Standards-Based Grades

To make sure students are meeting the Common Core, or any set of learning standards your district defines or subscribes to, your district can set up and track student progress using standards-based grades.

You can use rubrics, a set of structured grading criteria, to measure student performance. For example, you might create a rubric for each elementary school subject; elementary schools most often use standards-based report cards:

Or, you might create rubrics for each skill, such as essay writing for your secondary schools. Then, teachers can enter scores for each rubric criteria (for example, "Writes in complete sentences", "Supports arguments with solid quotes from text").

Aspen's gradebook provides teachers with Trend averages, which use the Power Law calculation to indicate a student's progress in meeting each standard. Your district and teachers can use these averages to determine which instructional practices are working, and which are not.

To set up standards-based grades, in the District view, do the following:

• Create and/or organize learning standards if you want to align them to reporting standards. (optional)
• Create rubric rating scales.

  Note: Aspen automatically contains the Common Scale (1-4) rating scale that you can use.

• Create rubrics and rubric criteria, and align them to learning standards.
• Create transcript definitions with columns for standards-based grades, if they appear on report cards and transcripts.
• Assign a rubric to each course in the school course catalog.
• Prepare reporting standards to send rubrics to teachers' gradebooks.

To use standards-based grades to track student progress in the Staff view:

• Teachers can create their own and view district reporting standards.
• Teachers align assignments to reporting standards (rubrics).
• Teachers enter scores for each reporting standard aligned to an assignment.
• Use the Trend and traditional averages to determine student progress.
• When it is progress report or report card time, update post columns with the Trend or traditional average to send to the office.

Then, standards-based averages can be included on standards-based report cards.

Note: You must configure schedules for elementary schools in your district. This allows teachers to use the gradebook in the Staff view to both enter standards-based grades for students in their classes, and to enter end-of-term grades for standards-based report cards.