After two years of research and planning, Mahomet-Seymour Elementary teachers presented their plans to switch to standards-based report cards for the 2015-2016 school year at Monday night’s Mahomet-Seymour School District Board meeting.
In November of 2013, a teacher from each grade level in the Mahomet-Seymour School District attended a standards-based report card conference in Springfield to learn about what the process might look like in the Mahomet-Seymour School District.
With the collected information, two teacher representatives from each grade (K-5) and two parent representatives with elementary-aged children have worked with Common Core and PARCC Assessment standards to develop a report card that will effectively communicate student progress throughout the year with parents and students.
Parents will quickly notice three differences in student report cards: report cards will be distributed electronically through Skyward every 60 days instead of 45 days, and the “grades” will be represented by “1,2 or 3” rather than “A, B, C, D or F”.
Third grade teacher Kim Johnson said the longer grading period will give teachers more time to truly assess what students understand or have missed during instruction. The 60-day periods will also align better with the PARCC testing schedule. Students will still receive progress reports, but they will come home every 30 days instead of 22 in the quarter grading system.
The backbone of the standards-based report cards and the “1, 2 or 3” system is communication.
Each grade level has identified four or five Common Core Standards students in that grade need to understand for each grading period. Now, instead of receiving a letter grade represent a student’s overall understanding of the material presented, students will receive a “1,2 or 3” to represent their overall understanding of a concept within a subject.
This process will help teachers show parents what their student understands and which concepts the students need to work on. Currently, students receive a grade letter to represent a child’s whole understanding of a concept. A child may receive a “B” in math, but a parent may not know that the represented units included adding whole numbers and number lines.
With the standards-based reporting, parents will see that their child completely understands adding whole numbers by seeing a “1” next to the concept. But the parent may see a “2” next to number lines. In this, the parent will see that their child has not completely grasped the number line concept, and the teacher and parent will be better to help the child understand the concept.
Johnson said each teacher will continue to have daily work or assessments to provide data for each standard mark. Director of Instruction Mary Weaver said the assessments are not standardized assessments such as MAP or PARCC, but “ongoing assessments that all teachers use to drive their instruction. It might be a chapter test, a quiz or the collection of a worksheet or activity that is part of the lesson.”
Superintendent Rick Johnston said school administration would like to see the district get to the point where all student assessments are tied to the instruction children receive in the classroom. Currently, PARCC assessments and the Common Core Curriculum are mandated by the State of Illinois.
The committee explained to school board members that the assessments will continue to be graded as they have been in the past. But the difference will be in how those standards are communicated.
Because of the consistency in the standards-based report cards between grade levels, parents will now be able to better understand their child’s growth throughout their elementary education. But this system will also tie instruction together between grade levels as all teachers will be assessing the students on the same standards rather than different tests or assignments.
The standards-based committee will continue to meet throughout the summer to develop the assessments for each grade level.
Weaver said the District administration will begin to look into standards-based report cards for the junior high school. The process will take several years, though.
