Setting up your gradebook

In this post I'll describe how I set up my gradebook.  I  used a blend between standards based grading and traditional grading.  If you were to use a 100% SBG approach, your gradebook set-up would be a little easier because you would only assess student progress towards mastery of standards.  Therefore, you would have fewer categories (if any).   I use an 80%-20% split between SBG and traditional grading.  Although I love SBG, I feel like I could not measure complex tasks via SBG.  Therefore, I wanted to have a way to incorporate projects and group work into students' grades.  I also wanted to track traditional things like assignment completion, participation, and preparedness.  Each of these things ends up being a very small portion of the grade, but it is still helpful to have access to this data when looking back at student progress to identify areas for improvement.

My school uses Sapphire but I also used PowerSchool , Sasi, and LearnBoost  and I could have done the same thing with those programs.  I started by choosing the categories that I wanted to use in the gradebook (each individual 'assignment' would need a caetgory to determine its weight in the grade calculation).  Here is what I use:

u  80% - Objectives – This portion of your grade communicates the level of mastery that has been demonstrated on the important course topics.

u  0% - Evidence – This portion of your grade communicates your progress towards mastery for course topics that are in progress and have not yet been fully assessed.  This is a temporary category.  Once a topic is completed, it will become an objective (see above).

u  5% - Independent work – This portion of your grade is graded for accuracy, but in a traditional way (point earned ÷ points possible · 100).  These assignments are completed individually.

u  5% - Collaborative work - This portion of your grade is graded for accuracy, but in a traditional way .  These assignments are completed in groups of 2-4 students.

u  5% Non-routine problems and projects - This portion of your grade is graded for accuracy, but in a traditional way.  These assignments might be completed individually or in groups.  These assignments measure  the mastery of complex skills in novel situations.

u  5% - Warm-ups, homework, participation, preparedness, progress reports, and exit tickets - This portion of your grade is graded for completion, in a traditional way.  These assignments are completed individually.

To set up categories in Sapphire you first need to open any class then choose 'categories' from the "My Class" drop down menu.

One at a time, enter each category.  This is the same as you would do for a traditional grading system except that you can see that I instructed Sapphire to use the 'Objectives' category as 80% of the overall grade.  

Next, for the SBG portion of the grade, I chose my levels of mastery.  In an earlier post, I described these levels of mastery in greater detail.  I came up with the following shorter descriptions that I used for grade mapping.  These descriptions show up at the bottom of my students' progress reports as a quick way to help students and parents to interpret the meaning of grades.

u  E= Exceeds Expectations (translates to a grade of 100%):  Demonstrates an in-depth understanding of the material by completing advanced applications consistently and independently

u  M = Meets Expectations (translates to a grade of 80%): Demonstrates a adequate understanding of the material by completing grade-level tasks consistently and independently

u  N = Nearly Meets Expectations (translates to a grade of 60%): Demonstrates a partial understanding of the fundamental material, by completing basic tasks, but is still working to master the complex material on a consistent basis

u  Y = Does Not Yet Meet Expectations (translates to a grade of 40%): Demonstrates minimal understanding of the fundamental material, by completing basic tasks with inconsistent success

u  U = Unrated (translates to a grade of 0%): Demonstrates no understanding of the fundamental material, even at the most basic level

If you want to be able to enter E, M, N, Y, and U as grades rather than numerical values, you just need to use the grade mapping feature in Sapphire.  This can be found under the 'options' drop down menu.

Enter each level of mastery in the description section and include the character (letter) you will be typing into the gradebook as well as the numerical value you want it to be mapped to.

That's it!  Not as complicated as it seemed :)  I also set up the progress reports so that these weights, descriptions, and grade mapping print out so that students and parents can come to understand what it means to earn an E vs an M as a grade.  I'll address that in a later post.

Here is one final comment.  I had a teacher ask me about using state standards rather than my own objectives.  I wrote about my rational for using my own objectives once before, but this teacher wanted to use the PA English standards.  What she decided to do was to basically keep a traditional grading system, but instead of having traditional categories such as homework, classwork, and tests, she had categories based on the state anchors such as informative, revision, conventions, argumentative, fiction, analyzing and interpreting.  She then recorded individual assignments in the gradebook but only grading them for one category at a time.  For example, maybe her students would be asked to write a paper about racism in Othello.  Then she would grade the essays only on information and record that grade in the informative category.  Maybe she would re-grade the essay for grammar and mechanics and then record a second grade under the conventions category.  I think this would certainly be another way to use SBG.  It may be more realistic in a school that wants to move to a standards based report card and transcript as it would be more difficult to report on 100+ objectives per course.