The Grading Podcast

119 – Emilyandsarah Alt Grading and Neurodiversity

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Emily: Or when those extrinsic motivators are really important to some students where they’re getting in the way for other students. And this brings up something I think that you mentioned, Boz, about the different needs of different kinds of neurodivergent students and the conflict between those needs was Sarah has talked about a lot as access friction. So she uses the term access friction to refer to this. So yeah, I think you know, I think it’s okay if people don’t say here’s the easy answer that I have for this, or the solution that I have this problem, right? Because it’s, it is a big, complex problem with a lot of conflicting needs.

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’, learning from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our student success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today? Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing well, I am looking forward to another day of going to the theater and then coming home and writing exams, because that is what my weekends often look like, is I go to the theater and then I come home and write exams for calculus and pre-calculus classes. So it works both sides of the brain because that’s what I have to do today. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: I’m doing all right. I’m actually in the next two weeks, I’ve got a lot of big projects coming up at my full-time job. Three of those projects are called Lesson Labs. And even though I really enjoy doing them, and I think they are one of the most powerful tools that I’m using in my coaching, it’s a lot of work and we’ve got like three of them back to back. So we’ve got an algebra and algebra two and a geometry all within a one week span. So it’s a lot of work to get done for that short of span.

Sharona: Well, and one of the things that I’m struggling with and that I think is gonna lead into a little bit what we’re talking today is I’ve been having issues, like I have a lot of those big projects too, but I’m having focus problems. I am not able to focus on things and I kind of was thinking about that as I was preparing for today’s episode because I think that focus is something that a lot of our students have challenges with and specifically some kinds of students also have those challenges. So I do wanna talk about who we have on the pod today with us, if that’s okay with you.

Boz: Absolutely. ’cause we’ve actually got not one but two guests with us in the virtual studio.

Sharona: Exactly. So I want to welcome back to the pod Emily Pitts Donahoe. Welcome to the pod Sarah Silverman. So Emily has been on our show before actually specifically in episode 49. She’s the associate Director of instructional support in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at university of Mississippi, ole Miss and I knew that. I was just like, Ugh. And then joining her is Sarah Silverman. So Sarah is an educator and independent faculty developer focusing on neurodiversity disability studies and inclusive instructional design. She teaches disability studies at Goodwin University and is currently working on a book project called an Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators in the Teaching, engaging and Thriving in Higher Ed series from the University of Oklahoma, Press. And both Emily and Sarah write Substack, which I am an avid reader of Substack blogs and things like that. And this is, I believe, how I wanted to invite the two of them here together because they did a collaboration on neurodiversity and alternative grading. So, welcome Emily and welcome Sarah to the pod. Thanks very much.

Sarah: Yeah, thanks so much for having both of us.

Boz: We are thrilled to have you both back, Emily, it’s always great to to have you on. For those that don’t know Emily is also one of the organizers for the grading conference, so it’s always great to get to work with you. But Sarah, one of the things that we always do when we have a new guest is we like to ask them just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Sarah: Yeah. So thanks again for having me. I’ll say I have been teaching since I was in grad school, and that was at UC Davis, but I’ve been getting grades for a lot longer than that. And I, I always was very troubled by the system of traditional grading with the risk of giving away one of the funnier anecdotes from my book that’s hopefully gonna come out soon. I recently, was talking with a kind of older neurodivergent educator who’s a mentor, and we commiserated about having every letter of the alphabet on our transcripts, quite literally. And I guess I would have to say that , I love learning. I’m a very self-motivated learner, but my experience of grades has been really all over the place. I was very inconsistent with the grades I got. I, I now link that somewhat to neurodivergence and somewhat to just like, kind of the vagaries of how motivated one is about particular topics, how much one understands the instructor’s instructions and expectations. And so it was actually from a pretty young age, maybe around middle school or high school that I identified the way that grades were given out to be very confusing to be honest. In a traditional grading system.

