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Learning Logs to inspire and guide student growth

August 17, 2014 by Nick Mitchell

A problem I've been kicking around for a while is how to give my students clearer feedback on their learning progress. In a standards-based system this can be a challenge, because feedback is more detailed than a single percentage grade; a single assignment often covers more than one learning goal and therefore is given multiple grades. This detail can be very useful to the student for guiding their learning, but only if they are able to take it all in and manage the feedback in a positive way.

Unfortunately, most grade books out there haven't mastered standards-based grading, making it difficult for both teachers to enter grades and students to access and understand them. I know this from first-hand experience: the past two years my middle school has been struggling to use Perason's PowerTeacher Gradebook for our standards-based grading (and to think they claim it's the "next level in classroom technology"- ha!). There may be some helpful updates on the way at some point- I haven't fired up this year's version up yet- but instead of waiting around for Pearson to solve your problems, how about taking matters into your own hands?

Learning logs to the rescue! A learning log is simply a record of a student's learning progress, made by the student, for the student. This is not a new idea- progress charts have been around for eons, in fact it was this picture from Robert Marzano's classic book The Art and Science of Teaching that inspired me:

What I've done is taken the old pen and paper progress chart and created an updated digital version using Google Sheets. Here's how it works: Each time the students complete an assessment, whether it's self-assessed (like a quick formative learning check we do in class often) or teacher-assessed (like a homework assignment or test), they record the results in their learning log document. The learning log has a different sheet for each standard being assessed, so if needed they can enter multiple grades for a single assignment. Here's an example of a learning log I've created for the Using Data standard in our Science Inquiry unit:

After the student fills in the date, their score (we use a 4-point scale at my school), the name of the assessment, and the type of assessment, a couple things happen. A "badge" appears depending on their score (kinda hokey I know, but 6th graders still lover stickers, and I appreciate the visual aspect of it). Their results also automatically graph on a progress chart next to the log. Here's an example of that chart:

Neat- but the most important part of this process is what comes next! After logging their results, I'm planning on having my students write a short comment about their learning so far. What are they still having trouble with? What can they do to improve? Do they feel like they have mastered the skill yet? I'll need to model these kinds of reflections at first, but hopefully the process of logging their learning will do two critical things:

First, the mere act of recording and charting learning progress reminds students that learning is all about growth. I just read Carol Dweck's book this summer, and it rams home again and again the importance of teaching students a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Charting progress and reflecting on ways to improve implicitly teaches students that they aren't expected to "get it" right away, that what's most important is where you end up, not how quickly you get there.

Second, learning logs teach students to be more responsible for their learning. You'll notice the Learning Goal description on the learning log is a blue hyperlink- clicking on that link takes students to the unit Study Guide where they can find several different resources to help them learn (or re-learn) that skill:

I'm planning on rolling these out this school year as part of my student's digital notebooks. The learning logs will become one of the sections for each unit, so students will have easy access to the document to edit it. The progress charts can also be published and inserted in their notebook, which I think would be a helpful reminder. I've even toyed with a chart that combines their scores for multiple standards, so with one look they can see how their overall learning is progressing:

This is still in rough draft form, so I'd love feedback on how to improve it. Here's the link to the template learning log, be my guest and make your own copy to play around with or use with your students!

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Learning Logs to inspire and guide student growth

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A problem I've been kicking around for a while is how to give my students clearer feedback on their learning progress. In a standards-based system this can be a challenge, because feedback is more detailed than a single percentage grade; a single assignment often covers more than one learning goal and therefore is given multiple grades.

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Using Badges

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When today's K-12 students enter college and embark in their careers, they will most likely encounter a wide array of game-like elements, such as badge systems. In June, Blackboard Learn, a learning management system for higher education, announced a partnership with Mozilla to support digital badges. In the corporate world, badge systems are also used to increase employee productivity. Mozilla's Open Badges Backpack serves as a virtual resume to display one's mastered skills.

Gamifying Education

One of the main goals of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is to prepare students for "college- and career-ready performance." According to CoreStandards.org, "English language arts and math were the subjects chosen for the Common Core State Standards because they are areas upon which students build skill sets which are used in other subjects." Badges can acknowledge the learning that has occurred along the way.

Game-based learning (GBL), like the CCSS, places a strong emphasis on mastering skills. In a gamified classroom, students start at the "newbie" level, and then build skills and "level up" to become masters. The "boss level" is when students apply all of the skills mastered to overcome a difficult task.

GBL does not necessarily mean that students are simply playing video games in school. A variety of non-digital games, including boards, cards or dice, can "gamify" learning as well. Problem-based learning (PBL) and challenge-based learning (CBL) units can be gamified by adding game mechanics, such as rules, missions and leaderboards. PBL and CBL lend themselves well to gamification because they present students with authentic tasks to perform using accumulated skill-sets. Teachers can also "mod," or modify, pre-existing games to fit skills and content.

Creative Ways to Meet the Standards

CCSS skill mastery can be acknowledged with a digital badging system. Badge accumulation can occur in a non-linear fashion; some students may earn different badges than others. This strategy, known as embedded assessments, is common in gamified classrooms. Embedded assessments are built into the overall learning experience. A teacher can award CCSS badges during a gamified unit rather than at the end. In this respect, badges can support differentiated learning. For instance, a student may earn a badge at any time for meeting CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.7.4: "Present claims and findings, emphasizing salient points in a focused, coherent manner with pertinent descriptions, facts, details, and examples; use appropriate eye contact, adequate volume, and clear pronunciation."

The CCSS only guide English language arts and math teaching. Other disciplines, such as science and social studies, should "anchor" or support the Standards. In social studies, a student can earn a badge for meeting CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.6-8.9, when he or she can "analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic." Similarly, science teachers can recognize students who meet CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RST.9-10.10 by reading and comprehending "science/technical texts in the grades 9-10 text complexity band independently and proficiently."

In order to maximize student engagement, a teacher can add a hidden challenge, known as an "Easter egg." Easter eggs empower the student to test the boundaries of the learning system. For instance, a student may solve a secret riddle in a lesson and, in the process, meet CCSS.Math.Content.HSS-MD.B.5a: "Find the expected payoff for a game of chance."

