Some school districts, including ones in Maine, New Mexico, Iowa and Oregon, are shifting to standards-based grading, where students are graded on the skills and concepts they learn instead of points accumulated from assignments and tests throughout the school year.

Jerrid Kruse, a professor of education at Drake University, studies how people learn and teach science, and standards-based grading is one aspect of this work.

The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, edited for brevity and clarity.

What is standards-based grading, and how is it different from traditional grading?

Jerrid Kruse: The main thrust of standards-based grading is really an increased transparency between what teachers are teaching and how they are assessing their students.

I think when most people think of traditional grading, they think of accumulating points or making deposits like in a banking model, where if I turn in the homework every day, I get 5 points. And I keep building those points up so that even if I do poorly on a test, I still end up with a B in the class, even though I may have gotten a C or even lower on a test.

Standards-based grading is a shift away from that. Instead of focusing on student behaviors, such as completing homework and showing up to class on time, standards-based grading focuses on if the student is actually learning the things we’re trying to teach them.

How exactly does it impact student learning?

Kruse: If teachers can assess student learning more transparently, then teachers have more accurate information about what students do and do not know, and students also have more information about what they themselves do and do not know. Then teachers and students can act on that information; that’s the key.

We cannot expect standards-based grading to magically fix the teaching and the learning that’s happening in the classroom. Instead, what it does is provide a more transparent assessment of to what extent the learning is happening in the classroom. And then it’s up to the teachers and the students to act on that information.

So the student can go home and study the particular things that they’re having trouble with, and the teachers can say, “OK, my class is really struggling with standard number 4, so let’s spend some more time on standard number 4.” It’s really about what teachers and students do with that information.

What are some of the challenges?

Kruse: One of the big things is teacher buy-in. Top-down initiatives oftentimes end up with really poor implementation or superficial implementation. In my experience, the best standards-based grading efforts have come from the teachers themselves rather than from an administrator. So I think it’s important to spend time getting teacher buy-in and maybe even making it optional at first to let it be more of a grassroots effort.

Another challenge for teachers is identifying the key standards. So rather than thinking, “Okay, I’m going to teach Chapter 3,” it’s shifting that thinking to: “What is the thing or concept that I want students to learn out of Chapter 3?” From there, they can better communicate that to students.

Also, what will the report card look like? Are we going to continue to report A, B, C, D and F grades? Are we going to report all of the standards? These are questions teachers and school administrators need to decide together.

Then finally, in terms of helping parents and students understand why a school might move to standards-based grading, I suggest leaning into the transparency piece. The goal is more communication and more accurate communication between schools and kids and parents. That’s going to be a key piece for any district considering this.

Why should people care?

Kruse: Grades are a consistent source of struggle for students. For some kids, it’s really about how we can help them be less concerned about the grade and more concerned about the learning. And so standards-based grading can help push in that direction.

And then on the other side, we have kids who have been underserved by traditional education, and a standards-based approach can help these kids see school as something that they can do because they can see incremental progress on the standards rather than just a C or other letter grade. It’s the difference between “I got a C,” and “I got a C, and these are the three standards that I need to work on.”

I think it helps all students, including high achievers and traditionally low achievers, but in different ways.

SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

Jerrid Kruse receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the William G. Stowe Foundation.