I guess once I began teaching as an instructor of record undergrads and then later graduate students primarily in a context where they were taking like a graduate teaching certificate, which I’ve taught a lot of classes for PhD students that are on that topic, I really gravitated towards complete incomplete grading. So a kind of grading style where if somebody seems to meet the expectations laid out for the assignment, they get a complete, and if they don’t, they get an incomplete with feedback and an opportunity to revise it. That’s been, I would say, the alternative grading method that I have most gravitated towards. Primarily because it always was almost physically painful for me to try to distinguish between like an 85 and 90 or 95. I felt that I would sit at my desk for an hour trying to make a decision about these sort of things without really any rhyme or reason to why I was parsing out the grades in that way. And so it was through that and through some more exploration of un grading and what Emily now calls collaborative grading that I found there were some roadblocks logistical and institutional roadblocks to fully implementing that.

So I, I began to gravitate more towards this complete and complete, which is, I would say my my go-to when I have the choice about how to grade. But as time went on, I became much more involved in the community of educators. I was discussing alternative grading. And the grading conference itself has been a major source of inspiration to me. I’ve attended a few times and presented a few times. Because I am currently a teacher of disability studies, I always like to talk about the history of how disability was oftentimes defined by people being literally on the margins of a certain distribution. Particularly the history of eugenics and the measurement of intelligence. And kind of the way that norming itself as a way to measure humans and then separate some humans as less desirable, less worthy. I feel still, you know, has some it has some traction in our traditional grading system of kind of trying to separate people who don’t measure up to certain standards and potentially suggest that they are less capable of moving on or that they didn’t try as hard as other people. I try to resist like those kind of those kinds of ways of thinking about grades to the greatest extent possible. So thanks for the question.

Boz: You know, that’s interesting you were saying how you used to just kind of agonize over traditional grading. Is this an 85? Is this a 90? When people ask me about the time I spend grading, that’s one of the things that I explained to them that I used to have to do when I was, you know, grading with traditional points, is I would, after I finished grading, I would take the last few and my first few and make sure that my grading hadn’t changed. ‘Cause I wanted to be equitable, but having to go back and relook Okay. This person made a similar mistake and I took three points away, but this time I only took two. Like going back and doing that double checking used to take me forever. And it’s not something I do with the type of grading I do now. I just, I don’t need to because it’s, it’s not such a small difference. Like when I grade now, the difference between a you know, proficient score and an almost proficient score, I don’t have to go back and recheck those.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes, that makes a ton of sense. And also the feeling of not having spent so much time in just this like decision space and more on the actual giving of feedback is very meaningful to me personally.

Sharona: So I do wanna dive into how you guys decided to collaborate and also then what came out of that. Like what do we know now about Neurodivergence in the alternative grading space versus that very sort of unexamined belief that I sort of had. I don’t know that I acted on it the way, but like of course I have all this built-in flexibility. That’s obviously going to be better because I as an instructor can be flexible. So how did this collaboration come about? I don’t know which of you wants to answer that. And then what did you discover as you started working together?

Emily: I can start. I have admired Sarah and her work for a long time. And we’ve been connected on social media for a long time and I guess I don’t even know how long ago it was several months ago, maybe a year or two ago, probably more than a year ago. Sarah really I was really pleased to get a message from Sarah saying, Hey, we should talk. ’cause we, it seems like we have a lot of things that we could talk about in the intersection of your work on alternative grading and my work on Neurodivergence and neurodiversity. We’ve both also got books coming out with the same series. And so we were excited to talk about that.

