What is "Grading for Learning"?
“Grading for Learning” intends the following: 1) Align instruction and assessment to skills and understandings described by Utah Core Standards; 2) Communicate progress towards learning targets more clearly to students and parents; 3) Simplify letter-grade calculations so that student-teacher dialogue may focus on learning objectives and feedback. Your student will still receive a letter grade for the course, but you will not see any scores in PowerSchool. Rather, you’ll see their level of progress towards the standard.
What does "Grading for Learning" Look Like?
In Canvas:
Your student will still receive a numeric grade for classwork (between 0-3) and for assessments (1-4). This is a quick way for us to keep track of the progress towards learning the standards.
In PowerSchool:
Instead of numbers for scores, you'll see one of the abbreviations within the table below. These communicate the level of performance for that standard thus far into the quarter. If we will revisit the standard in the quarter, I will use the abbreviation options under "Standard Ongoing". If we are done with that standard, then the abbreviations will be from the "Standard Completed" options. But for calculating the class grade, either abbreviation within the category count the same.
Your student will still receive a numeric grade for classwork (between 0-3) and for assessments (1-4). This is a quick way for us to keep track of the progress towards learning the standards.
In PowerSchool:
Instead of numbers for scores, you'll see one of the abbreviations within the table below. These communicate the level of performance for that standard thus far into the quarter. If we will revisit the standard in the quarter, I will use the abbreviation options under "Standard Ongoing". If we are done with that standard, then the abbreviations will be from the "Standard Completed" options. But for calculating the class grade, either abbreviation within the category count the same.
What About the Class Grade? |
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Instead of using the overall percentage of averaged standards, I will be using the following method to give your student a grade. While the quarter is still underway, the grade will be labeled "Projected Grade" and you can think of it as the current grade. Once we are done assessing the standards for the quarter, I will change the label to "Final Grade". Below is the table for figuring out which grade the student earns:
Example Gradebook
Based on the above criteria, you can see how it will look in PowerSchool. After each assessment, I will look across all the standards for each students, count any DEV (MG) or BEG (NEG) entries, and use the table above to figure out which grade to enter for the class.
Learning Behavior
The final component to the new grading program is the use of + and – with the letter grade. Standards-Based grading doesn’t really have a place for these determinations, but since we have to report a letter grade, it still makes sense to utilize them. In this class, the + and – will be based on learning behaviors. The rubric is included below but basically if a student can follow the rules at least 90% of the time, they will receive a + along with whatever letter grade earned (except for A since we don’t do A+). And likewise, if the student cannot follow the rules, they will receive a – along with their letter grade.
Can Students Redo Assignments and Retake Assessments?
Assignments can be redone as many times as necessary to get the desired score. The students will have two weeks from the due date to submit redone work.
Assessments can be retaken as long as two requirements are met:
Assessments can be retaken as long as two requirements are met:
- The student retakes the assessment within two weeks of the end of the unit (or end of quarter if that comes first)
- The student has scored 3's on all the assignments (the practice of those skills) for the unit