Dual Credit Think Tank - Weighted Grades Study v2

Alrighty, we are going to get started. Uh, it's so great to have so many of you with us today. My name is Jason Klene. I'm the senior director of learning partnerships at Northern Illinois University. Uh, where among the things I do is facilitate the Illinois P20 Network and we're really glad to have you. Um, this is an overview of the second version of this study related to weighted grades and dual credit about four years after the first one. We'll talk about that in a minute. And so, as we get started today, uh, I want to kick it over to Micah Kennedy from IICE. Micah, >> good afternoon everybody. um excited to be here and partner with um Jason and the P20 network and the dual credit think tank to deliver this information. Um wanted to give a quick shout out to so um has been around for over a decade now and we've been working on growing and helping and supporting the dual credit network throughout the entire state. So whether you are a secondary partner or a post-secondary partner, we um are working to really support all of you throughout this dual credit journey. So we host monthly webinars. Um we partner with great people such as Jason and other organizations in order to provide content. One of those things that we also do every year is called a dual credit summit. We do um our ILE summit in the springtime. In the past, uh, it had a nominal fee to it and then we increased our, uh, fees for joining ILUP and then we took the registration away for this because it was all-inclusive. We have now taken away all fees to join ILUP. So, we want everybody to enjoy in everything that has to offer, all the webinars, all the resources. So, if you're interested in joining ILUP, you can go to our website. I'll put it in the chat. Um, and you'll be able to that sucks if I actually spelled it correctly. Um, if you go to the website, uh, when you get there, it'll be a landing page, uh, where you can just put in your information and then we'll get you added to our list serve. That way you can get access. And then the other thing is the summit. We have our summit coming up on March 13th. Every year, every other year we flip-flop it. So, um, this year we're doing it in the middle of the state and then on off years we do it at the on the north and south ends of the state to accommodate everybody. So, we're going to be at H Heartland Community College on March 13th um, right in the heart of Illinois, Bloomington Normal. And I'm going to put a link in here to uh, the registration that is the link to the registration form for the summit. Uh again, since we did take away all uh fees related to LSU, we are going back to charging a nominal fee for this. It is $45. Um and we are excited to have uh Rosio del Castillo uh being our keynote. Uh the focus on this is going to be equity and access. So if you are interested in uh putting together presentation during the uh for the summit as well, let us know. uh we still have some spots open for um breakout sessions as well, but again really trying to focus on the equity and access components of dual credit. So which leads us directly into what we have to talk about today. So without further ado, I'll turn it back over to Jason. Thank you. >> Awesome. Thank you so much, Micah. And again, we're so glad to have everybody. So, first of all, from an Illinois P20 Network perspective, we just want to call out the fact that dual credit is by by definition uh dual and it requires real partnership between school districts and post-secondary institutions. It literally cannot happen if two sides or both sides are not working together. And so, we do believe that when dual credit is well implemented, it's a really a win-winwin. a win for the students most importantly um also for organizations on both end and ultimately for communities as more students are more wellprepared hopefully for both uh their post-secary educations moving forward as well as for careers with really intentional and aligned dual credit. So with that as the backdrop, this is kind of an important question we thought and [clears throat] previously four years ago when we did the study, we didn't talk about this out loud. So we wanted to call this out this time because obviously weighted grading is not the topic that typically dominates statewide dual credit conversations. Instead, we're arguing about teacher credentiing or discussing um who gets to make which decisions about things like textbooks, talking about money uh related to dual credit. But but here's the reason we we know this is important and it comes up frequently in our our work locally within regions around the state. it it'll come up through those conversations among teachers and post-secondary instructors as they're talking together. Um it'll come up often when we're talking to counselors or advisors at both levels and and weighted grades. That's obviously part of the equation of course selection for students and families. Um in general, we all know this as educators. What we measure and how we measure it speaks to our actual values. whether or not we want to admit that sometimes. Um so, so grade point average is part of that. Often times that's talked about in the context of standardized testing, but here we think that applies. And then we think that this also um is just one factor but a good symbol of kind of that that whole system around not just transferability but the transition from secondary to postsecary. And so it's an interesting thing to look at because of that and and then maybe start diving into other uh elements of that transition from high school to post-secary to careers. So [clears throat] that's why we've taken another look at weighted grading. And specifically, it was while we were doing work in in one region and we were talking about some transitions with weighted grading since the last study in a neighboring region. And um the folks in in the region we were working in at the time said, "Oh, I wonder if that's changed. I wonder how that looks now." We immediately said, "Ah, we should restudy that. We'll do that." This survey is a little different than the survey we gave four years ago. So the survey we gave four years ago was literally we called it a one question survey. It was really two questions. Um and so at the time though what we said is we wanted to learn