A students goal is to master the key ideas of science and skills used in science. As the teacher, I will break these ideas and skills into unit learning targets and give students the resources and practice to master these targets.  I will give feedback to help students focus their efforts. The students, then have to show the they know and understand the content ideas and that they can do things correctly at a defined mastery level.  That means grades in my class will be a measure of whether or not students have achieved this mastery of the defined unit leaning targets.

 

When it comes to mastering content target skills described above, I believe there are basically three groups a student will fall into. They either can demonstrate a skill and/or show enough understanding of a target to support you have it mastered (i.e. they get it), they kind of know “some” of what is being studied or they can kind of do some of what they are being asked to do, but not enough to show they have it mastered (they kind of of get it), OR they don’t know it and/or they can’t show or do it (they just don’t get it yet). So a student will see a rating score on a target practice or summative assessment by target as a “3” (mastered it/you show you get it.), “2” (progressing toward mastery/you show you kind of get it), or a “1” (far from mastery/you don’t get it yet). To the right is a table to help guide you in interpreting this grading system.