So Sarah and I now after being connected on social media have periodic meetings where we just kind of chat about the work that we’re doing in last summer Sarah and I were talking about an event that she was doing for faculty where they were talking about alternative grading and the idea that or the debate about whether or not it was good or bad for neurodivergent students kept coming up. And we were. I, we had a lot to say about that and, and thought that it would be good to share because there’s been a lot of recent research on neurodivergence and neurodiversity in higher education and also a lot more research recently on alternative grading. So the kind of intersection of those things we thought was really important to think more about and talk more about. We were both curious about it and so we decided to do some exploring and share that with people. Sarah, do you wanna talk a little bit about kind of intellectually where the conversation on alternative grading and neurodiversity has been? Before, you know, we started doing this project.

Sarah: So, I guess maybe one good way to also start is we could state our opinions prior to the research kind of where we were starting off. ‘Cause Sharona also already shared the kind of instinctive perspective of this will probably benefit neurodivergent students. So I’ll just go in with what my prior assumptions were. And this is of course gonna be informed by my positionality, which any researcher or writer will have. So I’m personally autistic and I’ll also say, just ’cause it’s relevant to the conversation, as far as I am aware and my personal identities, I don’t really fall into any of the other common forms of neurodivergence in higher education, per se. So I usually say some pretty common ones are autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, including specific learning disorders like dyslexia or dyscalculia. As well as potentially some other conditions like either OCD, certain mental illnesses or other mental diagnoses or dyspraxia. These are all relatively common.

So autism is the only one that I fall into that is quite squarely. And so my impressions coming in were similar to Sharona’s, I would say which is that it seems to me that traditional grading probably constitutes a form of what Jay Domage calls steep steps in higher education. Meaning it’s probably a barrier to maximizing someone’s learning, sense of belonging, self-efficacy and that the more flexibility and student-centeredness we are able to bring in via alternative grading, or any kind of departure from the punitive aspects of traditional grading, will probably benefit neurodivergent students. Why? Because definitionally it’s likely that neurodivergent students either think, behave, communicate, or otherwise learn in ways that are different than social expectations in educational setting. So that was my incoming thought. Emily, do you wanna say what your incoming thoughts were?

Emily: Yeah, sure. I to be honest, when I first started alternative grading I was thinking primarily about student motivation as my primary motivation, I was thinking about, you know, how do we get students to focus on learning rather than grades? And so I guess my kind of baseline assumption was that every student needed to focus on learning rather than grades. And that grades were an obstacle to every student in, in every case. And I’m not sure if that’s totally right based on a lot of the, the work and reading we’ve been doing. But I kind of early on, because I use a form of grading that’s sometimes called collaborative grading, sometimes called UN grading. I’m using the term collaborative grading because I use that form of grading. There’s also a, a lot of considerations around things like attendance, things like deadlines and questions about how structured the course is for students.

So I think a lot of people who come to collaborative grading or un grading, have this idea that it’s kind of unstructured free for all. Because when you take out grades on individual assignments and you can’t have things like participation grades, you can’t have things like attendance grades. Deadlines are optional because you can usually still turn in assignments if to the end of the semester. So pretty early on, it did become apparent to me that the less structured forms of this type of grading were not great for all my students. And sometimes the ones who self disclosed, they had ADHD to me were maybe not as able to keep up with their assignments or had different kind of strengths and challenges around alternative grading in the way that I was using it than other students. So my assumption was that this is kind of baseline good, but there may be some structural problems. And that was, I think, confirmed. For me through hearing a lot of other people talk about their experiences with collaborative grading or un grading and the ways that some of their students were struggling with it as well.

Boz: Well, and and that’s really similar to, you know, what you came in with, Sharona. Correct.

Sharona: In what sense?

Boz: Well, in your assumptions and what we discovered with some of our early mistakes, with the way we structured the statistics class that we teach together, that we both kind of assumed traditional is bad, so bad that of course anything else that we do is going to be good for everybody, including our neurodivergent students. But one of the things that we discovered really quickly, at least for our class and what we observed was taking those deadlines away thinking that, oh, we’re gonna give more freedom in the structure. But taking those deadlines away actually ended up being this really big barrier to some of our neuro divergent students. It was interesting.

