How to Grade for Mastery in Standards-Based Learning

Jun 24

An elementary boy works on an assignment in his notebook.

Many schools are switching to mastery-based or standards-based learning. For teachers used to a traditional grading system, it can be a hard transition to mastery grading. What is the difference between grading and scoring? Why should you use both in your classroom?

A quick summary is grading is the final evaluation of a student’s level of mastery achievement. Scoring is how a teacher tracks a student’s participation in the practice activities that develop the mastery of an objective. This post will explain the purpose, characteristics, and best practices for each.

What is Scoring in Standards-Based Learning?

Scoring is simply checking for student compliance in completing practice work. It is used for formative assessments. These compliance assignments should be focused on a specific target skill or objective, limited in number, and easily reviewed within a 10 – 15 minute period.

Why should teachers score formative assessments?

During formative assessments, a skill has not yet been mastered. It’s unfair to grade students on any practice they are completing while trying to develop mastery. Therefore, student assignments that are independent or group practice activities should be scored instead of graded, because they are designed to develop students’ skills.

In other words, these activities don’t demonstrate students’ final grasp of the criteria. They should not be included as part of their mastery grade.

A better way to record student compliance in completing homework or other practice work is scoring. Scoring is based upon the level of completion of the assignment/activity. It may be as simple as a check mark (√) or an X. Another simple system would be (2, 1, 0): 2 for completed, 1 for incomplete or late, 0 for non-submission.

How does scoring save valuable class time?

Scored work should be quickly checked (most often using a roster on a clipboard or gradebook) by the teacher. Immediately after scoring, you should provide an answer key for students to self-check their work (encouraging metacognitive development).

Instead of reviewing every problem, you should facilitate student engagement by having them ask specific questions about the assignment. This will target student needs and reduce the amount of time spent in review of the assignment. The targeted feedback you provide will increase student engagement and metacognitive learning of the objective.

With students evaluating, reviewing, and correcting their work, you will save valuable time for planning and assessing the lesson and its objectives, while still having a recorded score for the students’ work.

It will take time to get student buy-in for this system. Some students will understand right away that they will only benefit from practice - their final grade won’t be affected negatively by attempting work they don’t fully understand. Other students will need more time to see that practice really does increase their learning.

What is Grading in Standards Based Learning?

Grading occurs when the teacher gives a summative assessment. These assessments are evidence of a student’s skill development.

All grading of summative assessments is done by the teacher using an established set of criteria or rubric points. Students should know the grading scale or rubric and the accepted level to demonstrate mastery of the objective(s) from the beginning of the unit .

Summative assessments should be given one time.* If the majority of the students do not meet the established mastery level, the objective should be retaught. Student and teacher feedback are critical in the compliance part of a unit of study in order to ensure students are ready for the summative assessment.

*Students should be allowed to redo a summative assessment if they continue to work on the skill or objective. The goal is always student mastery. However, allowing students to simply retake assessments over and over without more practice and study actually de-incentivizes students to do their best. Why study if they can retake it?

When should teachers use scoring?

Scoring is done during the formative portion of a lesson or unit. It is based upon the level of completion of an assignment or activity. There should be far more of these scores in the grade book than summative grades.

Compliance assignments or activities should be short and easily checked as completed/partially-completed/not-completed. They should also be reviewable with an answer key within a 10-15-minute period. These assignments are meant to develop skills, generate feedback, and provide both you and student with information critical to the learning process.

Since the formative (compliance) assignments occur at a greater rate than the mastery assessments, they should be weighted to hold a lesser value, if any, in the overall assessment of the student’s mastery.

When should teachers use grading?

Grading is done during the summative portion of a lesson or unit. It should be used to determine the final level of students’ mastery of objectives. There should be fewer of these summative grades in your grade book than scores.

Summative grades are meant to be the evaluation of the student’s proficiency developed over the course of the lesson or unit. These scores are used to determine whether or not a class has sufficiently mastered the goals, objectives, or skills within the lesson or unit. Therefore, grades should hold a greater weighted value in the overall assessment of the student.

Example Grading System

Many schools adopted a rubric grading system, such as 0-5. If your school has not, you can create a mastery grading system by weighing summative grades more heavily than formative scores. Compliance activities should be either not be included or be a smaller percentage of a student’s final course grade than summative assessments.

While a true mastery-based grading scale would not include anything but the summative grades, that may not be feasible if your school is not adopting mastery-based grading as a hole. Instead, you may need to follow a more traditional grading system.

An example of a Weighted Grading System for Mastery Grading follows:

Compliance Grades: (40% of the overall student assessment)

Classwork: 10%

Homework: 10%

Notes/Participation: 20%

Mastery Grades: (60% of the overall student assessment)

Quizzes: 15%

Essays/Projects: 20%

Tests: 25%

When should students self-assess?

The teacher should grade mastery activities in order to analyze student mastery and misunderstandings. However, you might have students grade themselves on quizzes. Quizzes should be small (usually 10 problems or less), focused on a single topic or objective, and be easily reviewed with an answer key.

Students are responsible for grading, correcting, and reporting their quiz results. They should also ask questions about their errors if they have difficulty understanding them during self-assessment.

Writing assignments, projects, and tests are teacher graded according to established levels of mastery or rubrics of achievement. It is critical that teachers provide written feedback on these assessments for students’ metacognitive development.

Review

Scoring is used during the formative practice of a lesson or unit. It is based upon the student’s level of completion of the assignment. It is meant to generate student engagement, critical feedback, and metacognitive skill development, while making the most efficient use of class and planning time.

Grading is used to determine the level of mastery achieved on summative assessments. Grading is done by the teacher for assessments, which should not have multiple retake opportunities (unless the student continues to work on the objectives.) It determines whether or not the objective taught has been effectively mastered or needs to be retaught.

The importance of scoring is that it shows students how to earn 40% of their “grade” through compliance (participation in assignments.) This engagement buy-in creates more metacognitive skill development, which in turn generates higher mastery achievement (60% of their “Grade”).