Originally published in SmartBrief
Grades are a relatively recent addition to K-12 education. They were introduced in the late 1800s to measure student achievement. Over time, grades became a mixture of competency and skill, as well as other items that are not relevant to knowledge, such as attention and compliance, and occasionally items like extra credit for donating a box of tissues to the classroom.
Competency-based grading (also known as standards-based grading, evidence-based grading, proficiency grading, or equitable grading) is a model tied to students’ level of understanding of a subject. This system incorporates feedback loops through which students can improve their understanding, and thus their grade. Competency-based grading also promotes transparency, growth, and accountability within the learning environment.
At Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8, the grading system previously used a traditional configuration. Then our district started having conversations about what grades represent as part of our curiosity about what it truly means when students receive their diplomas. What does a high school degree indicate they are ready to do? How much does that credential tell them about their preparation for their next pursuit, whether it is a job or college or military service?
A poorly designed grading system that people don’t understand can dig a hole of despair for students—completely counterproductive for an institution whose goal is lifting students up. Instead of students asking teachers how many points they need to get from a B to an A, students within competency-based systems understand that grades represent knowledge.
On the traditional 100% grading scale, an F represents 59% of possible outcomes, whereas a B categorized from 80 to 89% represents only 10% of possible outcomes. To solve that, some districts have gone with a scale where everything is worth at least 50%. But that creates unintended consequences. If a student doesn’t turn in an assignment but still receives 50%, have you really improved your grading system?
In our Colorado district, we recognized that grades were inequitably represented within the grading scales, so a natural way to move forward would be to use rubrics. The challenge, however, is that even well-designed rubrics can still slip into using a traditional scale where points are assigned based on the rubric. We wanted to change the whole conversation.
It can be helpful to think of grades as a series of buckets representing the standards set by the state. At the elementary level, educators can keep track of what goes into each bucket fairly easily. But at the middle and high school level, it is less straightforward. Educators run into situations where they need to combine buckets into what is called a “roll-up” grade. The more buckets, the more complicated the task of grading becomes.
Let’s say a student submits a math assignment. It might go into the modeling and reasoning bucket. However, the assignment might also have number sense components, and those go into a different bucket. Then the data system needs to produce a final grade based on those buckets.
The roll-up grade is calculated across the existing buckets, or standardized groups of data. The groups are anchored to the Colorado Academic Standards and are identified in the district proficiency scales. When a teacher enters an artifact, they identify which group(s) the artifact relates to. The groups are then evenly weighted when combined into a roll-up grade. If there are four groups, each group is equally weighted at 25%. Teachers have input on the proficiency scales while they are developed, before they are finalized within the system. Teachers also determine how many artifacts they assign within each group.
Sequence is another consideration. Buckets are filled in a certain order. Some things are taught in February, while others are taught in April. It is unreasonable to expect students to have a full bucket in November.
A final component is effort. If a teacher observes that a student really struggled for the first part of the year but put in tremendous effort and is nailing the content now, administrators want the teacher to be able to associate the grade with their observation. On the other hand, if a student has reached a solid level of mastery but did not engage with the work—or if all their peers accelerated past the student due to a lack of effort—the teacher can take those factors into consideration.
Navigating to a new competency-based grading system requires educating a district’s teachers, principals, students, families, and other stakeholders. It is no longer enough to give them a list of grades and a list of artifacts that went into those grades.
In our case at Fountain-Fort Carson, it also required a new data management system that was capable of rolling up the buckets, and we were fortunate to find Otus, a company that is very well-versed in competency-based grading. We took into account that we would need buy-in from critical stakeholders, so our buildings did a lot of professional development up front, including developing champions who are essentially experts in residency. Now, instead of simply relying on the system to generate the final grade based on points, our teaching staff is empowered to take additional factors like effort and mastery into consideration without the behind-the-scenes maneuvering they had to do with our previous system.
Teachers find the competency-based grading system easy to use and more capable of facilitating conversations with students about exactly which skills they need to improve and which skills they have mastered. Students and staff have been quick to understand the philosophy and the process. They report that the system supports formative assessment for learning, student agency, and teachers’ ability to focus on individual student's needs.
We knew all adjustments take time, and we anticipated that adopting this new system would be particularly challenging for our district because we have a fairly mobile population due to our ties to the military. Half of our roughly 8,000 students receive their education on a military installation at Fort Carson, and about two-thirds are military-affiliated. Our district has been identified as the most diverse in Colorado. We have students coming from all over the planet at all times of the year due to their families’ moves. We also lose students at different times throughout the school year.
In addition, we are just south of Colorado Springs, one of the larger population centers in the front range of the Rocky Mountains. But historically this is an agricultural area, and we still have families who actively farm. So our district is an eclectic mix of students from military settings, multigenerational farms, and inner-city neighborhoods.
Military families typically stay in our district about three years. This means we’re constantly interpreting other schools’ transcripts, and we know they are interpreting ours.
We needed to implement a robust data system behind the scenes so students’ work could go into multiple buckets that would make sense based on the standards they were expected to learn in Colorado and could translate to the local educators at their families’ next duty assignment.
We have encountered some logistical challenges because our transcripts now use ones, twos, threes, and fours instead of percentages, and educating, informing, and training new students, families and staff to this adjustment is an ongoing challenge. For example, because we hire many military spouses who have relocated to our area, we are continually training new staff who have not been a part of the journey since inception—and simultaneously educating newly arrived families about what to expect when they see their child’s grades. This requires our school leaders to have systems to quickly bring new stakeholders into the fold while evolving existing practices.
Families have the largest learning curve with this system. They are accessing information in an unfamiliar format, which requires continual focus from school leadership and teachers to support their understanding as new families transition into the district throughout the year. This is a challenge we are still wrestling with.
We have leaned heavily into student agency, helping young people be advocates for themselves. We want them to understand what they're learning, why they're learning it, how it relates to other things that they're learning. We've also feathered in essential skills, sometimes called executive functioning skills, so students feel this grading is being done with them, not to them.When students leave our district, the receiving schools often have little understanding of the driving purpose to this work, and it takes some explaining for them to support the student with a transition back to a traditional grading system.
But the good news is that a growing number of districts across the country are instituting grading systems similar to ours. It is exciting to be on this journey together, having conversations that could impact the way student achievement is measured a hundred years from now.
Dr. William Dallas is the Assistant Superintendent of Student Achievement at Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8 in central Colorado.