How to use standards-based grading

Why this matters

A letter grade blends test scores with homework, participation and behavior, so a family can't tell from a B which skills their child has mastered. Moving a school to standards-based grading asks every teacher to report a level for each standard, in gradebooks built around assignments. Until that data exists, a principal learns how a standard is going when report cards go home.

What standards-based grading is, and how to roll it out

In standards-based grading, teachers give a separate mark for each skill or standard instead of one grade for the class, and rate effort and on-time homework apart from achievement. Thomas Guskey, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky who studies grading, told Education Week that these systems use three to five possible marks, and that the 1-4 scale is especially common (Education Week). On report cards in the Northern Cass district in North Dakota, a 1 or 2 means a student has more work to do before mastering a skill, a 3 means proficient, and a 4 means beyond proficient.

1. Choose the standards each course reports on. In Utah's Juab district, gradebooks list skills based on the state standards instead of assignments.
2. Have teachers define each level together. Juab's English teachers wrote rubrics together that describe a 1, 2, 3 and 4 for a skill such as analyzing a character.
3. Report achievement apart from behavior. Guskey says homework should still count, in its own mark. At Northern Cass, a student can return to a subject and do more work to raise a grade.

Flint keeps a level for every student on every standard a class adopts: Met, Approaching or Not yet. After a student submits an activity, Sparky, Flint's AI, judges how the student handled each standard the activity covers. A student who mastered it right away, recovered from a wrong turn on their own, or had a misconception corrected is Met. A student who needed Sparky's support, or only partly understood it, is Approaching. The student's most recent assessed work sets the level, and the activity's rubric grade doesn't feed it.

Sparky shows a curriculum lead what Approaching on RL.8.1 looked like in students' work

The Outcomes tab already lists who is Approaching on RL.8.1. Sparky's chat reads each student's submitted work and feedback, not those levels, so the curriculum lead asks it what the work showed. The school, students and staff are made up. Sparky's answers are its real answers about an example 8th grade English class, shortened.

What Flint did for Dr. Okafor

• When Dr. Okafor asked what Approaching looked like, Sparky named what each student's evidence was missing, from James still at plot summary to Emma not yet tying her details to a theme.
• In the same answer, Sparky quoted the students' own answers, such as Noah's "they sold their stuff", and showed that he retold the plot instead of citing the story.
• When she asked for report card comments, Sparky wrote one per student with a next step, told her to read each session before sending them, and offered to rewrite them for the school's own proficiency scale, such as 1-4.

No curriculum lead has time to open every student's session to see what a level means, and Sparky reads every one of them.

Where each standard stands in a class

On a class's Outcomes tab, Where students stand splits every assessed student and standard into Met, Approaching and Not yet, then shows the same split for each standard. Standards pipeline counts how many of the class's approved standards an activity covers, how many have graded work, and how many most students have met.

Try it with your school for free

Flint is free for up to 80 users at a school. An administrator sets up your standards frameworks under Admin, then Settings, then Curricula and Structure, choosing built-in frameworks such as Common Core or uploading your own curriculum documents. Teachers adopt standards in each class's Curriculum tab, and Sparky identifies the standards in each activity. Open a class, click Analytics, then Outcomes, or open Admin, then Analytics, then Outcomes for the whole school. The speech-bubble button at the top left, Ask Sparky about your analytics, opens the chat.

For more on what school leaders see in Flint, read Flint for school leaders.