Sharona: Well, and not just our neuro divergent students. I mean, there are is a certain group of students, depending on their internal motivations, that absolutely have to have a lot of structure. And in fact, the episode we did with TJ Hitchman, he said something very profound. He said, the more extrinsically motivated a given set of students is for a given class, the more structure you need. So if it’s a GE class that people are just not interested in and they’re there just to check a box, because it’s a requirement, you need a lot more external structure. Then of course that’s hardcore in their major is their senior thesis design class is the thing that decides on whether or not they get a scholarship Like that is very different. So that’s not so much an individual student difference as much as it is a structural difference and why that community of students is taking it. So yeah, before you guys started, go ahead.

Emily: I was just gonna say one of the big questions that came out of this for us is how motivation works differently for different groups of students. And I think it’s a really complex question because we don’t wanna suggest in any way that neurodivergent students are particular neurodivergent types cannot be intrinsically motivated. They absolutely can. But I think motivation functions differently for different groups of neurodivergent students. And that’s a thing that we’re still, I think, exploring and trying to learn more about because there’s a lot of nuances to explore in that conversation.

Boz: Absolutely. Especially with something as complex as motivation, that really is, I think until you get into looking at some of that research, I don’t think most people understand just how complex of a subject and a research topic that really is.

Sharona: So, Sarah, you said you wanted to start with where you guys started. And we did that. So where do you wanna go next then?

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So if it’s okay with Emily, I think we had three main findings, one of which is more of a general comment about alternative grading and neurodivergence. So I’ll just start with that and I can, we can go into our, our two other main findings. So the first comment is just that it’s very useful to remember that the categories of alternative grading and neurodivergence themselves, they’re quite broad. And it may depend quite a bit on what specifically within those categories you are hoping to address. So alternative grading could include everything from what Emily calls collaborative grading. Where there are no formal grades. There’s a lot of feedback, practice and feedback opportunities, and the student and the instructor collaborate to determine a final grade at the end of the semester. That could be anything all the way to specifications grading or standards based grading or labor based contract grading, which are much different ways of grading students. They may also involve different ways of assessing students and tracking their progress.

So too with neurodivergence I read a lot about the history of the concept of neurodivergence, but it both includes medically diagnosable conditions or identities like autism or dyslexia or learning disabilities or A DHD as well as the general idea that somebody’s neurocognitive profile may just differ from what society considers to most fundamentally, neurodivergence is more of a sociological concept than a biomedical concept, so we may kind of either know through disclosure or think through interacting with the student that they’re neurodivergent, but that could mean any number of things. Their neurocognitive profile may differ in any number of ways from the expectations we have of students. So that’s kind of the first point that we will oftentimes see people writing about this topic, actually making a pretty specific point. Something like students with a DHD might struggle with some aspects of un grading or collaborative grading. When there are no deadlines, when there are not that many opportunities to kind of check in at specific points during the semester, and then some extend that to, oh alternative grading may not be that beneficial for neurodivergent students, which is potentially a pretty big leap. So, I don’t know if you agree with that, Emily, that summary.

Emily: Yeah, I would say so. When, when we were having our initial conversation about the experience that Sarah had been having with faculty in talking about whether or not alternative grading is good or bad for neurodivergent students, we were like, well, what do you mean by neurodivergent students? And what do you mean by alternative grading? And so, I mean, it’s hard to make any definitive claims about whether alternative grading as a category is good or bad, whatever those would mean for this group of students. So I, I think we really need to be more specific as this conversation goes on about what aspects of alternative grading you’re ta are we talking about? What models of alternative grading are we talking about? What kinds of neurodivergence are we talking about? If we can be specific about that, right. So really thinking about fine grind practices and how they affect specific, sets of students rather than thinking in these broad capacious categories.