Deploying a Common Core Badge System

In a badge system, there are three interconnected participants: the issuer, the earner and the displayer. In the classroom, as opposed to a video game, the teacher is the issuer and the student is the earner. There are many options for badge displayers, including Youtopia, ForAllBadges, ClassBadges and Edmodo. Many of these sites let teachers create virtual classrooms and also provide predesigned artwork. You can download this PDF for a helpful, side-by-side, badge-displayer comparison chart.

Badges recognize the achievements that produce intrinsic satisfaction. Basically, when a student enjoys a task, learning feels less like work and more like fun. Intrinsic motivation differs from the extrinsic goals that are traditionally associated with school (grades) and with work (paychecks).

According to Cathy Davidson, badges "recognize competencies, skills, training, collaborative abilities, character, personal contribution, participatory energy, leadership and motivational skills, and other so-called 'hard' and 'soft' individual and cooperative talents." The teacher's role is to scaffold knowledge and skills as the student progresses through the content. The difficulty for acquiring Common Core badges should increase, or level up, as skills build up. The boss level badge represents mastery of a Core Content skill. Students who earn boss level badges should perform well on CCSS benchmarks and state tests, such as the PARCC Assessment and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). A Common Core badge system can also bring fun to the process of learning and mastering new skills.

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When today's K-12 students enter college and embark in their careers, they will most likely encounter a wide array of game-like elements, such as badge systems. In June, Blackboard Learn, a learning management system for higher education, announced a partnership with Mozilla to support digital badges.

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How one teacher does it

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It doesn't matter if you call them Standard Based Grades, Learning Targets, or Educational Assessment Goals, they are a good idea. I happen to use the term learning target so for the rest of this post I will refer to them as just that. As you can tell from the first sentence, this blog post isn't going to debate the value of learning targets. The goal of this post is simple; share a tool that I worked on over the last year to help me use learning targets in my classroom. As a teacher who loves the power of gamification, and game inspired course design, it should come as no surprise that it is gamified. Although I must tell you that it is entirely optional if you want to use the gamifed components. This tool that I helped create was all done on Google Sheets. If you didn't know that is another passion of mine. They are crazy powerful and you can get them to do just about anything on them. I say helped develop because this project was a true collaboration. As more and more schools switch to being Google schools this project fits perfectly in many classrooms.
Teachers who worked on the project: Kyle Pearce Alice Keeler David Griswold Michael Matera
Make sure to follow these excellent teachers on twitter as they are wonderful people filled with great ideas.

One thing that both gamification and Standard Based Grading (SBG) has in common is that timely and frequent feedback is key. Over the last two years I worked on how best to implement SBG in my class. As a lover of all things Google, it was only natural that I would work on this project. There are tons about this sheet that blow me away. Let's look at the features:
Crazy Powerful Sheet Features:

Personalized Student Dashboard

Full Fledged LMS functions that provide links to resources and reassessments

Weighted Standards

Builtin comment feature

Quick grade rubric function

Easy reporting

Tons of options to turn on/off to customize to your liking

The setup for this will take a bit of time, but over the course of a quarter it would more than pay for itself! Give it a shot! The spreadsheet is a powerful LMS, with features to comment to students, leave feedback on assignments, and provide links to activities. This is a totally new design and the one I use in my classroom. I will post a few video tutorials soon to help you get yours off the ground. But why wait? I think you should be able to walk through the steps yourself. So, why not just download and start today!

Below, there is a link to make your own copy and a video tutorial discussing most of the features. Enjoy!

I would love to hear from you about how you are using SBG in your classroom! Please post a comment below and or on Twitter or our Facebook page.
Files Needed: SBG Master Sheet (Teacher Grade Book) Student Learning Target Sheet (Master Copy) These will make copies and put them in your Google Drive. You need to setup your SBG Master Sheet first and then your Student Learning Target sheet.
Q15

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Standard Based Grading Gamified and Googled!

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It doesn't matter if you call them Standard Based Grades, Learning Targets, or Educational Assessment Goals, they are a good idea. I happen to use the term learning target so for the rest of this post I will refer to them as just that.

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AnswerGarden " What are your concerns with Standards-Based Grading?

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AnswerGarden is a new minimalistic brainstorm tool for online brainstorming, real time audience participation and classroom feedback.

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In the past, I was frustrated with grades. Usually they told me very little about what a student did or didn't know. Also, my students didn't always know what topics they understood and on what topics they needed more work. Aside from wanting to do well on a cumulative final exam, students had very little incentive to look back on older topics. Through many conversations on Twitter, I learned about Standards Based Grading (SBG) and I implemented an SBG system in several consecutive semesters of Calculus II.

The goal of SBG is to shift the focus of grades from a weighted average of scores earned on various assignments to a measure of mastery of individual learning targets related to the content of the course. Instead of informing a student of their grade on a particular assignment, a standards-based grade aims to reflect that student's level of understanding of key concepts or standards. Additionally, students are invited to improve their course standing by demonstrating growth in their skills or understanding as they see fit. In this article I will explain the way I implemented SBG and describe some benefits and some drawbacks of this method of assessment.
Image: The Integrity of the Grade, courtesy of Dr. Justin Tarte, @justintarte
I chose Calculus II to try an SBG approach because it was my first time teaching the course, so I could build my materials from the ground up. Also, unlike several other courses I teach, the student count remains low - approximately 25 per section. Before the start of the semester, I created a list of thirty course "standards" or learning goals. Roughly, each goal corresponded to one section of the textbook. I organized the thirty standards around six Big Questions that I felt were the heart of the course material. One Big Question was, "What does it mean to add together infinitely many numbers?" The list of standards served as answers to these Big Questions. The list of standards and a description of the grading system were distributed to the students on the first day of class. During the semester, students were given in-class assessments in the form of weekly quizzes, monthly examinations, and a cumulative final examination. The assignments themselves were similar to those found in courses using a traditional grading scheme, but they were assessed differently. Rather than track a student's total percentage on each particular assignment, for every problem I examined each student's response and then assigned a score to one or more associated course standards. I provided suggested homework problems both from the textbook and using an online homework platform, but homework did not factor directly into a student's grade. Instead, if I noticed a student needed more practice at a particular sort of problem, I would direct her to the associated homework problems for additional practice.

