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How am I going to teach my astronomy class to take advantage of Standard Based Grading ?
I’m revising my course over the summer, and I started doing a little research. Turns out one idea I’d had already has a name: Standards-Based Grading (aka SBG, or #sbar on twitter). I believe it was this blog entry from Terie Engelbrecht whose blog first clued me in. I’ve been reading a bunch about it, and there’s a good description by Jason Buell at his Always Formative blog.
So the grading part seems to make sense to me. I’ve got my objectives for the class already, I’m a big believer in objectives. (“Objectives” is the term I tend to use instead of “standards.”) Now I’m chugging through my objectives, figuring out what exactly I expect students to be able to do to meet expectations, exceed expectations, and so on. In the process, I cut back on thenumber of standards
The class is an elective, and the students have very diverse prior experience and preparation. I expect some are going to whip through the standards at a high level, others are going to struggle to master a few. This worries me.
My half-baked solution is to add back a few of the objectives/standards, and somehow count those as “exceed expectations.”
So my questions are:
1: Have teachers had issues with running out of standards for their students? Maybe I don’t need to worry.
2: How do teachers using SBG handle extra topics?
While I let those percolate, I’ll be pondering how to actually choreograph the instructional and assessment parts of the class…
And that concludes my very first blog post. Thanks for reading!
I tried SBG this year with my students and in my experience…
1. No. I pretty much tier my standards so the “A” level standards are at about the level of my top level students.
2. Occasionally I’ll have “extra” standards that are there, but don’t affect the student’s grade. It’s pretty much for the students who are so bored and/or underchallenged that they’ll work on that standard even though it doesn’t affect their grade. They probably have an A already anyway. And if they’re not that bored that they won’t work on it, then it’s probably not a problem.