District mastery and the standards-based gradebook

Mastery and standards-based grading are being implemented in many districts across the world. As classrooms evolve towards teaching and evaluating students with an eye on skill mastery, districts are looking for tools to help enable this transformation, measure student learning, and assess the efficacy of instruction. 

The District Mastery solution within Schoology is designed for districts that:

• Have a centralized model for defining and managing what standards, learning objectives, and competencies are taught in their classrooms.

• Want to standardize grading practices across their district.
  
  

  

  There are important caveats to note when using the Standards-Based Gradebook, due to how the new solution interacts with existing features like AMP and the current Mastery tool. At this time, Schoology must enable the District Mastery solution for your school or district.

We are continuing to build out features for the District Mastery solution. Recent updates include support for:

• Grade scale association with Learning Objectives
• Percentage grade scales
• Setting custom ranges for each level of a point scale used for the Standards-Based Gradebook

Districts that want to use this solution can be at any phase of their standards-based grading or mastery rollout. District Mastery is currently an opt-in feature that a district can choose to roll out to a select group of buildings or the district as a whole.

District Mastery is not supported in courses containing more than 10,000 members.

Getting Started

A primary challenge witnessed in working with districts is a lack of consistency between classrooms in how mastery is being implemented, assessed, and tracked. Ultimately, this can lead to a lot of data on a single student that is disjointed from year to year and results that are very class-specific.

Students and parents need to learn a new method of tracking success each year, and teachers have no visibility into the current mastery levels of their new students at the start of a year. For administrators, this type of tracking makes it difficult to keep track of what is going on across the district.

In response to these common pitfalls, the Schoology District Mastery solution ensures that:

• Your entire district will share one library of learning objectives.
• All learning objectives must have the same number of organizational levels, or parent objectives, across the district.
• Your entire district will share one mastery scale and calculation method.

Otherwise, how your district decides to organize your learning objective hierarchy and your mastery scale is completely customizable.