During in-class assessments, a single quiz or exam question asking a student to determine if an infinite series converged might also require the student to demonstrate knowledge of (a) "The Integral Test , " a strategy for determining if a series converges or diverges; (b) "Improper Integrals , " the process used to evaluate integrals over an infinite interval; (c) some method of integration, such as "Integration by Parts," and (d) some prior knowledge about how to evaluate limits learned earlier in Calculus I. For each of these concepts, I assign a different score (on a 0-4 scale), roughly correlated with a GPA or letter-grade system. During the semester, I tracked how well each student did on each of the thirty standards.

Since some standards appeared in a multitude of questions throughout the semester, a student's current score on a standard was computed as the average of the student's most recent two attempts. Outside of class, each student could re-attempt up to one course standard per week. Usually these re-attempts occurred during office hours and were in the form of a one- or two-question quiz. My rationale for continually updating student scores is that I want grades to reflect a level of understanding since I want students to aim for a continued mastery of course topics. Over the course of the semester, their scores on standards can move up or down several times. Students are motivated to continue reviewing old material since they know that they might be assessed on those ideas again and their previous grades could go in either direction.

At the end of the term, each student had scores on approximately thirty course standards. To determine a student's letter grade, I used the following system:

To guarantee a grade of "A", a student must earn 4s on 90% of standards, and have no scores below a 3.

To guarantee a grade of "B" or higher, a student must earn 3s or higher on 80% of course standards, and have no scores below a 2.

To guarantee a grade of "C" or higher, a student must earn 2s or higher on at least 80% of course standards.

I adapted this system from one Joshua Bowman used. I like it because it captures my feeling that an "A-level" student is a student who shows mastery of nearly all concepts and shows good progress toward mastery on the others; meanwhile, a "B-level" student is one who consistently does B-level work. Also, this system requires students earn at least a passing grade on each course topic. In a traditional system, a student might do very well in some parts of the course, very poorly in others, and earn an "above average" grade. In the system I used, for a student to earn an "above average" grade, they must display at least a passing level of understanding of all course concepts. While students aren't initially thrilled with this requirement, most are happy once I explain they can re-attempt concepts often (within some specific boundaries) and so the only limit on improving performance is their motivation to do so.

There are three major advantages of tracking scores on standards. First, I can quickly assess student performance:

Second, I can give meaningful advice to students:

Third, I can determine what topics are in need of review or additional instruction:

Students have noted that SBG has several benefits for them as well. They aren't limited by past performance and can always improve their standing in the course. Many students who describe themselves as "not math people" or those who say they suffer from test anxiety appreciate that their grades can continue to improve, thereby lowering the stakes on any particular assessment. In my office, conversations are almost always about mathematical topics instead of partial credit, why they lost points here or there, or what grade they need on the next test to bring their course average above some threshold. The change in types of conversations during my office hours has been amazing, and for this reason alone I will stick with SBG in the future. Students review old material without prompting, they feel less stress over any individual assignment, we don't have conversations about partial credit or lost points, and they are able to diagnose their own weaknesses.

With that said, the SBG system also has some disadvantages. First, it takes a thorough and careful explanation to students about the way the system works, why it was chosen, and why I believe it is to their benefit. Student buy-in is critical and it isn't always easy to attain. I have found that spending a few minutes of class time discussing SBG every day for the first one or two weeks is more helpful than giving a lot of explanation on any particular day. Students need some time to think about what questions and concerns they have, and I encourage them to voice these in class whenever they like. Initially, students think that this system will be too much work for them, or that their course grades will suffer since past strong performance could be wiped out in the future. (In contrast, by the end of the semester, almost all students say they really appreciated this method and felt they learned more calculus than they would have in a traditionally graded course.) Second, several students complained that their grades were not available through our online learning management system; I still haven't found a way to convince our online gradebook to work in an SBG framework. Instead, students must come to my office to review their scores with me outside of class time. Third, choosing both the correct number of course standards as well as a thorough description of each standard has been challenging. It's difficult to balance wanting each standard to be as specific as possible while keeping the total number of standards workable from both my viewpoint and that of the students.

After several semesters of using an SBG framework, I believe the benefits to the students outweigh the disadvantages. At this point, I don't have any firm data about student learning outcomes, but I do have some anecdotal evidence. The feedback from my students about this method of grading and, in particular, the details of my implementation has been very positive. I have received several e-mails from former students who, even semesters later, realize how much SBG changed their perspective on the learning process, or who wished their new instructors would switch to an SBG system. Comments on my student evaluations have mentioned that they feel their grade accurately reflects how much calculus they know, rather than how well they performed on a particular assignment, or how much they were punished from making arithmetic mistakes. As one student noted, "this class was not about how well you could take a test or quiz or do homework online that sucked. It was about the amount of calculus you understood and your effort to be better at it." As a calculus instructor, this describes my exact goal for my course.
Online SBG Resources
If you are interested in trying an SBG approach in your own courses, here are four questions to jump-start your journey:

1. What are the core ideas of your course? What concepts or ideas do you want students to master?

2. How many standards do you think you can track? You need them to be specific enough that students can understand exactly what each one means, but you also need to have few enough that your grading workload is manageable. I have 30 for a 16-week semester.

3. Will you allow re-attempts? What kinds of limits will you set, if any? I found that limiting students to re-attempting only one standard per week was essential in cutting down my grading workload. This limit also gave students the opportunity to focus on one topic at a time, rather than re-attempting several at once just to see what would stick.

4. How will a final assessment, project, or exam count? In my course, a student's course score on each standard is a weighted average: 80% comes from their pre-final exam score and the remaining 20% comes from the score earned on the final itself. In this way, the final exam contributes about 20% to the student's letter grade in the class, a figure in line with what is commonly used in my department.

5. How will you convert all the scores on standards into a letter grade?

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A Beginner's Guide to Standards Based Grading

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In the past, I was frustrated with grades. Usually they told me very little about what a student did or didn't know. Also, my students didn't always know what topics they understood and on what topics they needed more work.

