South St. Louis County News

St. Louis Call Newspapers

South St. Louis County News

St. Louis Call Newspapers

South St. Louis County News

St. Louis Call Newspapers

Lindbergh grading strategies presented at Board of Education meeting

Lindbergh grading strategies presented at Board of Education meeting

Lindbergh School District’s grading strategies were presented to the Board of Education Sept. 16 in an effort to educate the board on standards-based grading in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Standards-based grading sets out specific check points for grading students, so anybody looking at a report card can see what a student did well or poorly on, as opposed to the standard A, B, C, D, F format. An example shown at the meeting displayed “determining the area of a triangle” as a specific checkpoint students could strive for.

Executive Director of Elementary Education Craig Hamby said there are priority standards and essential skills where a student’s progress can be tracked over time.

“It’s a checklist where I can sit down with a student or parents and show you ‘Here’s where we are and here’s where we need to go,’” Hamby said. “It is a much more informative way of determining where a student is in their learning.”

Students grades sixth through 12th at Lindbergh do not use standards-based grading because colleges may look at grade point averages when evaluating students.

Executive Director of Secondary Education Ronni Zagora said those higher grade levels are on their way to a more standards-based approach, but there isn’t a specific time frame for the change.

Zagora said students across the country have been brought up in a system that values grades over actual learning. 

“If a student takes a quiz or test and they don’t perform well … and we move on, are we sending the message that it wasn’t worth learning if they don’t learn it the first time?” Zagora asked.

She said going forward she wants a system that allows faster and slower learning students to benefit. She hopes students will learn what grades and learning really mean through standards-based grading before they get to sixth grade — grades should be less about the final letter grades and more about what a student took away from a class.

More to Discover