Boz: You know, and I think that’s a really important point to bring up about when we say the word neurodivergent, that can be so many different groups of people and things that they need. And sometimes those are actually in contradiction with other groups of neurodivergent students. You know, I am, my main job is a high school educator, and that’s one of the, you know, last 15, 20 years. One of the big things is about, you know, making sure that we’re trying to address all of our students and that we’re doing all this differentiation. And it cracks me up when I’m talking with educators and they’re like. Okay, I’m gonna do this thing for all of my Neurodivergent students. And I’m like, wait, wait, wait. That might work for one type of neurodivergent. It’s actually gonna be harmful for another. So it’s not, oh, this is what I do for neurodivergent students. It’s, this is what I’m gonna do for the two neurodivergent students I have in my class, which might be different than what I have in my fifth period. So it, like you were saying, Emily, it really is a very, very broad term, just like alternative grading. And if we’re gonna do any claims, we do, we need to get much more granular about those claims because there, there is no true, at least I don’t think there is any true statement you’re gonna be able to make about the whole neurodivergent group other than the name Neurodivergent is there for a reason, and all those diversities aren’t the same.

Sharona: Well, and this is one of the things that I’ve grappled with, when I go back to thinking what I was thinking in my head at the beginning, I was looking at it from an instructor perspective of saying, if I’m building a system for myself as an instructor, that incorporates flexibility, I will have the flexibility within the system to address each individual student’s needs. So it’s not that my system is good for the student, it’s that I, as the instructor operating in the system that I built, have built in flexibility that can assist each student to go on their own path. And one of the pushbacks that I’ve gotten is. Well, that’s sort of the arising, tide lifts all boats thing, and that’s not what we’re trying to do. And I, so I struggle with, but if I’ve built a system where I think I have the tools I need within the system to address, if not all students, at least 99% and then I can break my system for the last one, is that not something we should be striving for? So that’s, I’m curious to see what came out of your research, because in my head I was thinking my situation, my structure within this broader umbrella. So I’m curious to see where it went for you guys.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So one, I would say one of the categories that we investigated, and I guess I’ll just preface this whole thing by saying intensive, quantitative or qualitative studies of neurodivergent students and their experiences with alternative grading are not particularly available, if any exist at all. We are mostly drawing off of written perspectives of instructors and students who either practice alternative grading or are neurodivergent and have experienced alternative grading. And you can see our full series for the fullest of references there. So we’re probably just gonna talk about some broad trends today. So I think finding or consideration one is the question over what amount of structure is incorporated into the course design and the grading method. That could include due dates slash deadlines, however you wanna figure that. And potentially also kind of the scaffolding of assignments, executive functioning support, et cetera. So the origin of this conversation for us was Karen Costa. Article, which is LinkedIn, the piece in and Karen Costa, by the way, is a wonderful educator and writer who writes a lot about A DHD in higher education. I believe she has a book coming out soon about that. And she kind of brings up the point there, there may have been an assumption or a, drift towards the idea that un grading or alternative grading more broadly was against the idea of deadlines or offering students or requiring students to meet regular benchmarks along the way to the completion of their assignments. And she writes a lot about how those kinds of structures were really essential for her as a person with ADHD in learning and work situations. And that I think she writes very powerfully about how the availability of like detailed calendars and schedules and due dates for things are really make possible a lot of the stuff that she does and that she experiences significant impairment in in doing work and learning when those things are not in place. And she kind of called attention to the fact that a lot, the way a lot of people, this was a couple years ago, were talking about un grading, which was as if the idea of having a date on which you were supposed to submit something or a component part that you were supposed to get done before the entire thing was done, as if that was a bad thing. And as if that was kind of like the oppressive traditional grading structure creeping in. And she says, you know, I don’t think that’s the case. And I think if you’re considering my neurodivergent experience here, you might think otherwise. And a couple other authors pick up on that and suggest, Hey, you know, we might need to reconsider the way that un grading works if we’re thinking about some neurodivergent perspectives.