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SBG Set-Up Example, FAQs, and Parent Guide

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SBG Set-Up Example, FAQs, and Parent Guide

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See p. 37-38 for Reassessment Request Form

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Check out slides 13-26

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For the last two years, I've been increasingly frustrated with the traditional approach to assessing students and reporting grades. I want my students to value learning, not the accumulation of points. Unfortunately, I feel like school is akin to a Pacman game where students are myopically focused on gobbling up points and, as a result, miss the point of learning entirely.
Redesigning My Gradebook
This year I decided to overhaul my gradebook and assess students based on their mastery of particular skills, also referred to as standards-based grading. Instead of organizing my gradebook using traditional categories (e.g. homework, classwork, projects, tests, and projects), I identified the main skills we would be focusing on developing in this class and used those to create my gradebook categories.
Last Year This Year
Because my students create everything from digital stories to digital portfolios to RSA animation, I also included "Creative Design" and "Academic Engagement" categories to cover additional skills that are crucial to their success.
Don't Grade Everything
In the past, students received points for almost every activity they completed in class. This led to an enormous number of grades in my gradebook, but it did not provide real insight into how much they were actually learning. This approach to grading created a disconnect between a student's level of mastery and his/her grade.

Much of the work we do in class is focused on learning and practicing specific skills. During these activities, students should feel that it's okay to struggle, or even fail. That is part of the learning process. If everything they do is collected and given a grade, students don't have the time or space they need to really learn. It's my job to support them during this phase of learning by providing meaningful feedback and support. My energy is better spent working with them in small groups or one-on-one in these moments instead of collecting massive stacks of paper to grade and enter.

It's important to explain the rationale behind this shift in assessment and grading to students, so they understand the importance of the work they do in class - even if that work doesn't receive a grade. Again, the focus needs to be on learning not the accumulation of points. I explain that certain activities are designed to help them practice and hone skills which will be assessed at a later date by a writing assignment, quiz/test, or project. Each activity they do in class and at home is designed to continually build their skill sets.
Entering Grades in Relation to Specific Skills
In the past, I entered grades in a way that worked for me. Although I used a detailed rubric to grade their essays and projects, I only entered the total score into the gradebook. So, an argumentative essay would be entered as a point value out of 100. A student might earn an 80/100, but a parent looking at his/her child's grade wouldn't know exactly what their child did well or what they need to work on. As I reflect back on it, I doubt my gradebook really made sense to my students or their parents.

I redesigned my gradebook with the goal of helping my students and their parents better understand exactly where they are succeeding and where they are struggling. My hope is that this would make it easier for students to focus on the areas where they were struggling and for parents to better support their children.

Now when I am entering the grades for an essay, I enter each individual element that I am assessing from the rubric as a separate score. For example, an argumentative essay on the novel Of Mice and Men might have the following entries in the gradebook:

Of Mice and Men Argumentative Essay: Claim

Of Mice and Men Argumentative Essay: Quality of Evidence and Citations

Of Mice and Men Argumentative Essay: Depth of Analysis

Of Mice and Men Argumentative Essay: Strength of Rebuttal

Of Mice and Men Argumentative Essay: Conclusion

Of Mice and Men Argumentative Essay: Spelling, Grammar, & Formal Writing Norms

If each element is entered separately, the student can see how he or she did in relation to each skill. Then they can focus their energy on developing the specific skills they are struggling with.

Teachers can decide to allocate different amounts of points to different elements or assign them different weights in the gradebook depending on the difficulty of the skill being assessed. That's totally up to the teacher.
Grading for Mastery Using a 4 Point Scale
After an enlightening conversation with Jon Weller, another English teacher in the North Bay, and exploring the work done by Robert Marzano, I decided to use a 4 point scale to assess where my students are on the road to mastering a skill.

In his book Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading, Robert Marzano breaks down several examples of what it looks like to assess students using a 4 point scale. On his website, Marzano provides a generic scale to help educators think about what each point value should represent.

A student who earns a 4 "goes beyond what was taught." A student who earns a 3 demonstrates a strong knowledge of what is explicitly taught. A student who earns a 2 shows a grasp of the simpler concepts and may have errors or omissions when it comes to the more complex concepts taught. A student who earns a 1 only demonstrates a partial understanding of simpler concepts taught (Marzano 2006).

If individual teachers are using a 4 point scale to assess individual skills and the entire school is not shifting to a standards-based approach to grading, they may want to reference a translation scale that turns that 4 point scale score into a percentage score.

Here is a conversion chart based on a recommendation by Robert J. Marzano and Tammy Heflebower in their article "Grades That Show What Students Know" (2011).

As I continue to make this shift in my own teaching and assessment practice, I will continue to blog and share both the successes and challenges of shifting from traditional grades to a focus on mastery in relation to specific skills. I am by no means an expert on this topic, but I am excited to see how this shift will impact the learning happening in my classroom. If you have resources or experiences with standards-based grading or grading with mastery in mind, please post a comment and share! I'd love to learn from other educators doing this.

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Grading for Mastery and Redesigning My Gradebook

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For the last two years, I've been increasingly frustrated with the traditional approach to assessing students and reporting grades. I want my students to value learning, not the accumulation of points. Unfortunately, I feel like school is akin to a

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Guest post by Jodi Robertson, Founding Humanities Teacher, Marysville Early College High School. Marysville STEM Early College High School is a collaboration between Marysville Schools, Ohio Hi-Point Career Center, Columbus State Community College, Honda of America Manufacturing, the Union County Chamber of Commerce and KnowledgeWorks.
When I started teaching at Marysville Early College High School, it meant moving from a traditional teaching and learning environment to one based on mastery. Mastery learning truly changes things for me as a teacher as much as for the students. There was something that ended for me, though: the struggle I felt when reaching the "end" of a lesson only to feel like I needed to start over again after seeing the students' products.

[Tweet ""Mastery learning truly changes things for me as a teacher as much as for the students.""]

A mastery and standards-based style of grading has changed not only my end result, but my overall pedagogy in unexpected ways. This was a personal journey of frustration and failure on my part. My first foray into mastery learning focused primarily on not accepting work below the standards set. Students were expected to go back into their work and redo, edit, resubmit, etc. before I would mark them as having "Mastered" any given standard. The results were never ending units and a backlog of "Not Yets" for many students.

My "aha" moment came during the second half of the year as my ELA co-teacher, Jen Hinderer, and I workshopped with students over a recently written essay. She and I finished the day talking about how profound workshopping is with small groups of students. The days always feel meaningful and full of growth. However, it is overwhelming and time intensive to give feedback over an entire essay. It would be better to conference and workshop at various points along the way. This conversation became the impetus for a shift in the entire pedagogy of the class.

