New report cards are coming for elementary and middle school students beginning this fall.
But for some parents and teachers, they may take a little getting used to, say School District 43 officials.
Tuesday, assistant superintendent Reno Ciolfi and three administrators laid out plans for introducing the new report cards that students in kindergarten to Grade 8 will take home starting in November.
A working group has been developing the new design for months, with nine schools piloting the updated assessment for the June report card, Ciolfi told trustees at a board of education meeting.
The biggest changes will be the way the report cards offer insight into student abilities rather than their knowledge of content.
Older report cards are "more focused on content, content, content measurement and based on the mark assigned. This is fundamentally different," Ciolfi said.
For example, students will now be assessed on how well they are meeting performance standards for literacy, numeracy, health and well-being, and for how they investigate and explore, design and create. Comments will describe their abilities while words such as "not yet," "approaching," "meeting" and "excelling" will be used to describe their progress.
Letter Grades won't appear until Grade 4 but, even at that level, the emphasis will be on personal comments rather than marks, and there is even a section where students' perspective is recorded.
STUDENT VOICE
"The student voice is a new part," Ciolfi later told The Tri-City News, "and for me it is a very exciting part because the more students have voice, the more likely they will be engaged in their own learning."
Another section of the report card, now called a "communicating student learning report," discusses collaborative goals and next steps while student work, such as special projects and reflections, will form a self-assessment of how students view their own progress.
Meawhile, work on middle school report cards is continuing.
Teachers are being brought up to speed on the new report card, which requires a different approach to marking student progress, while parents will be introduced to the changes next fall.
Ciolfi said information will be provided to the District Parent Advisory Council and school parent advisory councils, and a variety of communications will be sent home to parents.
As to why the changes are being introduced now, Ciolfi told trustees the process began last year with the rollout of the revised curriculum and a new form of assessment had to be developed to adjust to new teaching strategies that stress mastery of core competencies over memorizing content.
