The Wisconsin State Journal utilized the expertise of UW–Madison’s Courtney Bell in a recent article about Madison East High School’s new “standards-based” grading system.
Bell is the director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) and a professor of learning sciences in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology. She is currently engaged in both national and international studies of teaching, teacher education, and teacher learning.
Madison East High School has recently switched to a standards-based grading system for its ninth grade students. Instead of receiving grades such as “A,” “B,” and C,” students will receive final grades that evaluate their proficiency, such as “advanced,” “proficient,” “developing,” and “emerging.”
According to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) STEM director, Patti Schaefer, “this will more accurately portray how students progress over the course of an entire semester or school year.”
But Bell notes that the standards-based grading concept isn’t new, and has actually been around since the 1980s.
“For decades, schools have been using some version of standards-based grading,” Bell tells the Wisconsin State Journal. “In education, we always relabel things, and we want to talk about it as bright and shiny and new and different. And rarely that’s true.”
Bell also warns of potential confusion and pushback from teachers, students, and parents, who are unfamiliar and unprepared for a change in the grading system.
“As long as we have traditional models for grading, there will be tension with anything that’s different to that,” she says.
Read the full Wisconsin State Journal story to learn more.
Read the full article at: https://education.wisc.edu/news/wcers-bell-interviewed-by-wisconsin-state-journal-on-standards-based-grading-system/