When Jen and I sit down to plan, we still start with the end in mind in terms of what we want students to know or be able to do, but we no longer place the summative assessment on the last day and start filling the gaps in between. We break down the learning and larger performance task into smaller chunks with embedded workshopping and assessment along the way. At the end of the unit when students turn in or present their final product of learning, we have already assessed the vast majority, if not all, of the intended learning. Jen and I are much happier with our outcomes and the students are as well. They not only have more opportunities to access the learning, but they learn valuable skills of resilience, pride, and goal setting.

[Tweet ""We no longer place the summative assessment on the last day and start filling the gaps in between.""]

While I would never make the choice to go back to a traditional style of grading, I do think I could replicate many of my favorite pieces of mastery-based learning in a traditional system.

Create opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery more than once. This doesn't just mean students retake a test. Instead, offer embedded remediation and support alongside legitimate alternative ways for students to show learning.

Plan units with assessment and feedback along the way, saving very little for the last day of the unit.

Embrace the fundamental belief that all students can learn and be flexible about what the finish line looks like.

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Mastery Learning: Saying goodbye to traditional grading

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Guest post by Jodi Robertson, Founding Humanities Teacher, Marysville Early College High School. Marysville STEM Early College High School is a collaboration between Marysville Schools, Ohio Hi-Point Career Center, Columbus State Community College, Honda of America Manufacturing, the Union County Chamber of Commerce and KnowledgeWorks.

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Each week brings some new idea that teachers are supposed to implement, while still preparing lessons, grading papers, and keeping their classrooms in some semblance of order. Amid all these challenges, a call to change grading policies can seem particularly unrealistic.

One grading practice that is gaining popularity is standards-based grading, which involves measuring students' proficiency on well-defined course objectives (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006). Although many districts adopt standards-based grading in addition to traditional grades, standards-based grading can and should replace traditional point-based grades.

My school, Montrose High School, is located in a small but rapidly growing rural community in southwestern Colorado. We serve a community that is primarily white but that has a significant Latino population. After spending the last three years implementing standards-based grading in my high school math classroom, I have discovered seven solid reasons for replacing point-based grades with a standards-based system.

Reason 1: Grades Should Have Meaning

An A means the student has completed proficient work on all course objectives and advanced work on some objectives.

A B means the student has completed proficient work on all course objectives.

A C means the student has completed proficient work on the most important objectives, although not on all objectives. The student can continue to the next course.

A D means the student has completed proficient work on at least one-half of the course objectives but is missing some important objectives and is at significant risk of failing the next course in the sequence. The student should repeat the course if it is a prerequisite for another course.

An F means the student has completed proficient work on fewer than one-half of the course objectives and cannot successfully complete the next course in sequence.

Reason 2: We Need to Challenge the Status Quo

Many notions I had at the beginning of my career about grading didn't stand up to real scrutiny. The thorny issue of homework is one example of how the status quo needed to change. I once thought it was essential to award points to students simply for completing homework. I didn't believe students would do homework unless it was graded. And yet, in my classroom, students who were clearly learning sometimes earned low grades because of missing work. Conversely, some students actually learned very little but were good at "playing school." Despite dismal test scores, these students earned decent grades by turning in homework and doing extra credit. They would often go on to struggle in later courses, while their parents watched and worried.

Over the past three years, I have radically changed how I formally assess homework-I don't. Of course, it is essential for students to do homework that is tied closely to learning objectives and for students to see those connections (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Systematic and extensive feedback on assignments sends students the message that they can and should do homework as practice. A typical homework assignment for my students consists of a small collection of problems, each of which is linked to a learning objective. At first, I make those connections for my students, but eventually they make them on their own.

When I assign homework, I discuss with my students where and how it applies to their assessments. My goal is to get students to constantly ask themselves, "Do I know this? Can I do this?" To my surprise, my homework completion rates have remained steady over the past three years. Some students don't do all of the homework that I assign, but they know that they are accountable for mastering the standard connected to it. Of course, not every student who needs to practice always does so, but I am amazed and encouraged that students ask me for extra practice fairly regularly.

Reason 3: We Can Control Grading Practices

One of the biggest sources of frustration in schools today is the sense that we are at the mercy of factors we teachers cannot control. We cannot control student socioeconomic levels, school funding, our salaries, our teaching assignments, increasing class sizes, difficult parents, or a host of other important issues. However, we can control how we assess students.

When I approached my principal and district officials with the idea of using an experimental grading system, I received support and encouragement from all of them. In addition, a number of colleagues have been intrigued and want to make standards-based grading work in their classrooms.

If a teacher must use a point system to satisfy an administrative mandate or to use a particular grade book, that teacher can still use a standards-based system. The crucial idea is to use a system that is not based on the inappropriate use of averages. The system must not allow students to mask their level of understanding with their attendance, their level of effort, or other peripheral issues.

I have found that avoiding point values that might appear in a traditional percentage-based system is helpful because parents and students can get confused if they see numbers that look like what they've seen in the past but refer to a different scale. Teachers who have to assign points can avoid this confusion by using completely different numbers. A point value in the range of 1 to 10, for example, would not have the strong associations of a point value of 85, and thus would not be as easily misinterpreted.

Reason 4: Standards-Based Grading Reduces Meaningless Paperwork

Since I adopted standards-based grading, my load of meaningless paperwork has been drastically reduced, which provides time for more important considerations. Standards-based grading enables me to get the most from every piece of paper students turn in.

Writing feedback only on selected homework problems saves my time when marking papers while still giving me a sense of where students are in their learning. These homework assignments and other formative assessments help me judge the progress of the group as a whole before deciding how to proceed.

I don't assess student mastery of any objective until I am confident that a reasonable number of students will score proficiently, and that makes each assessment mean much more. Students who are still struggling after a significant portion of the class has demonstrated mastery can retest individually. The bottom line is that when I review any set of papers, I walk away knowing a great deal more about what my students know than I ever did before.

Reason 5: It Helps Teachers Adjust Instruction

Imagine two different grade books for the same set of students, as shown in Figure 1. Which one of the two better illustrates what students know and what they still need to learn?

[figure currently unavailable]

The standards-based grade book gives a wealth of information to help the teacher adjust instruction. Note that two objectives (1 and 3) may require more class instruction. The notations for Objective 2, on the other hand, suggest that the class only needs practice and one student needs some reteaching.

Students can also see much more information about their learning. In the traditional grade book, Amanda would assume she is in great shape, but standards-based grading reveals that she has not mastered a crucial concept.

