take place: “My first few years here I had a traditional grading system…I’d never really been thrilled with it…In my third or fourth year is when Kelly came…and the way Kelly explained it, and the resources she had, the work she had done…I was like ‘oh, this is really interesting, I’ll do this with the seniors’….It was terrible.”
Eventually though, she saw the difference it made in her students’ understanding, and realized, “I didn’t totally know what I was doing, but I knew…This is exactly what fits with progressive education, it fits with the way I believe learning happens, it fits with what we believe as people in this school.”
Kara Luce, a newer teacher at LREI, whose introduction to SBG came partially through Kelly’s blog, witnessed the same difference in student agency and comprehension; “I first did SBG with just my chemistry class…the next year they were like ‘this is the first class where I actually remember anything the next year.’”
She also recognized SBG’s ability to reassess multiple times as an advantage to students learning, “What I find most useful with my ninth graders is frequent short quizzes, and then they can do reassessments after that. They end up really liking the short quizzes…by the end of the year they’re like ‘oh yes, this is actually a really good thing because I have multiple opportunities, if I don’t get it that first time I know I can get it that second time.’”
Daniel Li also appreciated the opportunities SBG provided for more creative quiz questions, which helped place focus on the use of content, rather than memorization: “Because the standards are usually sort of active it’s not like ‘I can memorize and recite this list of things back to you’…I find myself designing quiz questions that require a little bit more from the students instead of just spitting back at me the list of organelles or whatever, I try to get them to integrate knowledge in another way.” There wasn’t only a shift in student approach to work, but teachers as well. Pat Higginston reflected on the perspective he adopted to use SBG most effectively: “I think that sometimes I can get in the mindset of ‘oh this is going to change everything about the way I teach’, that can be kind of a trap…because it’s just another tool…another thing that can be used well or not well.”
According to the teachers we interviewed, SBG’s reviews remain somewhat mixed within the student body. Daniel Li describes some of the student opinions on SBG that he collects through surveys at the end of his classes. He says, “most of them have a positive view of it…they agree with the sense that they know exactly what they need to improve…also they don’t have to worry about having to do well on the first time.” Pat agrees and explains that while his students sometimes question SBG, many students appreciate that they can keep working on challenging concepts in his classes, “usually taking form in asking, ‘can I retake this quiz?’…my sense is students like that.”
Manjula agrees with Daniel and Pat, however she also feels that some students misunderstand SBG because it is unclear that the numbers she gives are indicators of understanding the concepts and not equivalent to percentage grades. She explains that this misunderstanding is apparent when students ask her, “Why did I lose two points on this [standard], if I just made this one mistake?” Manjula argues that since SBG is about providing feedback on understanding, not overall grades, “You didn’t lose two points”– the lower number means that the student didn’t provide evidence of mastering the standard.
Preethi Thomas-McKnight also shared that not all students use SBG most effectively. She explains that students who pay attention to their grade throughout the year are able to continually bring up their understanding, and therefore their grade, with requizzes and classwork. But some students don’t fully take advantage of that ability, and wait to requiz until the end of the trimester anyways.
Every teacher we spoke to shared positive reviews of SBG, while also expressing aspects of SBG that they would change in an ideal world. Manjula shared that she “[wants] to find other ways of assessing student knowledge other than pencil and paper tests.” While attempting to achieve a new system, however, she’s found that some seemingly more progressive test models, like take-home quizzes, facilitate an “equity issue to a certain extent” because of some students’ reliance on tutors.
Additionally, Daniel explained that SBG doesn’t reflect classroom habits including “participation or…handing in your homework every day or you are engaging with your classmates in a productive manner…those kinds of things that aren’t really skills they’re just expected.” Without these habits graded, Daniel says, for example, “there is some difficulty with kids who don’t do their homework because homework isn’t graded or they don’t engage with their classmates the right way because it’s not graded.” However, he argues that SBG “can’t really encompass those things,” but they can possibly be included by using SBG as “a portion of your final grade…like 80% standard based grading, 10% participation, 10% homework or something like that.”
Pat takes a different stance, saying that SBG’s use of “5-6-8-10 is good because it’s transparent…the wider school system…[needs] a grade that comes out of 100 or has a letter grade attached to it at some point,” but this system can also “take away from…looking at the full picture.” Since 5-6-8-10 translates more closely to percentage grades, Pat thinks that students sometimes get distracted by attempting to calculate their final grade and don’t focus enough on how the numbers are indicating their level of understanding at that point in time. He says that he would want to “change [the numbering system] to 1-2-3-4…that communicates more closely what I want to communicate about where you are with this standard.”
Along the same lines, Kelly’s would change SBG so “you wouldn’t have to get a grade in the end…I think all forms of grading are pretty much flawed…that doesn’t seem like really what the purpose of school should be…but I still like the idea of giving feedback specifically on different things…I think it’s useful..I don’t think it needs to turn into a B+ or A- at the end but that’s a larger institutional thing.”
There remains a range of opinions within the student body on whether or not SBG is the best grading system for our school. If there’s one thing we can all take away from these interviews, it’s that there are concerns that come with every grading system, and without students voicing their opinions and questions, and seeking to understand the roots of the systems better, those concerns cannot be addressed.