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If you’re a parent of a Lowell Public School student, check backpacks this week.  (Most K-8 reports should be coming home today; LHS report cards are due home on Thursday.) Love them or dread them, report cards are one way parents and teachers can connect around student learning.  Like most things in life, report cards have changed, and elementary cards, in particular, have undergone a complete overhaul to provide a more objective, informative snapshot of your child’s school work.  Today’s elementary report cards, like the curriculum, are standards based, which means students are evaluated on their ability to achieve the standards expected at each grade level. For instance, a first grade math standard under Number Sense & Operations requires students to name and write numbers to 100, identifying place and value. By second grade, that standard is to 1000, by third it’s 9999, and so on.  ELA categories are also standards based with students evaluated on their ability to show “knowledge of vocabulary” and “spell grade level words in writing.” The elementary report cards also include a bar chart that indicates a child’s reading ability based on grade level expectations. The marks used to evaluate progress in elementary report cards are also different.  For instance, letter grades such as an A used to mean Outstanding and a B meant Above Average; now numbers are used for academic subjects with a 4 indicating Area of Excellence-Exceeds Standard and a 3 meaning Area of Competence-Meets the Standard, while letter grades now convey student effort. These changes provide report cards that offer parents an informed report of student achievement based on consistent, standards-based instruction as well as a more objective assessment tool for teachers.