Gifted and talented students can be truly challenged in a standards-based classroom because if they show early mastery of fundamental skills and concepts, they can then concentrate on more challenging work that is at higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy or that seeks connections among objectives.

Students who struggle can continue to retest and use alternate assessments until they show proficiency, and they are not penalized for needing extended time. I guide students with special needs to modify their work and, if needed, develop different ways of demonstrating that they've met their proficiency goals. Their working styles can be easily accommodated in this system because modified assignments and assessments require no special adjustments in the grade book. The grade book simply shows where they are in meeting the standards, without reference to how they are demonstrating their learning or what modifications needed to be made.

Reason 6: It Teaches What Quality Looks Like

In the adult world, everything is a performance assessment. If adults on the job make poor decisions or cannot determine the quality of their own work, the results are generally undesirable. Quality matters, and the ability to measure the quality of one's own work is a learned skill.

So how can we teach this essential skill? One way to teach quality is to demand it. We must create an environment where standards can and must be met and where students are not permitted to submit substandard work without being asked to revise.

If we base our grades on standards rather than attendance, behavior, or extra credit (which often has nothing to do with course objectives), we can actually help students grapple with the idea of quality and walk away with a higher degree of self-sufficiency. We can and should report information about student performance in areas like attendance and effort, but we can report it separately from academic achievement (O'Connor, 2007; Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006).

Reason 7: It's a Launchpad to Other Reforms

When I began using standards-based grading, I quickly discovered that I needed to reexamine my curriculum. Each class needed a clear and concise set of standards with precise levels of mastery. This prompted a number of discussions with other teachers in my department, and each year we continue to adapt our objectives. No one can use standards-based grading without clear standards.

In addition to improving curriculum, I have found new ways to use formative assessments and intervention strategies. My work with special education students and English language learners in particular goes much more smoothly because all the modification needed is already built into what I do. I have also been able to work much more effectively with parents by giving them better information.

How do students respond to this style of grading? Of course, their reactions vary. It takes time, discussion, and reflection for students to understand their rights and responsibilities in such a system, and teachers must be patient as students and parents adjust. Many students have expressed increased satisfaction with having a larger degree of control over their grades, although some students do not like the revisions they are required to do. Some struggle to overcome test anxiety and need access to alternate assessments.

As for parents, many of them simply want opportunities for their children to succeed, so they are grateful for the revision and retesting. Each year, parents ask thoughtful questions, with some noting that this method of grading is more similar to evaluation in the workplace.

These seven reasons to change to standards-based grading are merely a starting point. High school teachers need to hold their own practices up to scrutiny and decide whether those practices are worth keeping. By doing so, we unleash a force for change that we can control, with our students and parents as partners.

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Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading - ASCD

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Each week brings some new idea that teachers are supposed to implement, while still preparing lessons, grading papers, and keeping their classrooms in some semblance of order. Amid all these challenges, a call to change grading policies can seem particularly unrealistic. One grading practice that is

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Let us take a journey into three different classrooms: Each one set in a different discipline, each one serving its students in different ways. These instructors have swilled deeply of the SBG kool-aid, but have come up with wildly different flavors.

First, some stipulations:

1. Grades should reflect learning and nothing else. (i.e.: not behavior, nor organization . . .)

2. Later assessments should outweigh earlier assessments to indicate growth.

3. Practice should be safe, ungraded, experimental, and feedback heavy. (i.e. Homework is not graded)

4. "Skills" and low-level concepts should be emphasized within the context of richer issues.

Aside: Hopefully, someday, grading will be viewed as archaic as corporal punishment, but we are not there yet. As far as I've seen, SBG is the common ground between the world of grading and the world of learning. Perhaps it is a liminal stage.

Let's meet our teachers:

Reassessment Policy: Students may not initiate reassessments. Concepts are reassessed at the teacher's discretion through weekly quizzes, projects, observations in class, etc. They are reassessed frequently, and the students are unaware of the schedule. This creates a nearly random system of rewards that students find impossible to resist.

Grade Calculation: Mr. Hocking uses a Power Law calculation, wherein previous grades are reduced in weight and most recent grades are increased in weight. These weighted grades are then averaged. The more assessments given, the less credence earlier assessments receive.

Homework Policy: Homework is given in copious piles. Assignments must be turned in, but the amount attempted is left up to the students. Hocking requires students to indicate - with a red question mark - where they would like specific feedback. Students may not take an assessment without turning in a homework assignment. Hocking spends a lot of time writing specific feedback to the problems that students turn in.

Lesson Design: Dr. Hocking's lessons are succinct. He does not leave much room for fluff, and he has yet to do a get-to-know-you activity on the first day (and probably never will).

Example: To teach the necessity of definite integration, Hocking asked the students to manage a piece of farmland for a (mock) season. They identified their land using Google Earth, and then began to work out the economics. It soon became obvious that knowing the exact area of their irregular piece of land would be necessary; Hocking then introduced the concept of area with integrals.

Other Notes: Hocking teaches quantitative courses. His students take reassessments seriously, and are often crestfallen when they are not assessed over something that they have recently been working on. They must wait and retain that knowledge for when the content does return on a teacher-initiated assessment.

Students claim that Mr. Hocking cares about how much they learn, but he is very busy, as, in any given semester, Mr. Hocking may have 100 unique students.

Reassessment Policy: Both student and teacher may initiate reassessments at their fancy. Mr. Fynsh's room varies from flooded to streaming with students attempting to demonstrate new knowledge. Mr. Fynsh repeats concepts regularly and scrutinizes every answer for evidence of any standard. Some students receive back quizzes with 10 altered grades delineated, while some may have only responded with enough information to receive a single altered grade.

Grade Calculation: Fynsh uses only the most recent score for each standard. He then averages these most recents to calculate his students' final marks. He keeps track of every single reassessment attempt in a log so students can identify the concepts they had the most difficult time mastering as retention-assessing, summative exams approach.

Homework Policy: Mr. Fynsh rarely sees his students' homework. He provides a fair amount for his students to do as practice, and expects them to do as much as they need. He only interacts with his students' practice when they ask him for help. This is Fynsh's attempt at preparing them for the responsibility of college.

Lesson Design: Fynsh's lessons are designed to attack high level thinking skills only. He believes that memorization and practice are best done individually and would be a waste of the large group's time. Lessons often begin with simple questions that allow the students freedom in their choice of methods for coming to conclusions. Students are often excused from class in small groups to go find other sources for their arguments (e.g.: local museums, university libraries, interviews, etc . . .)