I will say the perspectives that we saw that quoted Karen, they did not necessarily say, well, here’s how I’m gonna change what I do, but more just saying, Hey, I think this is something I need to consider. Maybe, I don’t know what the response is yet but it is something I wanna think about. Yeah. Emily, do you wanna pick it up from there?

Emily: Yeah. So. I think there’s also a question in there about the extent to which grades themselves serve as with some people who picked up. Karen Costa’s article also kind of suggested that grades themselves are maybe important extrinsic motivators for some kinds of neurodivergent students, or the idea that relying on extrinsic motivation is really not all that bad. Right? And I think I think that’s a really complex topic because again, I think, you know we can help all students or we can try to help all students discover an intrinsic motivation. But there is a real question about what do we do when that’s maybe just not as available to some students or when those extrinsic motivators are really important to some students where they’re getting in the way for other students. And this brings up something I think that you mentioned, Boz about the different needs of different kinds of neurodivergent students and the conflict between those needs, which Sarah has talked about a lot as access friction. So she uses the term access friction to refer to this. So yeah, I think you know, I think it’s okay if people don’t say here’s the easy answer that I have for this, or the solution that I have this problem. Right? Because it is a big, complex problem with a lot of conflicting needs.

Boz: Yeah, there absolutely is no silver bullet one answer fits all kind of solution to these questions that we’re asking it that just doesn’t exist.

Emily: I also feel like I’m starting to be annoying on some of these points where I go on a podcast and I’m like, there’s no easy answers. Right. But I just, I don’t have an answer to a lot of these problems.

Boz: Hey, we’ve been doing education for a very long time as a species, if it was easy and there was one answer, we would have found it by now. Yeah. Someone would’ve.

Sharona: But here’s the thing that I would say that I, I agree a hundred percent with what you’re saying and it’s not so hard that it’s not worth trying to solve, and it’s not so hard that you’re going to go out of your mind trying to solve it. We’re just, I feel like what I wanna do, and the reason we wanted have you on, is we want to go. Slightly beneath the, oh, obviously it’s good. Obviously it’s bad, but we don’t have to go down to, you must like customize your grading system for every single one of your 150 students that you have every semester. ‘Cause that’s not realistic or, or some of our large lecture classes, like there is an medium

Emily: around and, and we talked we talked in the series as well about, you know, what are some of the benefits, maybe even the less obvious benefits of alternative grading for some of these neuro divergent populations. And I’d love, Sarah, would you would you share about tolerance for error specifically? So Sarah has a great suggestion about one way that alternative grading is good for neurodivergent students specifically.

Sarah: Yeah, sure. So. This is kind of my, my own theory. I presented on this at the grading conference of what makes alternative grading potentially a good option for teaching neurodivergent students. So tolerance for Error is one of the original principles of universal design that is not universal design for learning with which people listening to this podcast may be familiar, but the original principles of universal architectural design. And I’m sure in the notes for the podcast we can link to them. But the idea of tolerance for error is that. When somebody uses a space or a product it can be used in many ways without running into a true barrier to use. So there, there may be, for example, you can turn a knob up and down in order to push a door open. It may be that a button that you have to press is very big so you don’t have to press in one little tiny spot if somebody has difficulties with their motor coordination or something like that.

A kind of tech example of this, I would say is that if you happen to enter your password wrong or something, you get a few chances to enter it correctly before you’re locked out of the system. It’s not like you entered it wrong once, and now you’re locked out for 24 hours. Not only that, but if you forget your password, you can get an email with a code to reset it. Those are all examples of tolerance for error. Where the most severe consequences you could imagine don’t come up right after an error is made. The reason I think this connects a lot to neurodivergent students in education is that for me, one of the more under examinee aspects of neurodiversity is that it’s pretty common for neurodivergent people to have differences of understanding from other people, including neurotypical people. And that effective communication takes some time to establish. So I kind of think of it like if we assume that a neurodivergent student might face a bit of a steep learning curve of understanding and interpreting their instructor’s expectations and make what one might call errors along the way that a certain amount of tolerance for error that could be incorporated into alternative grading would make that process much more about learning and establishing an effective communication and learning to demonstrate your knowledge in a way that helps the instructor understand where you are, that that becomes more of a learning experience than, okay, you made one error, now you got a bad grade.

