NORTHWOOD — When the Northwood-Kensett sixth-graders move buildings this fall, some of their grading system will come with them.

The 2018-19 school year will mark the first in an extended rollout for Northwood-Kensett High School’s new standards-based grading system. It is a year after Northwood-Kensett Elementary School made the move to better reflect Iowa Core standards and be more transparent in reporting a child’s progress and understanding in class.

With the standards-based approach, departments select priority standards set forth by the Iowa Core, a set of statewide academic standards, for their subject matters. Students are assessed based on their ability to meet these standards, and the report card is more extensive in its communication of what standards are and how students are meeting each one.

Although the solution is not yet fully-formed, it will include retaining letter grades, GPAs and the 0-100 scale to maintain compatibility, Northwood-Kensett High School Principal Keith Fritz said. Instead, it is how those letter grades and that scale are applied that will change. The 0-59 “hole” that is an F is a big one to climb out of, Fritz said. The new grading scale will have those letters demarcated equally.

Furthermore, some of what students are currently graded on is not a representation of their material understanding. In class, that one letter grade also encompasses how compliant and conscientious that student is, Fritz said. With the new system, there will be a separate citizenship grade for every class that splits behavior from comprehension.

Therefore, the transition to standards-based grading marks a shift in what factors into a student’s grade.

“There’s so many important ways that a kid arrives at that single letter grade,” Fritz said. “I think if we don’t know those ways, don’t know all those variables, (don’t) do a better job of breaking it down, then we aren’t supporting them in ways that we should.”

The high school’s new system is intended to be less about points and more about demonstrating mastery of a standard, Fritz said. According to the principal, more data points can be less accurate than fewer, more significant data points, such as assessments alone. Assessments can include tests, presentations, projects and demonstrations. Fritz said the school is still considering how those data points will be evaluated and applied for students’ final grades.

While the secondary school is making the switch for similar reasons to the elementary school, Fritz said there are different factors to consider on a high school level. For students involved in sports and those planning on higher education, a grading system simpatico with state league and college entrance requirements is a must.

“How do we reconcile state rules, local policy … how do we reconcile that with what we know is better grading, where we focus less on the letter and more on … how well the student comprehends the standard or exhibits mastery of a standard?” Fritz said.

Although the percentage that an A represents will broaden, the 4.0 grading scale will remain the same. Therefore, when a college looks at a student’s GPA, it won’t look any different than it does now, Fritz said.

At first, he predicts seeing fewer As with the new approach than with the current system because it redefines what a high-achieving student looks like; a student who scores well on assessments and a student who supplements mediocre assessment scores with practice points and extra credit will no longer be receiving the same A.

The new system is not just making it easy for everybody, Fritz said — this is a misperception he has heard from parents. The goal is to raise the standard. The goal is to create a more challenging system.

“If it isn’t challenging, you’re not learning,” Fritz said.

 

Partial familiarity

Although this fall sets the stage for a building-wide standards-based grading system adoption, it is by no means Northwood-Kensett High School’s first introduction to the approach.

The conversation started last spring, Fritz said. The school had already adopted elements of a standards-based system: picking essential subject standards from the Iowa Core’s list, for example, and posting them in classrooms to make students aware of their educational focus. In addition, the school had the positive pressure of incoming sixth-graders who, after a year with the standards-based system at the elementary school, would have had to make a switch back to a previous grading model.

“We are now at a point where we are ready to take some bigger steps forward into formalizing this,” Fritz said.

It is a step the whole building will be taking together. Previously, the school considered implementing standards-based grading solely for junior high grades, seventh and eighth. Instead, the approach was shifted from “all for some” to “some for all” because almost none of the teachers in the building have solely seventh- and eighth-grade students.

“I’d be demanding that my staff manage, concurrently, two very different ways of grading,” Fritz said.

Although he has an implementation timeline formed, Fritz said he would like to keep it flexible on purpose. He has been working with Northwood-Kensett Elementary School Principal Brian Costello and the district teacher leadership team to create a set of district grading beliefs. Fritz is also forming a team of teachers to put together building-specific processes, including proficiency indicators and what factors the citizenship grade will evaluate.

