Shifting to standards-based grading ¹

At-A-Glance

Current behavior:

Teachers assess students using traditional letter grades.

Desired behavior:

Teachers assess students on a longer list of standard-aligned content areas, which separate categories for effort/process.

Change approach:

Working group of teachers and school leaders recruited pilot participants and designed presentations, technical assistance, and guides to persuade peers to join; a state-wide experiment eased roll-out by letting teachers and parents test out both systems.

Impact:

Teachers and parents now support standards-based grading and appreciate the additional information it provides, despite the additional work for teachers.

Implications for implementing partners:

Invest in conveying the rationale for change, not just its mechanics, since that can overcome other barriers such as added workload; consider giving users an experimentation period to get comfortable with a new system.

Implications for supporting partners:

Provide additional support to enable experiments to ease adoption.

Kentucky is one of several states that recently shifted to standards-based grading. Under the new scheme, students receive scores on specific learning topics tied to the state standards, and process/participation scores are isolated from content mastery scores.

Kentucky first convened a grassroots-style working group of different teachers, principals, and district leaders who had been independently exploring standards-based grading. These individuals formed the core of the initial pilot and designed the new report structure. They were also responsible for recruiting peers to join early efforts and providing presentations and technical assistance to interested schools.

When the new system was rolled out statewide it received mixed reactions from parents and teachers. In particular, the training for teachers had focused too heavily on the mechanics of using the new system, and not on its rationale, leaving many teachers unmotivated and frustrated by the additional work it required.

To address this, Kentucky paused the roll-out, and convened a task force of teachers to review and better explain the new system and its rationale. It also treated the new reports as an experiment to ease teachers and parents into it: for two marking periods, several pilot schools sent out two sets of report cards – one using traditional letter grades, and one using standards-based grades.

Once teachers understood the philosophy and rationale for the new grading system, they became supporters, despite the additional effort it required.

Once teachers had sufficient experience and understanding of the new system, they strongly favored it. While they still noted it took more effort, they said found it to be worthwhile since it provides better information about student achievement. The parents, who had originally been skeptical of the system, ended up even more supportive than the teachers after the experiment.