Standards-Based Report Cards Replace Letter Grades

This year report cards at Miles Elementary in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio, will report student progress toward specific standards, instead of letter grades. Teachers collaborated to create rubrics to determine whether students are making no progress, making progress, meeting standards, or above the standards that will help them continue to the next grade level.

So far, it looks like Miles may have learned a few lessons from Prospect Hill Elementary's (Pelham, N.Y.) switch to standards-based grading—parent involvement is playing an important role in the transition from letter grades.

Furthermore, our assessment expert Jim Popham offers this advice to schools adopting standards-based grading:

[T]he quality of your standards-based report card initiative depends on the clarity and rigor of the reporting system you adopt. Standards-based reports that are less than clear will be less than useful. Second, if parents, students, and teachers are obliged to evaluate a student's progress with respect to an excessive number of content standards, such a report card approach is certain to stumble. Standards-based clarity is a good thing. Standards-based clarity about too many standards is a contradiction in terms. The upper-limit number of standards to include in such report cards should be based on what the participants can easily keep in the forefront of their minds—somewhere between 6 and 12 standards. I lean toward the lower end of that range.

Bob Marzano's Classroom Assessment & Grading That Work goes deeper, explicitly outlining the steps for implementing standards-based grading and asking us to consider how our methods for reporting student achievement (letter vs. standards-based grades) make students—and teachers—more capable to improve learning.