about this but these were our three caveats. We weren't promoting grades or GPA. We definitely weren't promoting weighted grade point averages, but we were acknowledging that given that everybody gives traditional grades and awards uh weighted grades and has GPA as a result, we thought it was worth studying. So, this is not to suggest that when we get to the recommendations at the end that we're saying to a school that might be standardsbased or competency based, oh, you should abandon that and go to a traditional grading system. That is not what we're saying at all. So when we did this last time, we had 56 responses from around the state after we had cleaned up the data and those were our us uh usable responses and it represented almost a third of high school students in the state. You can see we had a really wide range of districts. Um and this was based on numbers of 9th through 12th graders, as few as 150 and as many as almost 12,000. Um, and there was the the average. Um, again, looking at at these numbers, really diverse school districts from a district with only 3% of students being low income to a district with 81% of students being categorized as coming from low-income families. Uh, in terms of English lang language learners, we had a district with zero uh% of students as English language learners and another district that almost four and 10 were. So again, a very diverse data set. Um we had a private school last time, maybe a couple, and then uh the majority of respondents last time were secondary districts. So this was the one question. Now the second question on the survey was what district are you from? And that was how we were able to bring in all that other data for analysis. And so this was literally though the simple question we asked. And this newest survey, as many of you know, having taken it, was a more complex survey. Still only about a dozen questions, but now we were really able to to go after some different and additional things. So, we're not going to walk through all of these, excuse me, all of these uh responses from last time. These are the slides that were in there last time and and we'll be sharing this out as a followup. But a couple key things we wanted to acknowledge while we'll just click through a few slides. Approximately 52% at that time four years ago said they waited dual credit the same as either AP or honors classes. And for this we said honors classes were a heavier waiting than regular classes but maybe a lower rating than AP classes. And so together we called those advanced or accelerated classes. Um, so we're not going to again look at all of these factors in detail. One thing we did do last time is pull in a bunch of other data. And we found that none of that other data was predictive four years ago of how school districts were waiting um their grade point averages with regards to dual credit, advanced placement, etc. We did make a recommendation four years ago and the recommendation was if you have weighted classes, we recommend that all early college coursework should be weighted the same and it should be weighted as advanced or accelerated coursework. Um, one of the things we've seen, we've seen a couple regions since then that we know about that have have taken this study, have had conversations, have seen school boards make changes to how their grades have been weighted, um, and have had some really interesting conversations across those regions. >> [clears throat] >> So one of the reasons at that time or the list of reasons I should say at that time that we suggested behind our recommendation were was this list that's teacher credentiing is at least as rigorous if not more rigorous for dual credit coursework. Um dual credit courses have different opportunities for depth and breath particularly in comparison to where one's uh knowledge and skills in the course is judged by a a less than half day test at the end of the course versus your performance throughout the course and the ability locally with the community college the post-secary institution talk about what highquality performance really looks like and how we get there. um the dual credit courses uh may be more likely often are more likely to be actually transferable to uh students post-secary paths. Um, and so the the the ability of dual credit courses across both gened and and career and technical education courses to help us move away from an outdated model of um academic courses and CTE courses being two separate paths and one being um more important or beneficial than the other and acknowledging there's there's benefits to both those paths and frankly all students should probably have a mix of both those paths. Um and and it shouldn't be separate and then um allowing all students to equally learn and benefit from being engaged in early college coursework while still in high school and ready to transition smoothly into post-secary to perform at that high level expected um in in their post-secary environments. So, we redid the survey version two. [clears throat] This time we got 63 responses. We would say that geographically these were as diverse as version one. We did have more um central Illinois school districts represented in this survey. Um now this time the total number of all Illinois high school students represented while the number of districts went up the percentage of high school students went down. still almost a quarter of high school students who are represented in the survey by their districts. Um the fewest number of high school students in a district was down to 86. Um the most high school students in a district was up to over 12,000 and uh we saw the mean go down. So we had more smaller districts um participate this time than last time. Again, we can see that very diverse responses. So, our percentage of lowincome students went from 5% to 82%. Um, our percentage of students with IEPs from 9 to 22%. One of the things we looked at this time was evidence-based funding adequacy to see if maybe school finance made a difference in some of these outcomes. We have widely varying um district funding levels with the lowest only being at 60% 66% of adequacy and the highest being at 168% of the amount of money that the state calculation has determined they need to successfully fund the education of their students. And this time we we again pulled in