When I made my mid-year switch to an SBG system, my first assessments looked an awful lot like my old assessments. I knew I wanted to start sorting the quizzes into concepts, but hadn't thought much past that point. I still had a jumble of questions and when it came time for grading, I wasn't really clear on what would earn somebody a 2 versus a 4. I was giving 4's to students who answered everything correctly, 3's for students who answered mostly everything correctly, 2's for students who answered some things correctly, and 1's for almost all wrong answers. Students got a level 0 for leaving a question blank. The problem here is that it's really still just a traditional grading system with a nice SBG mask on.

I went back to look at some of Dan Meyer's sample quizzes to see how he organized them. Dan's post was what originally sparked my interest in SBG. He seemed to have very clear cut problems that would demonstrate the students' understanding of the topic. My initial thoughts about his problems were that they were very procedural, and that I wanted my students to be able to do more complex problems. I decided to give it a go, and continued sectioning quizzes by concept and giving these straight-forward problems. My grading remained pretty much the same: 4's for correct solving, 3's for minor mistakes, 2's for major, etc. I still didn't feel like I was doing justice to a true SBG system.



So, I turned back to the levels themselves. Marzano talks about these 4 levels of understanding as the basis for labeling understanding of a concept so why wasn't I using these?

After talking about this a lot with some colleagues, I thought why not make the levels as obvious as possible within the assessment? I decided to try having questions separated by level. Based on Marzano's 4 levels, I wanted the Level 3 question to demonstrate the concept itself. I started there, and then simplified this for Level 2, and made it more complex for Level 4. Here's an example of a quiz on the number of solutions to an equation.