Reporting

Introduction

Hutchinson Public Schools’ grading and reporting system shall provide students, parents, teachers, and the community with a framework for accurately reporting student achievement. The District will establish a clear and accurate system of grading and reporting academic achievement.

When the student graduates from Hutchinson Public Schools, the summary of these grades, the academic transcript, will provide a permanent and accurate accounting of the student's achievement of academic course standards, attendance, and academic dispositions or habits also known as character.

Hutchinson Public School Teachers of the same course will emphasize the same essential learning outcomes/standards, will have the same summative assessments, and will have common formal formative assessments. The data gathered from the common assessments will be used during PLC meetings in order to determine further interventions or enrichment needed for students. These common assessments, either formative or summative, are critical to improving teacher practice and student learning. Teacher classroom activities to achieve these essential outcomes/standards may differ from teacher to teacher.

(ISD 423 Policy 618)

Qualities of Effective Report Cards

An effective Standards-Based Report Card has the following characteristics:

Reports Product, Progress, and Process grades separately.
Creates and accurate picture of academic strengths and areas for improvement. Educators should consider using one ore more options to create this accurate picture. Educators may use letter grades, numbers such as 4, 3, 2, and 1, and/or narrative comments.
Balances detail with practicality. A report card should give enough detail for students and parents to understand a student's academic strengths and areas for improvement. However, it should not be overly complicated for interpretation and use.
Is concise, understandable, and easy to interpret. Avoid educational jargon, organize most important information first, and provide a key for what letter or number grades mean. (pp. 172-186).

Guskey, T.R. & Bailey, J.M. (2010). Developing Standards-Based Report Cards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Academic Achievement Reporting

The term grades for a course will be reported separately as a Product Grade, Progress Grade, and Process Grade. All courses will report at least two of the three types of grades. For ISD 423:

All courses will report a Process Grade.
All courses will report a Product Grade. Teachers may supplement a Progress Grade with a Product Grade prior to the onset of a course with principal approval.
A course may report all three types of grades: Product Grade, Process Grade, and Progress Grade.

Product Grade

The Product Grade is the combination of the academic practice and academic achievement grades will be based on embedded standards, course rigor, and common assessments. The following calculation provides a best practice guide for grades K-12:

Formative: a maximum of 20% of the term grade.

Summative: a minimum of 80% of the term grade.

Individual departments and grade levels in collaboration with the building administration will determine what assignments and assessments are included in the Formative and Summative categories.

What is Formative Assessment?

Formative assessment is used during the process of learning to improve and change learning while it is still going or being developed. It is used to inform learners about their strengths and weaknesses in the process of obtaining the standards of learning, as well as to inform teachers about how successful instruction is and to guide future instruction. Examples of formative assessments include: daily informal observations and formal assessments such as quizzes, homework, teacher questions, and worksheets.

What is Summative Assessment?

Summative assessments are used to provide information to be used in making judgments about a student’s achievement at or toward the end of a period of instruction. Examples of summative assessments include: tests, final drafts/attempts, assignments, projects, labs, presentations or performances.

Process Grade

The Process Grade indicates the dispositions, skills, habits, or character the student demonstrates in the process of learning the course content. This is reported separately from the academic (product) grade and progress grades.

Process Grade Rubrics:

West Elementary (link to be added by building leadership teams when complete)

Tiger Elementary (link to be added by building leadership teams when complete)

Park Elementary (link to be added by building leadership teams when complete)

Hutchinson Middle School (link to be added by building leadership teams when complete)

Hutchinson High School (link to be added by building leadership teams when complete)

Progress Grades

The Progress Grade indicates the academic growth a student made from the beginning of the course to the end of a course or unit of study. This grade does not indicate if a student is proficient; rather it indicates how much academic growth a student made over time. This is reported separately from product and process grades. A progress grade, for example, can be reported using a standardized assessment such as those assessments located in our FAST and STAR assessments. These assessments show how much a student grew from Fall, Winter, and Spring reporting. These assessments also indicate if a student was proficient (product grade). Other assessments that indicate progress may also include local summative assessments.

Grading--Converting SBG to a Traditional Percentage Grade

Standards-based grading looks different from traditional grading. Studies have shown that reducing the number of levels on a grading scale drastically increases the reliability of a grade. There is much research that challenges the reliability and validity of the 100 point percentage grading scale.

One of the leading experts on standards-based grading, Thomas Guskey, states the following:

The choice of 100 points is quite arbitrary.

In a percentage grading system, to move from a B to an A generally requires improvement of 10%, say from 80% to 90%. But to move from a zero to a minimum passing grade requires six or seven times that improvement, usually from zero to 60% or 70%.

A grading scale in which two-thirds of the designated levels describe failure also implies that degrees of failure can be more finely distinguished than degrees of success.

As the number of potential grades or grade categories increases, especially beyond five or six, the reliability of the grade assignments decreases.

The integer grading system makes recovery possible for students. It also helps make grades more accurate reflections of what students have learned and accomplished in school.

The use of integer grading systems will result in grades that are just as meaningful and a lot more reliable.
Grade Conversions and how to best do this.

Guskey, T. R. (2015). On Your Mark. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Standards based grading utilizes an integer system

Standards-Based Grading will follow a five-point integer scale as defined below.

A teacher will provide to students a standard score of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 on assignments and assessments. Teachers will determine, in consultation with their Professional Learning Communities, what students are to demonstrate to achieve each level. Teachers of a common course must use the same criteria to determine a grade.

Exceeds (4) is defined as a student exceeding grade-level expectations of a standard; Meets (3) is defined as a student meeting grade-level expectations of a standard; Partially Meets (2) is defined a student demonstrating some understanding and progress towards grade-level expectations of a standard; Does Not Meet (1) is defined as a student attempting but demonstrating very limited understanding of a standard; No Evidence (0) is defined as a student not attempting or providing very little evidence for a teacher to determine any level of learning.

ISD 423 will use the following conversion if a standards-based grade needs to be converted to a traditional grade. A conversion score is reached by adding all standard scores together and dividing by the number of standard scores. This is then equated to a traditional letter grade. In order to determine GPA, the traditional GPA scale will be applied to the traditional grade.

What Could a Report Card Look Like

Ultimately, it is a local decision about what is reported on a report card. In a standards-based report card for a product grade, each academic standard is reported. According to the MDE Academic Standards (K-12) website, "An academic standard is a summary description of student learning in a content area. Academic standards are comprised of one or more benchmarks. A benchmark supplements the standard and is the specific knowledge or skill that a student must master to complete part of an academic standard by the end of a grade level or grade band." Therefore, the benchmarks determine if a student has met a standard. In order to determine if a student met a standard, the student needs to meet the benchmark. What constitutes meeting a standard is a local decision as well. Read Understanding Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards.