Turning Off The Calculator

Reflections on Configuring a Standards-based Gradebook

Next year my school is introducing standards-based grading in the Upper School, where I am the Digital Learning Specialist. One of my responsibilities is digging into the settings and configurations of our electronic grade book, preparing it for the transition.

In case you’re not familiar with these sorts of databases: collecting, calculating, storing and reporting scores from different teachers and classes, for hundreds of students, is a somewhat complicated technical process at the best of times, let alone trying to blend together the data from two philosophically-opposed systems.

Good times. I won’t bore you with the particulars.

Thoroughly testing a variety of different gradebook configurations, mindful of how those configurations will affect teachers workflow is an essential part of this process. In traditional grading, this involves some math, spreading the final grade over the semesters and exams, assigning point values, weighing the relative value of a “test” versus a “quiz” and details like that.

It can be deceptively complicated to set up, let alone explain to a parent or student about how that meaningfully relates to learning.

In setting up our new standards-based gradebook for the first cohort of teachers, it turns out one straightforward approach was to simply turn of the automatic calculations altogether, using the “manual override” button helpfully provided by the software.

It struck me that this was a perfect metaphor to explain the fundamental difference in philosophy between standards-based grading and more traditional approaches.

Let me be clear - our teachers will continue to be rigorous, collecting the same amount of evidence they were previously. Likely, there will be more grading, since lists of specific standards and benchmarks will require a broader range of assessments.  

But the philosophical difference truly reveals itself in the basic nature of the data collected in the two approaches.

Traditionally, assignment scores entered into teacher gradebooks are, on a basic level, data being fed into an equation.

Assessments go in, final grades get spit out. Of course student performance matters - but so do the underlying calculations. Sometimes they matter a lot. Believe me - troubleshooting teacher gradebooks has been a big part of my job for quite some time.

In this sort of system, the idea of “turning off the calculator” makes no sense, because it is fundamentally based on reducing learning to a calculation. 30 percent for tests and quizzes, 20 percent for the final exam, and whatnot, is usually how it goes.

In a standards-based system, grades are better thought of as snapshots of student learning. They are indications of where students are at that moment, measuring their progress towards achieving specific standards and benchmarks.  We are still using numbers - in our case a simple 1 - 7 scale representing different achievement levels.

Besides being reassuring for college applicants, I think numbers can be useful to help teachers to be objective and consistent in assessment practices and communicating with parents.

But numbers representing positions on a simple 1 - 7 scale is fundamentally different from the sorts of algebraic calculations you see in traditional gradebooks.

A standards-based grade doesn’t reduce a semester’s work to final grade through calculation. Instead, those individual assignment scores merely answer the same, simple question, asked repeatedly:  “Where is the student, against this standard?”  

With this in mind, I think it is perfectly appropriate, philosophically and pedagogically, to instruct teachers to manually override their automatic gradebook calculations.

When you think about it, it is in the minutia of these gradebook settings that assessment philosophy is made real.

Still, trying to convince a calculator not to be a calculator is deceptively difficult.

But hunched bleary-eyed amongst discarded coffee cups, combing through help files and spreadsheets full of standards and benchmarks, I know I’m in the privileged position of being on the front line of progressive education.

Good times.

Note: As per usual, this analysis is my own and doesn't necessarily reflect the opinions of my employers or colleagues.