Over the past year or so, a number of SBL experts have been advising districts to use “Mode” (the most frequent result) as the best way to combine multiple assessment scores into a single score for a standard. This is often helpful to shift teachers’ thinking away from using averages to calculate traditional grades, and focus them on students’ most consistent recent demonstrations of mastery. In response to this demand, we’ve added a “Mode” calculation algorithm to TeacherEase.
Admin Main > Grading Scales
Instructor Main > Gradebook Setup > Grading Scales
While “Mode” is a useful cognitive construct, using the standard Mode() function can sometimes yield undesirable, counter-intuitive results for SBL. So we added edge-case handling to our "Mode" implementation to make it work better for calculating standards-based scores (as compared to Google Sheets or MS-Excel).
Two issues that cause problems with the "Mode" calculation are: 1) long sequences of data with many early low scores, and 2) ties. To address these issues, we provide a few features:
Here’s a table of data that highlights the performance of TeacherEase in these edge cases, as compared to Google Sheets (assuming the 5 most recent scores are used).
Score #1 | Score #2 | Score #3 | Score #4 | Score #5 | Mode Calculated by Google Sheets | TeacherEase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | #N/A | 3 | ||
1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | |
1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
Even with our improvements, there are still a few situations where "Mode" results are not representative of student mastery. It mostly revolves around situations where higher scores are spread out across multiple values (see below). This is especially true when districts use large grading scales (e.g. 1-4 with half points). In these cases, it’s better to manually override or use a different grading algorithm like “median of recent scores” or “decaying weights.” We believe that grading algorithms should be chosen with care, and the decision should include thoughtful inspection of the results for many different SBL scoring patterns.
Score #1 | Score #2 | Score #3 | Score #4 | Score #5 | Mode | Median (of last 5) | Median (of last 3) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
The Common Goal Team