“I see us jumping deeper into the pool next year, much deeper into the pool the year after that, so that within the next, by the end of the next three school years, I would like to be seen as the school in the area that is looked to as a leader in standards-based grading,” he said.

The school has already had a building-wide retest and redo policy in place for three years, an element Fritz said is essential in standards-based grading. Students have to demonstrate to teachers that they have achieved additional or different learning, and when that is satisfactory, they can retake an assessment.

“If a kid says, ‘I want to show you I’ve learned more,’ how can we as educators say, ‘No, no, the test is over’?” Fritz said. “‘You can’t show me you’ve learned more. We’re on to the next thing now.’ That’s educational malpractice.”

When the retest and redo policy implementation began, Fritz said there was some concern that students would use the first assessment as a pre-test and skip preparations. This has not been the case. Now, Fritz said he hears teachers wishing students would take them up on this opportunity now that they have it.

“I don’t have a lot of kids that retake tests,” social studies teacher Dave Capitani said. “You do occasionally, and sometimes it’s a kid that got a C and wants to get an A. A lot of kids that maybe don’t do well on the test just don’t see it as a viable option, or an option that they want to take as long as they’re passing the class.”

However, he said he isn’t sure whether that will change as more elements of the standards-based grading system are implemented and as students understand they may need to do the retakes to prove they’ve mastered a particular standard.

“Hopefully, students will take a more active role in their learning, and that’s what education is all about: their learning,” Capitani said. “Also, they’ll be made more aware of, you know, what they are … definitely expected to learn before they complete a class. It’s a little more clear to them, clear to their parents.”

 

Hurdles

Fritz estimated that approximately 20 percent of his teachers are already using some elements of standards-based grading in their own classrooms.

One such educator is math teacher Kim Borowczyk. Borowczyk provides her students with a rubric at the beginning of the year so students know what their expectations are. For standards, she pulls “I can” statements from the Iowa Core — for example, “I can use formulas for volume of cylinders, cones, pyramids and spheres to solve problems” for geometry. Borowczyk only grades assessments, but for those assessments, students receive two in-class, open-note days. While she still looks at her students’ homework, she does not grade it. Instead, she sorts it into piles: These students get it. These ones are on their way. These ones do not understand.

“I was here, like, way too much,” Borowczyk said of her first three weeks teaching. She felt like she lived at the school. Now, in addition to feeling like she has an accurate read on her students’ learning, she said she also feels like she is closer to a school-life balance and has reduced her stress in terms of time spent on grading.

However, she recognizes an initial drawback of the switch. For general math classes (think geometry and algebra), implementing standards-based grading was made easier by having Iowa Core standards to work from. For other subjects — Borowczyk listed social studies and anatomy as an example — the Iowa Core standards may be broad or nonexistent. The latter will be the case for Borowczyk’s business math class. This means teachers or departments may not just have to choose standards, but hone or create standards themselves.

“Anytime you’re going to something that’s, you know, dramatically different than what you’ve been doing, yeah, you have some concerns about it, but I like the approach we’re taking — kind of a step at a time,” Capitani said. “If it’s all thrown on you one year, I think it’d be an awful lot.”

For the students, it may mark a change in how they consider their educational priorities as the system moves from a focus on points to one centered around performance.

“For kids who have been motivated only by points, this will be a struggle at first,” Fritz said.

Capitani also mentioned students who depend on daily work to do well in class, perhaps because they do not test well.

Nonetheless, Fritz sees in the standards-based system one that sets his students up for success.

Northwood-Kensett High School is one in several schools making the change to standards-based grading.

“In education, this is finally gaining steam in far more schools than it ever had because it’s working,” Fritz said.

The change is also in line with a resemblance Fritz sees between education and the medicine.

“No doctor would keep their license using today techniques that were accepted and commonplace 50 years ago,” he said. “They shouldn’t. They use the best and the most safe and the most accurate and the most beneficial strategies, tools, procedures for the patients possible. We have to be unafraid to do the same in education.”