I’ve been toying around with my learning objectives for Standards Based Grading in Calculus for three years now, and I want to get some other people to weigh in on what I have. Please, take a look, tell me what you think!

Some notes:

1. I love the first person language, which is an idea I think I stole from @kellyoshea.
2. The physics modelers all have crazy acronyms for their standards like CVPM and UBFPM and ERMAHGERD. These seemed confusing to me at first, but then I thought that students might really benefit from this. The standards aren’t organized around chapter numbers, or something else arbitrary, but rather BIG DEEP IDEAS (models!). I wanted to do something similar for Calculus, so I organized mine around Local Linearity, Slope Functions, Proportional Rates and Accumulating Change (with short, simply worded descriptions in the document below). I don’t know how well this worked last year, but one goal for me is to try to always relate the standards back to their big ideas.
3. I didn’t do the standards like this fully in order, and this year I am totally changing the order. But just to give you an idea of how I did things, I did all the IP and LL (limits) standards, then SF.a through SF.g (basic derivatives), then PR.a (optimization), then SF.h through SF.n (graph sketching), then PR.b-PR.h (exponential functions), then SF.o/PR.i (implicit and related rated), then all the AC standards. It was a bit confusing to go back and forth, but organizing the standards like that made it make so much more sense to me. Tell me what you think about that…
4. I struggle with how general/specific to make the standards, and how to include both calculation and interpretation into the standards. Sometimes I split the two, sometimes I kept them together. This is the hardest thing for me!

Anyway, any thoughts are necessary! These are my standards from last year, the second time I taught Calculus.

Calculus Standards 2011-2012