Example: Fynsh asked, "How can we know if the United States' welfare system is working?" Students furiously answered and found many different avenues to explore this question. Fynsh assigned readings that concerned poverty from great literature. He allowed a group of students to interview Department of Human Services officials off campus but during class time.

Other Notes: A. Tickus teaches courses heavily based on readings. Students often wind up with D's and F's after the first round of assessments. Students test the waters to see if they can pass just by listening in class and quickly find that this is impossible. Students claim that Fynsh is unorganized and highly idealistic; they also claim that by the end of the course they have never learned more.

Reassessment Policy: In order to be reassessed, which takes a lot of Frox's time, students must prove that they have spent time outside of class working on a skill. This proof is often observational, as Frox also manages the weight room. Students may also bring in a note from parents concerning home workouts. Haiden also presents biological information concerning health and exercise science that students may remediate verbally or in writing at times of their choosing with evidence.

Grade Calculation: Mr. Frox uses the most recent method of scoring, but he requires students to assess at the same level twice (or twice higher) to change a grade. His standards span concepts including cardiovascular health, diet, workout regimens, injury rehabilitation, and many more. Students are expected to improve their mile times and weight lifting over the semester, as well as create appropriate workouts to meet their fitness goals.

Homework Policy: Homework is light and mostly in the form of readings. Students are assessed physically and are expected to implement the axioms of a healthy lifestyle, as will be evident by their improved vitals standards.

Lesson Design: Frox models living a healthy lifestyle. Lessons often center around a physical measurement that can indicate the health of an individual, and how that measurement can be greater tuned.

Example: While teaching about the heart and the stress it endures while it pumps, Mr. Frox set out to explain interval training and reverse-interval training. Students wore heart monitors and performed alternating long stints of intense aerobic activity followed by a small amount of mild stretching. Their heart rates were graphed over time. Frox then had the students do yoga for extended periods of time and alternate with short bursts of intense aerobic activity. The students then discussed how they felt during the workouts and what the heart rate monitor told them.

Other Notes: The students do not welcome Mr. Frox's approach to gym class. They are wary of anything but playing games, and they do not feel that gym should be academic. After a while most warm to the style of setting personal goals and being graded based on how close they achieve them.They appreciate being able to fail a few times before learning and still not be shouldered with poor grades.

Feedback is given openly and frequently during class.

It means that there are many ways to implement SBG, it is a philosophy not a set of rules. Some teachers do not give students the power over their own reassessments, some do; how can this be reconciled? Students know that either way progress will be recorded and used in their final evaluation.

Some teachers ignore all previous data about a standard, and some use it to calculate a standard's grade. This is ok, as long as the most recent information is used more heavily, as it should be indicating the growth we all claim to want from our students.

Homework and lesson design all seem to have common threads. Homework is important, but only because the students realize that it helps them learn, not because it will pad their grade. Lessons are student-centered and thick with motivation.

Who do you most align with? Personally, I'm a Fynsh man.

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Standards-Based Grading: Variations on a Theme

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Let us take a journey into three different classrooms: Each one set in a different discipline, each one serving its students in different ways. These instructors have swilled deeply of the SBG kool-aid, but have come up with wildly different flavors. First, some stipulations: Grades should reflect learning and nothing else.

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MATH: The Comprehensive Math Assessment Resource

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MATH: The Comprehensive Math Assessment Resource

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Due to time constraints in my corner of the world (school started a week ago) I'm gonna have to shelve my typically softspoken online persona and get straight to it. If you'd like to see assessment amount to more than a meaningless exercise in classroom control, if you'd like to see cheating drop and confidence rise, if you'd like to see a higher correlation between the grade you feel a student deserves and the grade on that student's transcript ...
... take something from this page.

1. Textbook manufacturers directed assessment, issuing lengthy tests at the end of their chapters, tests long enough to both intimidate students and make their percent grade totally indescriptive of what they know and don't know. (i.e. two months down the line, what does a 67% on "Chapter 6 Test" really mean?)

2. Assessment was the same for every student with every student receiving the same test no matter how many times they'd demonstrated competence on an assessment.

3. Students hated tests. They complained about them. They scheduled absences around them. They cheated on them. And who could blame them? The tests covered broad chunks of texts, with trick questions seeded every few pages. If you did poorly on a test there was little ability or incentive to improve. The class moved on.

How Things Are In My Classes

1. Learning directs assessment. Learning breaks across skills not chapter units. Instead of assessing at the end of chapters, we assess at the completion of a significant skill. Instead of lumping all the skills together under one grade (making that grade useless beyond a "did good" or "did bad" level) we track each skill separately in our grade book.

2. Assessment is different for each student. Once a student demonstrates competence in a skill, once on a basic problem and then on a hard problem, she achieves "mastery" and can skip that skill on every test thereon.

3. Students like assessment. Most do, anyway, and I'm not even playing with you here. Students like the process. They know which skills they need to improve (because we track them separately - me and them, both), they know how they can improve them (by studying or coming in for tutoring), and they know they'll be rewarded for their efforts (I'll increase their skill grade in my gradebook if they demonstrate improvement).

1. You teach.

2. As you teach, you try to sense when you've hit the end of a self-terminating skill. This skill shouldn't be so small (e.g. "Adding Numbers") that you'll be tracking ten such concepts on a week but not so big (e.g. "Factoring") that you can't tell how to remediate a low grade. In Algebra 1, "Integer Operations" is my first self-terminating skill.

3. You write a test (here's the template) of either three questions or six, depending on how much you want to grade that week. Handwrite them or pull the template into your editor of choice. You'll number the first test of the semester 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but you'll number the last test of the semester 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, depending on how many skills you pull out of your semester. This is to say, the test numbering is continuous throughout the year. The test numbering is very significant.

4. You grade the test on a four-point scale. 4 is perfect. 0 is blank. The rest is at your discretion.

5. You enter the tests into your grading program. The possible points for every concept on this first test is 4.

6. You pass the tests back.

7. The students record the new concepts and their scores on their Concept Checklist. (Template here.) They have now started a self-monitoring process which will continue throughout the year. This is one of the most beautiful parts about this system, that every student knows exactly what she does and doesn't know. [2011 Aug 26: here are my most recent thoughts on the concept checklist.]

