Kate Steinheimer of the Great Schools network reviews changes in report cards that reflect standards based classroom instruction and learning.

A standards-based report card lists the most important skills students should learn in each subject at a particular grade level. For example, in writing, a second-grade report card might list these skills:

Writes in complete sentences

Uses capital letters, periods, question marks and quotation marks correctly

Uses the writing process (prewriting, first draft, revision, and final draft)

Writes a friendly letter with a greeting, body and conclusion

Knows the purpose and use of a dictionary, thesaurus and atlas.

Instead of letter grades, students receive marks that show how well they have mastered the skills. These marks might show whether the student is advanced, proficient, basic or below basic for each standard or they might be numbers representing whether students meet, exceed or approach each standard.

Here's an opening for a mobile PC independent software developer who works with forms.

Create a report card program that records each student academic performance against each standard. Allow each teacher to enter ratings of student progress against each standard at teacher selected intervals. For example, allow the teacher to report if Billy wrote a complete sentence once, twice, or each time he was asked to do so in a given reporting period.

These report cards make sense. I think parents should expect to receive such notices from teachers. But, criteria based reporting is difficult to accomplish with manual records.

Individual student performance can change rapidly with appropriate instruction. Teachers must attend to individual performance continuously, provide standards related exercises and tests, and figure out how to record performances in terms of criteria for meeting each standard. Would that more teachers use this view of instruction and reporting.

Many educators have tried to use versions of criteria based reporting manually during the past four decades. It's a cumbersome process to rate each student against specific criteria. Even enthusiastic teachers have slid back to indices of averaging evaluations, such as recording 1, 2, 3, or A, B, C after a year or so of trying other reporting.

Now is a good time for software developers to create recording and summarizing templates for teachers to use quickly and reliably. Maybe such programs can be derivitives of OneNote or Journal?

I wonder how Tablet PC schools with 1:1 learning record academic performance?

Besides using a manual gradebook with average records of 1, 2, 3, or A, B, C, how do you record, summarize and report student progress toward each standard?


Tablet PC Education Blog