SBG: What's the point? Feedback!

Mobile rant from my phone, so please excuse errors...

One of the main purposes of standard based heading is to provide detailed and accurate feedback about what the student actually knows. to do this successfully, certain procedures must be followed. First, standards must be clearly stated in a measurable way. This let's students know exactly what it is you're evaluating them for and how. This should never be a secret. It can be done various ways. For example, a standard named "listening comprehension" in a foreign language would be very poorly written. How do you know students are comprehending the material? How do they know? A better standard would be "identify the picture described", and this would likely include various other indicators of listening comprehension that "just happen" to be the same tasks students perform on assessments. Even better, make your rubric for that standard (which you do have, of course, to be sure you are grading fairly) available to your students and parents. Now, they have all the tools available to them that they can use to understand their scores and what they can do to improve (or at least avoid getting worse).

One more note: getting multiple scores on an assessment (since you are evaluating independent standards) target than one overall score is new to students and parents as is the SBG scale. Unless students know what their score is for and what it means, then it is meaningless (no duh Sherlock) and the entire purpose (feedback) of SBG is lost. LABEL those scores! And TRAIN your students and parents to understand what each one means by teaching them to refer to the standard itself (which is, of course, written in clear and student-friendly language on the grade book), the rubric used to determine the score, and decide what to do from there to achieve the student's goals.  (While on that last note, a discussion about goal setting and achieving within the SBG class should take place at the beginning of the year, but that is for another post).

In sum, SBG is supposed to clarify to students what they are expected to learn and achieve on class and grading them on just that. Thus, they also have a clear understanding of where they are in trends if rugose learning goals and what they can do to get better (or worse) If its implementation results in cryptonic numbers somehow connected to abstract standards and student confusion, then its use has failed indeed.