How do I align and grade materials with the Standards-Based Gradebook/District Mastery?

If your school or district is using the new District Mastery solution, the new standards-based gradebook can be enabled by school building within a district. All of the information below applies to teachers within buildings that have District Mastery enabled.

How do I align materials?

As a teacher in a building with District Mastery, you can align district learning objectives to all materials that allow alignments:

• Assignment
• Assessment
• Test/Quiz
• Discussion
• Page
• File
• Link
• External Tool
• Grade Column

Learning objectives can be aligned to materials within a course, Personal Resources, and Group Resources. When creating or editing a material, you will see an area near the bottom of the create/edit form that says Learning Objectives:

1. Click Align to get started.
2. This launches the alignment screen. You will be able to navigate through your district’s library starting at the top parent level. Click into each sub-parent level to drill down.
3. When you reach the bottom level of the hierarchy, you will see all available learning objectives:

You can select multiple learning objectives at once. You can even select learning objectives from different parents and align them all at once.

Once you’ve selected all your learning objectives, click Align. This will align your selected learning objectives to the material.

You can see the objectives you've selected as tags under the material in the course materials view, or under the align button when you edit the material. You can add or remove alignments at any time.

How do I grade materials?

If you've aligned course materials to learning objectives from your district library, a rubric grading view will be automatically generated for that material. The rubric will be created based on the aligned objectives and cannot be shared or copied across other materials.

• This is a different workflow from the existing rubrics that can be created, edited, and managed in the course Grade Setup area. You cannot use an existing rubric in conjunction with a material that is aligned to district objectives.
• You cannot currently set a Total Score or Overall Score override for the material. Materials must be graded by each aligned district objective.

These material-specific rubrics are generated based on the district objectives aligned to the material and enable you to evaluate the student's submission by each learning objective according to your district’s mastery scale, which is configured by your System Administrators. Learn more: District Mastery Settings (System Admins)

You must also select a Gradebook Scale for the material to determine the score for the material in the course Gradebook. You can select the same scale your district has in place as the Mastery Grading Scale, or you can choose a separate scale, such as the default Numeric scale.

When grading student submissions, you can use the rubric view to enter a score by each aligned district objective:

These objective-level scores will display in the Standards-Based Gradebook. The objective scores automatically calculate the Total Score. Both the Total Score and the Gradebook Scale you've set for the material determine the score in the traditional Gradebook.

Using the above example assignment, a student has been awarded 4.00, 3.00, 3.00 and 2.00 for the objectives. Those scores display in the standards-based gradebook as follows:

The assignment has been configured with 100 Total Pts possible and the Numeric scale set as the Gradebook Scale. Therefore, the Total Score is calculated in the rubric grader as 75/100 and displays in the traditional Gradebook as follows:

• If you make changes to the learning objective scores in the rubric, the Total Score in the gradebook will be updated.
• If you add or remove aligned objectives, the Total Score in the gradebook will be updated.
• You cannot currently set a Total Score or Overall Score override for the material. Materials must be graded by each aligned district objective.