“Mode” Supported for Standards-based Grade Calculation in TeacherEase

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:

1. Mode of X recent scores
   The algorithm includes the most recent scores only and ignores older data (the number of scores is user configurable).  For long sequences of data, it’s common for some students to have many 1’s early in the instruction cycle, which can be difficult to overcome when using "Mode."  The default number of scores to include is 5, but other small odd numbers are also good choices (3 and 7).  This lets students’ recent consistent performance determine their score.
   
   
2. Tie Handling
   If you use Excel or Google Sheets, ties are typically a problem.  If you get the same number of 2’s as 3’s, these tools will choose the first result, which for SBL is typically not representative of students’ current ability. We offer you the option to break ties by choosing the most recent scores (by default) or highest.

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).

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.

The Common Goal Team