teachers with master's degrees that percentage at the at the district level um because that has a big impact on your ability to deliver dual credit coursework. So when we look at how the districts played out by EBF tier and we know EBF tier gets confusing for people. Tier four means you have the most money. Tier one means you have the least money. Um, and we saw a pretty pretty wide spread of districts across the four tiers. Though at the same time, we had twice as many respondents in tier 1 as we did in tier 4. Uh, district type, we had 5% of our districts not identified, but now very different set of responses unit to secondary compared to when we did this survey four years ago. Only about a fourth of our our school districts responding were high school districts. the rest were unit districts. So, looking at whether or not districts have weighted grades, this was actually a little bit of a surprise to me that almost a fifth of our districts, nearly 17% said they do not have weighted grades. Um, unsurprisingly to me, at least over 83% do have weighted grades. Um, then we asked if if academic core academic and career and technical education courses are weighted the same. [clears throat] And um nearly twothirds said yes. Um but over a third said no, they are not weighted the same. We asked about the high school GPA scale. Thought this would be a useful thing just for other high schools to be aware of. Over the last 30 years, we've seen a pretty big transition to the four-point scale consistently. And we see that here. Over nine and 10 districts are using the four-point scale. Now, this is where we get into the exciting bits that you're really here for. So, how are people waiting their dual credit courses? Now, again, we consistently looked at these both gened core academic classes and then separately CTE or pathway courses. Now, we didn't ask people to put courses in which bucket. So, different respondents may have put certain classes in their head in one bucket or the other. computer science for example. I don't really know. We didn't ask about that. But just to give you the general idea. So um this is how it it lays out. We've got over a quarter um who are who are waiting their core academic gened classes the same as as regular classes. And then we've got uh a prepoundonderance of them that are are waiting them 40% the same as uh AP classes for example. Another uh almost 13% waiting them um as same as honors classes but lower than AP classes. And interestingly uh we've got over 3% saying no dual credit is weighted the highest uh of all. [cough] When we look at the CTE pathway courses, we see a big mix again, but now things really start to settle in in a couple categories. So, while in the in the last one, 40% were waiting dual credit gened classes the same as AP classes, here dual credit CTE classes, 40% are rated the same as regular classes. 35% or nearly 35% uh of CTE dual credit courses are being weighted the same as AP courses. So how is this compared to four years ago? Again, we didn't ask exactly the same question in exactly the same way, but it was pretty similar. So, in 2022, this graph was already up earlier, 52% weighted dual credit. Um, the same as some type of advanced or accelerated waiting. This time, that's up to 59%. Across the four categories. So, we are seeing more districts uh based on this sample waiting dual credit as an advanced or accelerated waiting than we were four years ago. Not a huge amount more, but more. When we look at the CTE and pathway courses, which we saw just a moment ago, um 49% are waiting at dual credit the same as advanced or accelerated classes. We can't compare that directly to 2022. So, this the results are pretty similar to 2022. Overall, there hasn't been a big shift, but we did go ahead and ask some additional questions. And as you're listening, if you have questions, please go ahead and feel free to drop those in the chat. You'll also be able to come off mute in just a little bit. Um, so some other things we looked at. How many districts have reviewed their policies since 2022? And the split here is almost 50/50. Um, 51% have not, 49% said they have. Now, how many districts have changed their policies since 2022? 3/4s have not and only 25% have. So, this was a surprise to me because for me, it felt like I was always in conversation over the past few years with this district or that district looking at making that policy change. Now, of course, that's the bias inherent in my job. of course I'm more likely to have conversations with districts who are really thinking about making those changes and that's why they're reaching out to have those conversations. And so this was a good level set there um for us to consider. Also, this will make for a good discussion in the doc class I'm teaching where we're spending most of the semester talking about our implicit biases that we bring to whatever we're studying. So, we asked a new set of questions as well about transcripts. And again, these are the this is the kind of topic that we don't spend a ton of time on in these big statewide conversations, but it comes up frequently at the local or regional level. And and we get to hear about it through talking with our community college partners who are leading dual credit work in their regions. We hear about it from counselors, sometimes from administrators. So, we asked about labeling dual credit and AP courses. We've seen in work we've been able to do alongside districts, districts that within their own district are inconsistent about how they label courses. Some courses have nothing in the title, others say DC, some say AP, some don't. Um, it it can be real real all over the place. So, we asked about does your district clearly label dual credit and AP classes with text in the title on transcripts and in your student information system? And so, over half of districts said yes, both dual credit and AP courses are labeled. Over a third of districts in the third column here said AP courses are are labeled and that implies but dual credit courses are not. um only a handful of districts said only dual credit courses or or neither. Um so kind of interesting to consider and a pretty easy process to go through at this time of year still for next year to clean up course titles uh before you commit your schedules sometime in the spring or summer