STANDARDS-BASED GRADING @ COA

At COA, we envision a studentfriendly report card with clearly defined learning targets aligned to high quality, balanced, rigorous assessments that will prepare our students to be college and career ready. Our Standards-Based Report Card seeks to provide meaningful feedback so both students and parents can track student progress toward mastery of key aca- demic concepts, reflect upon strengths and weaknesses, and identify multiple pathways to deepen learning. This is the vision of COA for our 2020/2021 school year.

What is standards-based grading?
Standards-based grading communicates in student-friendly language, how students are performing on a set of clearly defined learning targets by grade level. Our teachers developed these learning targets based on Common Core Standards within each grade level. The purpose of standards-based grading is to identify what a student knows, in relation to pre-established learning targets, as opposed to merely averaging grades/scores throughout a grading period, which can mask what a student has learned, or not learned, in a specific class. Our goal at COA is to know where each student is in the mastery of these learning targets. This provides us with specific information on how we can support or challenge each of our students.

How does standards-based grading differ from traditional grading?
Unlike with traditional grading systems, a standards-based grading system measures a student’s mastery of grade-level standards by prioritizing the most recent, consistent level of performance. Thus a student, who may have struggled at the beginning of a course, when first encountering new material, may still be able to demonstrate mastery of key content/ concepts by the end of a grading period. In a traditional grading system, a student’s performance for an entire quarter is averaged together. Early low quiz scores would be averaged together with the more proficient performance later in the course, resulting in a lower overall grade than current performance indicates. Standards-based report cards separate academic performance from work habits and behavior to provide parents a more accurate view of a student’s progress in both academic and behavioral areas. Variables such as effort, participation, timeliness, cooperation, attitude, and attendance are reported separately, not as an indicator of a student’s academic performance.

How will my child’s grades be determined?
A student’s performance on a series of assessments (both formative and summative) will be used to determine a student’s overall grade in a course. Practice assignments (homework) are just that, practice, and thus should serve primarily as a source of feedback and instructional support for both students and teachers.

Nicole Strobel, Curriculum Coach