Virtual Learning may be the time for Standards-Based Gradebooks to Shine

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Those who taught with me a decade ago know that I had an unusual “education” obsession: Standards-Based Grading.

As a high school teacher, I sometimes surprised my colleagues with my stance on placing standards in my gradebook rather than assignments. Some argued that it wasn’t very collegial. “They are not going to be graded with standards in college,” I was told, and those colleagues may have been right. For every pro I discovered in constructing my high school gradebook this way, there seemed to be a con.

In 2012-2013, I studied the effects of gradebook construction for my doctoral dissertation. And while I would love to share that study in its entirety, my conclusion was this: grades more accurately convey what a student has learned when constructed with standards and students are even more cognizant of what they have or have not learned, BUT constructing gradebooks in this way requires a mindshift for teachers, parents, and many students that would require a great deal of work for a shift that may only reap minimal academic gain.

While I still stand by my conclusions from that study, published in 2014, the benefits of standards-based gradebooks may warrant a second look in the fall semester of 2020. With the possibility of more virtual learning on the horizon, I hope school administrators will consider the opportunity a standards-based gradebook construction can provide to our efforts to guarantee learning.

For instance, if a high-school-level learning goal in an ELA classroom is for students to “formulate effective topic sentences,” it makes sense for teachers to isolate this skill and to continue reporting a student’s level of understanding and ability (with that skill) until he or she has mastered it. Similarly, in a science classroom, a learning goal may be to “utilize the scientific method” and it makes sense for students and their teachers to know how well a student is able to do this. At any one time, students may be focusing on multiple learning goals, of course. However, once a skill has been mastered, students can move onto new, more challenging learning goals.

Setting up my gradebook this way allows me - as a teacher - to isolate different groups and to differentiate the learning for these groups based on what they’ve mastered. Perhaps, in my ELA classroom, I have “Group 1” writing an essay this week because we are working on “supporting topic sentences,” but I have another group that has already mastered that...so “Group 2” is reading The Scarlet Letter and attempting to isolate literary devices used by Hawthorne. We don’t have to all do the same thing or complete the same assignments. Some students may need to keep working on paragraph structure all semester; others will have mastered that before they even showed up. Importantly, I use the learning goal examples that I do to emphasize that standards-based grading is not just something that can be helpful in an elementary classroom. Secondary teachers can benefit from this practice, too!

There are many reasons that virtual learning is a tough transition for teachers. For many of us, it has taken away our ability to connect with students the way we have in the past. However, if we can embrace a standards-based gradebook construction, we are going to find a new way to connect with students and to help them learn exactly what we need them to learn.

To learn more about standards-based gradebook construction and how it can be effectively applied in the high school classroom, please contact me at drkevinmabie@gmail.com.

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