for next school year. We [clears throat] also asked this question and that's do you label your course your courses with IIAi course codes? Now let me say here the IAI course code should not be critical for post-secary enrollment and for students to get credit for that course because it should be the community college the postsecary transcript that the postsecary institution is using to give credit for that course. But we are in complex systems filled with human beings. And so one of the things we wonder about is is it helpful and we don't really know this answer to make sure that um that people are seeing the same course codes from the high school transcript and the post-secary transcript. Um and so here we would we asked about are you labeling with the II course code? And so, uh, I was actually very surprised that nearly 10% said yes for all I AI courses. Um, and and another almost 4% said for some I AI courses. So, 13% of respondents are actually doing this to some degree already, which was not something I was aware of. Now, 87% of of respondents said exactly what I would have expected, which is, "No, we're not. We're not doing that." And Amanda, we'll come back to your question in the chat. Thanks for dropping that in. So, comparing district types. Um, last time we looked at secondary versus unit. So, looking at that here, um, we can see that secondary districts, uh, nearly 70% over twothirds of of secondary districts who responded are waiting dual credit courses as either the same as AP or honors. Um, so that's a pretty high percentage and that's for the core academic or gened. For the CTE pathway among secondary districts, that percentage is lower, but it's still pretty high. And particularly when we include the higher than regular, but lower than honors or AP, so some separate category. Um so again about 2thirds of secondary districts in CTE with CTE dual credit courses are weighting those more heavily than regular classes. Now when we look to unit districts um we see this drop and shift with a lot more variance in how they're waiting them. um still a fairly high percentage um over half when you add up the first four categories here on the left um but nevertheless it's a lower percentage than secondary districts and we'll comment on that in one second. In the CTE pathway we see that same thing. the percentages drop um they drop fairly significantly from um from the gened and certainly in comparison to the secondary. Now this difference between secondary and unit districts is a pattern we saw four years ago as well and it's a pattern that kind of makes sense. In a unit district, we've got administrators worrying about all kinds of of things, right? From early childhood to elementary literacy to our focus on career and college readiness, college and career pathway endorsements, dual credit work. In a secondary district, there's a hyperfocus on those secondary topics. And so it's not unsurprising and it's not a criticism of unit districts that this is like this. At the same time, we've now seen this pattern in two surveys. So for unit districts, there is this opportunity to say, "Huh, are we paying attention to this or how can we leverage uh nearby secondary districts that we might have a relationship with to really understand what they're doing in these spaces to kind of not that you have to mirror exactly what they're doing, but at least to stay on track with what some of those topics are that are being considered in secondary districts. What we don't know and might be very worthy of study is how does this look again in other areas. So like if we compared elementary districts to unit districts and so unit districts we know also probably have a whole bunch of advantages when it comes to something like the pace framework implementation. So again a lot to study for those of you who might be interested in pursuing your doctorates. Lots of great topics here in our our setup and structure of school districts across the state of Illinois. So, we also looked at EBF tier because again, if you're in tier 4, you have more money to work with based on your student needs than do tier one districts. And so, are you spending that money on time, energy, people that might result in some different decisions on topics like this? We can't answer that directly, but we can start to get a hint towards that based on what comes out here. And so, this is a lot of data. I'm not going to walk through it all in great detail, but we see here's the tier one districts core academic gened classes. Pretty wide distribution here. Um though we see 57 58% in the two categories to the left. um over 60% are weighting it as advanced accel accelerated courses higher than regular courses. Um at the looking at the CTE, these numbers go down significantly among tier 1 districts with the majority of them waiting CTE or pathway dual credit the same as regular courses. When we look at tier 2, um, things spread out a little bit more in some different ways on the core academic gened side and also on the CTE side. Again, kind of interesting. When we look at tier three, now things are starting to fall into fewer categories. You'll remember we had fewer respondents in tier three and tier four. Um, but we still had a chunk of respondents in each. And so [clears throat] we've got some less variation here on the core academic and gened side and we've got some more variation on the CTE and pathway side. And then when we get to our tier four districts, uh we see 62.5% of them are waiting dual credit and AP the same and then 37 and a half have said other. And so that tells us that it's some more complicated waiting differences with um some some classes being weighted one way, others being weighted another way. We know that from the comments as well. But then here on the CTE side, we see that same percentage. And so that's that's an interesting question that would require further study. Uh what we're not saying here is oh having more money means you are more likely to weight them both and both uh both similarly and both the same as AP classes. Um there's there's more work that would need to be done across a bigger sample. Um but certainly there's some data here that would suggest that that would be an interesting study to understand what's happening in these districts. And for example, would more money help tier one and