Why Standards Based Grading?
Standards-based grading (SBG) is an intentional way for teachers to track their students’ progress and achievements while focusing on helping students learn and reach their highest potential. It is based on students showing signs of mastery or understanding various lessons and skills. In fact, many districts across the country have embraced the idea for decades. Standards-based grading is a way to view student progress based on proficiency levels for identified standards rather than relying on a holistic representation as the sole measure of achievement. (source)
How does SBG work in Science?
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) utilize three different components. Students will be assess on the standards that fit within each of these components. The components are: Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs), Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), and Crosscutting Concepts (CCs). SEPs include the skills and practices of scientists including questioning, modeling, designing and carrying out investigations, and communicating and analyzing data. DCIs include the content standards for the course (waves, energy, chemistry, humans and the environment). CCs include the overarching ideas that relate to all science domains and include things like finding patterns and trends, cause and effect, stability and change, and scale.
What do the numbers mean?
This year in science, we are using a similar scale to what the Language Arts teachers at OTMS also use. It is shown below...
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Because SBG is a system that shows the students' level of understanding of standards, students have the opportunity to redo any assignment to demonstrate mastery. Not all students learn at the same rate, and not all students learn in the same number of tries. SBG is an equitable way to provide feedback regardless of student experiences or prior knowledge since all students have the opportunity to demonstrate and reach growth. Behavior and tardiness are not included in the SBG system. Alternative consequences may occur for habitual behavior and tardy issues.
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