8. You teach some more.

9. You give another test. Perhaps here it's concepts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The pace is such a specific thing between you and your class. Any question they're seeing for a second time, though, give 'em a harder one. Add terms. Use negatives. Make the problem about trinomials rather than binomials.

10. You grade but this time you add only one new entry to your gradebook. That's #7. You keep the rest. You keep the rest and you change their possible points to 5. Now, as you go through, you overwrite low scores with higher ones. Grades that drop (and there will be some - the problem was harder, after all) stay the same. If a student pulls a second 4, you enter in a 5.

11. You pass the tests back. The students write down the name of #7 and start penciling in new scores next to old ones. If a student has a 5 on a concept, they call you over and you put a stamp or a signature next to that concept, telling them they're done.

12. You keep going.

1. Blank Concept Checklist

2. Algebra 1 Concept List (suggested)

3. Algebra 1 Sample Tests

4. Geometry Concept List (suggested)

5. Geometry Sample Tests

6. Precalculus Concept List (suggested)

7. Precalculus Sample Tests

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Don't students try to game the signature/stamp process?
Nothing that happens when I'm out stamping changes the grade in the district's computer. A kid could claim two 4's and I could stamp her paper in error, and nothing would happen to her grade. The stamping process is entirely for the students, so they can take ownership in the process and have a document in their hands that describes their learning. (Still I ask to see both 4's before I stamp.)

2. How do your class grades break down?
70% - Tests (strictly limited to these concept quizzes - no other assessment)
10% - Final Exam (assigned exactly once per term)
20% - Classwork/Homework (everything else)

3. Once a kid has mastered a concept or skill, don't they just forget it?
Do kids forget? Yeah. But that's the nature of the thing. Everyone forgets everything given enough time. But with a system of objectives this clearly defined, can I pull them back quickly? Absolutely.

4. How do you break the curriculum down into concepts? There's gotta be hundreds.
I've found it to be the hardest part of this system. My list has flexed every year so far.

I could write a post describing the slashing & burning process but the hardest work is done internally. You've gotta convince yourself that you don't need to test absolutely everything.

Some concepts are great for classwork, for exercises, good for in-class formative assessment, but don't need to show up on a summative test.

You then merge topics where appropriate (being careful not to make 'em too large, unmanageable, or ungradeable) and write the rest off.

5. How often can a student re-take a concept/skill test?
As often as she wants. She can come in at lunch or before school or after school. I don't let her re-take the same concept twice in a day, though. Gotta draw a line somewhere on the issue of rote, temporary memorization. [ 2011 Aug 26: Someone - I forget who - said they allow students to either retake a concept or get tutoring in the concept but not both in the same day. That seems really, really wise to me.]

1. How Math Must Assess, the PDF treatise that got things going on my campus.

2. How To Assess, the practical implementation.

3. The Presentation, a talk I gave to the faculty about all this.

4. Assessment Part Deux Redux, some notes on the risk-reward cycle.

I started this at the beginning of this school year and I have to say that this is the most profound change my classroom has ever undertaken and I am very impressed with how it is going. The concept checklist has been a very important tool in terms of communication between school and home. I made a big deal of it at back to school night and told the parents to check their students' orange folders (that's where I have them keep all their sbg stuff) often. The parents love it and I can tell they are keeping an eye on that folder from the types of emails I am getting. It is better information on their kids' progress than they have ever gotten before.

2011 Oct 19: Christopher Danielson wrote up some provocative thoughts on students with ongoing mechanical errors receiving 60%.

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The Comprehensive Math Assessment Resource

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Due to time constraints in my corner of the world (school started a week ago) I'm gonna have to shelve my typically softspoken online persona and get straight to it. If you'd like to see assessment amount to more than a meaningless exercise in classroom control, if you'd like to...

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I'll admit something. I've never liked the portfolio system of grading. As it was explained to me, and as I've seen it implemented, students gathered their work throughout a grading period. At the end of it, they submitted a portfolio. In better systems, students would sit with teachers and explain each piece that was submitted. The teacher and student would talk about it, like an artist talking about his/her work. It sounds wonderful. In practice though, I never got it.

Two big issues. The first is that it seemed to represent what a student knew, not what they currently know. I'd have issues with someone's best work being done in October. Second, it didn't seem to guarantee any sustained performance. Throw enough crap at the wall, eventually something will stick (this blog is a good example of that).

Toss in the fact that almost nobody has time for the critical interview portion-unless it's a schoolwide thing like a student-led conference-and you have a system that's assessing Young MC on Bust a Move and not the rest of Stone Cold Rhymin'. Or only using Sixth Sense when considering M. Night Shyamalan for a lifetime achievement award for film making.

It wasn't until a few weeks ago I realized that I had been using a portfolio system. It was just weekly. ¹

I've already mentioned my students keep track of their quiz scores in a folder. In the prongs they keep the tracking sheets and any other thing I need them to keep handy, like their benchmark scores and their periodic table. On the left side pocket they just keep stuff. Usually current quizzes. I don't really look at that side. On the right side they put anything they definitely want me to look at. Usually these are the quizzes, worksheets, or whatever that they think represent their current best efforts.

Additionally, in their science notebooks, they're supposed to put a sticky note if they want to draw my attention to anything they think I should look at. In practice, I've been bad about keeping up with the sticky notes because I suck about going to office depot and they're champs at turning all my post-it notes into flip books. My students are pretty good at drawing my attention though, either by folding a corner or drawing pink glitter hearts that say LOOK HERE.

A more organized version of me would also have them occasionally write justifications for why they want me to look at each piece of work. Maybe that me will arrive next year. As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that simply writing the standard number on anything submitted would be a good start and is so obvious I feel dumb for not thinking about it sooner. Hooray for blogging!

I still look at other things. I think it's important to take a look at the whole game. But the thing that's always appealed to me about the portfolio system is having students self-select what he or she perceives as quality. Developing the skills of self-evaluation is probably the most important thing I want a student to get out of standards-based grading.

1: And by weekly I mean, 3 out of every 5 weeks when none of my children are sick.

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I'll admit something. I've never liked the portfolio system of grading. As it was explained to me, and as I've seen it implemented, students gathered their work throughout a grading period. At the end of it, they submitted a portfolio. In better systems, students would sit with teachers and explain each piece that was submitted.

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Implementing Standards-Based Grading in my Social Studies Class, Finally