Dive Brief:

• Color-coded standards-based grading, which allows families to see what skills their child has mastered or is struggling with, is rising in popularity and replacing traditional letter grades.
• The move toward a standards-based system is tied to the Common Core State Standards and their emphasis on individualized mastery learning over traditional, cumulative achievement.
• The idea behind this approach to grading is that students are assessed based on their personal gains and mastery of benchmarks, ultimately offering a more personalized report card that acknowledges an individual student's progression.

Dive Insight:

Many ed tech companies are betting on this form of mastery assessment as the way of the future, creating products to help make it easier to track students' progress through benchmarks (because this form of grading also probably means more work for teachers). One such product is MasteryConnect, which has a report card feature specifically designed for districts, teachers, and parents transitioning from traditional letter grades to mastery-based assessments. As one would expect, the platform's “K-12 mastery report card service” notes all of the standards directly on the report card so that parents can know exactly where their child stands academically.