Increases Effectiveness of Work Done for Student and Teacher
- It's about LEARNING.
- Providing specific feedback gives students a sense of where students are in their learning. Homework assignments and other formative assessments help judge the progress of the group as a whole before deciding how to proceed.
- Feedback Cycle
- Feed-up, Feedback, Feed-forward
Helps Teachers Adjust Instruction
- The standards-based grade book gives a wealth of information to help the teacher adjust instruction. Some standards may require more class instruction and/or some students my need additional instruction or practice.
- Students can also see much more information about their learning. In the traditional grade book, a student would assume she is in solid shape with a letter grade of a “C”, but standards-based grading reveals she has not mastered some crucial concepts and therefore needs to complete additional corrective activities.
It teaches what quality looks like.
- In the adult world, everything is a performance assessment. Quality matters, and the ability to measure the quality of one's own work is a learned skill. We create an environment where standards can and must be met.
- If we base our grades on standards rather than attendance, behavior, or extra credit (which often has nothing to do with course objectives), we can actually help students grapple with the idea of quality and walk away with a higher degree of self-sufficiency. We can and should report information about student performance in areas like attendance and effort, but we can report it separately from academic achievement (O'Connor, 2007; Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006).
If nothing else, grades should have meaning.
- What does each grade indicate to students, parents, and teachers about what students have learned, or not learned, in a course? What does 8/10 really mean? Is 5 out of 10 ever good? How is an 81% different from a 79%? Should we “curve” grades? When pressed to describe the qualitative difference between an A, B, C, D, or F, could we?
- These questions are simplified in a standards-based grading system. Students are provided with the standards and the criteria on which they will be assessed in every unit and for every assessment. Students and parents can clearly see which areas students are performing well and where they may need support. Grades are no longer a mystery.
