Advice for Getting Started with SBG

One of our teacher ed grads emailed one of my colleagues in search of SBG resources for a pre-algebra course he's developing for next year. He wrote:

When I had you for ____, you graded our assessments using a form of standards based grading. I remember receiving a paper back that listed what standards I had mastered and which ones I still needed to work on. I have wanted to try using a standards based grading system ever since I saw it in your classroom. Would you have any resources that you would be willing to share with me?

My colleague replied with several tips and resources, including Matt Townsley's growing list of scholarly articles SBG. He also Cc'd me, and while I was drafting my own response I realized it might be better to write it as a blog post. So here it is, for what it's worth: my list of suggestions and resources for getting started with SBG in the math classroom.

Crowd-sourcing Our Midterm Review

I had to take a sick day today, so we are reviewing for our Mth323 midterm exam by crowd-sourcing a review guide. Students have been asked to add at least two tips for our learning targets, plus as many questions as they have. Check it out (updated every 5 minutes or so):

SBG at Math in Action (2014)

Here are the slides from my talk at the 2014 GVSU Math in Action Conference.

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SBG has grown too big for this post! To access my growing collection of learning targets, presentations, and links to a variety of SBG resources, please visit the new Standards Based Grading page.

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Those Less Convincing Performances

I recently completed my second semester of standards-based grading. I have learned a lot, and will try to post more about that this semester.

After a conversation with a colleague, Pam Wells, about the SBG system I'd been using. The conversation got me thinking about how to handle the, shall we say, less convincing performances. 

Email to Pam on the matter:

Pam, I appreciated the opportunity to talk with you about SBG on Friday. Since then, my thought keep returning to the rubric and the question of what a “1” means. I think I will change how I use 1’s in the future.

When we talked, we agreed that 1 basically means “you don’t get this yet.” In that sense, a 1 should not count as evidence of proficiency at all. So a 1 and an 0 are similar: they mean “no evidence provided”, but for different reasons. Anything at a 0 or 1 simply does not count as a piece of evidence for that target. If we require two pieces of evidence for each target, this reinforces the mastery mode of grading implicit in SBG. If you don’t get to two pieces of evidence, the grade is reduced.

How to do SBG, better, next time!

Wordle of this semester's SBG Targets

Over the last few semesters, I have begun implementing a standards-based grading approach in my classes. My first real attempt was over the summer in a small intermediate algebra class. The results were very positive, but I had fewer than 12 students in the class for most of the semester. Plus it was summer. Could SBG stand up to the challenges of an academic year? Thinking the benefits were worth it, I decided to go for it.

It was worth it -- and I'll talk about why another time -- but I also learned a few things along the way. As the semester is drawing to a close, and I'm grading a lot of student work as they seek to fill in "holes" in the SBG gradebook, I thought it was prime time to reflect on what I would do differently next time: hence, this post.

My Intermediate Algebra Targets (Su13)

I used these targets as part of a my standards-based grading effort in a summer offering of our Mth110 course (Intermediate Algebra) at GVSU.

They are not perfect. Some changes I would make for next time include:

• Reducing the overlap between certain pairs of targets (Target 1.2 and Target 1.14 are examples of that).
• Splitting some targets that merge two concepts or skills in one target (Targets 1.5 and 1.11 are two examples of that).

But overall these worked well and were well-received by my students.

Feel free to use or modify for your own non-commercial educational purposes. For all other purposes, please contact me and let me know what you have in mind.

Intermediate Algebra Learning Targets

I don't know this...yet!

I've written before about my experiences with Standards Based Grading and why it feels so right. See "Show me what you can do" and "I can show you more than that".

Yesterday I gave a quiz on measurement and data. During the quiz, I noticed a few students really seemed to be struggling with some questions (evidence: prolonged periods of time spent staring at a blank spot on their paper).

So interrupted the class with the following announcement:

Remember, one of the great things about this SBG grading system is that you can always turn in more evidence later. So if you don't know how to do something yet, it really is okay to just write "I don't know yet." We'll keep working on it, and then you can turn in stronger evidence when you're ready." 

The release from the students was immediate. Tense shoulders relaxed. One student said out loud how much better that made her feel. It was a memorable moment.

I'm not grading this

I asked my students to turn in a draft of the Cheesecake Task last week. But when I sat down this weekend to prepare to write feedback on their tasks, I hit a snag. Simply put, the work was not good, but their self-evaluations were off the charts high. How could this be?

 Before I started inking comments, I decided to sort the stack into two piles:

Pile one: Almost got it, needs minimal feedback. 
Pile two: Needs a lot of work (and lots of feedback).

Pile one had 5 papers in it. Pile two had 19.

Ugh. 

I can show you more than that

In a previous post, I talked about my grading system based on the mantra, "Show me what you can do." Here's a quick example of a student's response to a quiz item that shows why this proficiency-based approach feels so right:

One of my learning targets was:

___1.5. I can solve linear systems and represent the solution symbolically and graphically.

I stated that objective at the top of the quiz, along with several others, then gave the following task:

The solutions to the following system of equations are provided. Show that you can use the elimination and substitution methods (use each one once) to solve these problems.

{y = 3x+6
{2x + 4y = -4              solution is (-2,0)  

{7.5x - y = 10
{15x - 4y = 10            solution is (2,5)

Show me what you can do

I have a new mantra this semester, reflecting a new (for me) way of thinking about my assessment and evaluation. The mantra is basically: "Show me what you can do." It's a big shift from my early assessment systems.

"Show off!"