[in progress] Skills-Based Grading

Skills-based grading, more often called Standards-based grading in the LMS setting, is a way for instructors to track students’ academic progress and achievements while helping students learn and reach their highest potential. While traditional grading is oriented to all-or-nothing and percentages-and-letter-grades, skills-based grading offers different ways to assess the evidence of students’ learning based on proficiency levels for identified standards. Instead of marking as percentages and letter grades, skills-based grading commonly uses 0-4 or 0-5 scales that reflect students’ increasing skills or mastery levels. For a 0-4 scale, for example, a score of 1 (which could be labeled as “Below basic”) means that the student has little understanding of a concept that the instructor taught in class and cannot demonstrate any mastery of it. A score of 2, 3, and 4 shows the student’s partial mastery, aimed level of mastery as proficient, and higher-than-expected mastery or aimed level as advanced, respectively.

Skills-based grading offers several advantages. It provides students with enhanced motivation and ownership without their worrying about points. Instructors could give more detailed feedback on each student’s skills and learning mastery. Hence, based on each student’s learning curve, they could also give different, appropriate assignments tailored to each student’s level. However, some disadvantaged could never be ignored. Yet, most students are accustomed to traditional grading. Also, skills-based grading might put pressure on instructors to design comprehensive and cohesive rubrics for skills with which they correctly assess the success level of their students.

For more information, here is an article that illustrates an example of skills-based-grading implemented by Linguistics instructors at UCLA: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743114.

While there’s still criticism in the Canvas Instructure community that Canvas is more for percentages and points-based grading, the followings are the steps to employ skills-based grading in Canvas (Bruin Learn).

1. Creating outcome rubrics

Before importing to your Bruin Learn course site, you need to create and design your own outcome rubrics. Here is a CSV template you could modify and update: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xSWrvtfokNovzHXg0mWhSqUHmoM0lBca/view?usp=sharing

While detailed explanations about what each column means are here (Outcomes Import Format Documentation - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation), below are brief workarounds.

The first column “vector_guid” is a value that uniquely identifies your learning outcome or outcome groups. As normal numbers or texts might have already been occupied by other courses, you may need to put unique texts or numbers tailored to your course site.

The second column “object_type” should remain unchanged as “outcome”

The third column “title” and the fourth column “description” are to describe the title and explanation of each outcome rubric, including the order as 1, 2, 3, … or 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.

The fifth column “display_name” could be left blank unless you want to give a display (or friendly) name to that outcome rubric.

The “calculation_method” column must be one of "decaying_average", "n_mastery", "highest", "latest", "average" or blank. “n_mastery” means N number of times attempted to achieve mastery.

For the “calculation_int” column, Valid values depend on the "calculation_method". For "decaying_average", the value must be between 1 and 99, inclusive. For "n_mastery", the value must be between 1 and 10, inclusive. For "highest", "latest" and "average", this field must be blank.

The “parent_guids” column is to designate the parent outcome group for your outcome or outcome groups. If no value is provided, then this outcome or group will be added to the context's root outcome group.

The “workflow_state” column should remain “active”. If the outcome is inactive, you should mark it as “deleted”.

The “mastery_points” column means the number of points that define mastery for this learning outcome.

The “ratings” column could be modified, in decreasing point order, based on your mastery scale.

2. Importing outcome rubrics to your Bruin Learn course site

Go to the “Outcomes” menu, click “Import”, and drag the CSV file from your desktop. Unless you receive an error message, it will be successfully imported to your outcome groups.

3. Creating a new assignment with the imported outcome rubrics

Go to the “Assignment” menu and click the “+ Assignment” to create a new one. Finish to set up details as you do normally. You could leave “Points” as 0. Once you have finished the setup, you will be back on the assignment summary screen. Click the “+ Rubric” button on the bottom.

Open

Then, delete the rubric provided by default, and click “Find Outcome”.

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Import an outcome to use for this assignment one by one (you cannot import in bulk). Once you are done, check “Use this rubric for assignment grading”, and click “Create rubric”.

You will see a pop-up window that explains there’s a difference between the assignment’s total points and the rubric’s total points. You could leave it different unless you want to change it. The assignment’s total points are still 0, which means students won’t get any points just for doing the assignment. Based on the level of achievements, students will receive points by the rubrics.

4. Grading the assignment by the outcome rubrics

Go to the SpeedGrader to give grades for the assignment. Click “View Rubric” on the right. Mark proper rating (with comments if necessary) for each rubric, and click “Save”.

5. Viewing learning mastery from the Gradebook

In addition to seeing the normal points-based gradebook, Bruin Learn also offers an option to view the learning mastery of each student. To use this function, make sure to turn on the related feature options from the Setting menu.

Then Go to the Grades, and change the dropdown menu left to “View” as “Learning Mastery”.