tier 2 districts look like this if this is an outcome that we really want to have. So some interesting notes. One district described something in detail. We thought this would be interesting to share out that they've got some criteria they use to determine uh how their dual credit courses are weighted. So one is um first does the college equivalent class is it is it worth at least three credit hours. So if the equivalent class at their community college is one credit hour that is not going to get weighted um heavily like an AP class would. But if it's three credit hours it might. The second criteria is their 1.1 classes um are given AP waiting and their 1.2 classes are given honors waiting. So again, it's it's kind of an interesting they've they've obviously thought this through, had some discussions, and then as new classes come on the books, come into their course catalog, they can match them up against these criteria in that district and say, "This is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it." And it can kind of just happen relatively automatically. Some other interesting notes that we thought people that would be attending today might want to know about. There are a number of school districts that are offering different weights, including no waiting for different dual credit courses. Um, so that is not uncommon and that's probably something to know and the district we just showed that example from is is an example of that. The other thing is there are um a fair number of school districts and community colleges that are offering dual credit for advanced placement courses that have said this AP class matches up to this class. we offer at the community college and so we can offer dual credit in that advanced placement class and that's not something that in the conversations I've been a part of is something that's often talked about seemed relevant to highlight for people here again we're not recommending or not recommending that so we did do some higher level statistical tests with this and like we found four years ago we found that there was no predictive pattern of looking at other data. So having more teachers with master's degrees does not affect the likelihood of waiting dual credit classes more like AP classes or not. For example, um having more money, same thing. having uh more students from low-income households also not affecting um these outcomes in terms of how people are waiting dual credit classes for either core academic or CTE pathway courses. So we had thought some of those things might be indicators kind of leading indicators. They're not uh based on this data set. Now we've given you a lot of ideas for future research. We've got more. Um, do perceptions of dual credit coursework uh from students, families, teachers vary based on how GPA are weighted? Um, that's an interesting question. That might also be a little chicken and egg question there. Um, what impact, if any, do various GPA wait uh waiting approaches for dual credit coursework have on course selection from students? Um, this is something I've had conversations about with people. um that we haven't been able to study yet. What impact, if any, do GPA waiting approaches have on admissions for post-secondary institutions for students, if any? And then is there any impact of various GPA approaches to postsecary student success? Obviously, it would be really interesting to be able to follow groups of students into their post-secary environments and see if any of these things have an impact on their post-secary success one way or the other. We don't know the answer to that. We do have some recommendations. Um, so our recommendation from 2022 is unchanged. If you have weighted classes, our recommendation is that all early college credit coursework should be weighted the same and as advanced accelerated and including an especially advanced placement and international balora coursework. And we think it should reflect a post-secary level of performance um if you are waiting it that way. And we think that's kind of inherent to what dual credit is intended to be all about and where the critical collaboration between post-secondary institutions and school districts takes place. We want to lean in here to the NASP accreditation. Um so NASP is the gold standard the NEP accreditation for how dual credit should be working. And one of the things would we we would offer from our perspective is even [clears throat] keeping in mind the accreditation can help regional conversations uh with what they're focusing on how giving specific uh topics to reflect on as regional groups with both the post-secary institution and the school districts. And so we think NASEP accreditation, whether you're pursuing it or not, whether you've earned it or not, has some value to look at as that gold standard and to work from for our local conversations. And so here, um, we know that NASP accreditation suggests that you use the same titles in the high school as the postsecary institution uses. And we're then also going and and making suggestions to use consistent formatting. um related to the early college credit course types. So you can see the examples here, biology, advanced placement, principles of biology, dual credit. Um there there isn't going to be uh a counselor, a teacher, a parent, a student, being unclear about which which course you're going to be in. Now again, if you're offering a AP course that is also a dual credit course, that that's an outlier that starts to get more complicated here. And then we're suggesting where there is an II course, including the II code for that course as another way of ensuring that we're communicating on both um the community college side and the school district side. Hey, this is this I AI course um because that helps our students. And so that recommendation looks like this. And again, making this change is a pretty uh easy to implement change on the school district side. um that doesn't take a lot of time or energy and could still be done as late as now or even in the coming months for next school year or if it required course catalog changes etc. Now is the time to have those conversations so that when you're updating course cataloges late summer, early fall, you're ready to do that um because you've had those conversations this spring. So, some stuff to think about there.