This theory, I, I will add is, is based on my personal experiences as a student, which is I would routinely, especially as an undergrad, get kind of catastrophically bad grades based on a misunderstanding or miscommunication, not actually based on anything about the content that I had learned. Like for me, often interpreting an instruction way too literally writing one sentence where three paragraphs were expected based on a misunderstanding of the instructions. And I guess I do kind of connect this to the idea of like grading for growth. And the way that book talks about you know, grading for growth, being about not be always having an opportunity to revise if there has been anything that has like been left out or not demonstrated knowledge to the degree expected. So that’s kind of my, my idea about tolerance error. I also think that tolerance error is a good counterpoint to what some call transparent teaching or clarity of expectations. I think transparent teaching is a great idea. I’m all for it. I try to do it to the greatest extent possible. But I never want the idea of being transparent with the expectations to come out on the other side with okay, but you’ve done something wrong if you didn’t understand my transparent expectations. And so that’s where I think tolerance for error comes in that maybe to integrate kind of the way Jay Dolmitch explains this is multiple ways to be right in a situation.

Emily: And just to add to this Sarah presented at the grading conference this last summer alongside Amy Ernst who’s doing dissertation research on how many different students experience alternative grading. And she interviewed for that research she talked about this in her presentation. Some neurodivergent students who initially went into an alternatively graded class, feeling quite negative about that grading system and not knowing what their instructor wanted. They couldn’t get a handle on the class. But because the class was built with some tolerance for error and also with lots of opportunities for communication, honest communication between the instructor and the students, the students felt comfortable enough to take that frustration they were feeling to their instructor. And the instructor was able to say, Hey here’s what we can do, or here’s adjustments we can make, or how, you know, figure out how they could be more clear with the students. So there may be some tolerance for instructor error as well. Right.

And by the end of that semester, those students, said that they had much more positive experiences than they had expected with alternative grading. And that, you know, even one of them said it turned out to be their favorite class. So I think that idea of tolerance for error cuts both ways, right? The tolerance for kind of instructor miscommunication or student misinterpretation. And that fits with kind of what you were talking about, Sharona, and incorporating flexibility into the systems on our side, right? We can we can be a little bit more individualized in how we’re interacting with students. Yeah.

Boz: Now, I don’t remember ’cause I wasn’t able to go to that session that you were just talking about. ’cause I had to help out with one of the other sessions. But, those students that were going into that class with a negative opinion about alternative grading, had they already experienced some somewhere else? I don’t remember.

Emily: I don’t think Amy said Okay. Whether what their experience was.

Boz: I’m just, I’m not that I recall. I’m just curious. ’cause I, I think this is actually one of the points, that you two bring up in that three part series that you collaborated on, is that alternative grading methods. It’s best not to look at them as good or bad, but more how neurodiverse informed they are in their design. And I think that’s a really big point. ’cause you know, like Sharona and I when we first started doing this, it was a lot of trial and error and one of those uninformed things that we did, just thinking it was, oh, this is gonna be great for everyone. You know, those deadlines, taking those deadlines away. So yeah, it was a decision that we made that was not done based on a large understanding of neurodiverse informed needs that unfortunately, you know, for at least one semester, some of our students are neurodivergent students had to suffer through ’cause we didn’t know better at the time.

Sharona: Well, and yeah, I, okay. I was just gonna say, thinking about this idea of tolerance for error and what we ended up doing, what’s coming to my mind is the fact that most of the crosswalks in my area have replaced those little crosswalk buttons that you had to press with like one finger with these crosswalk buttons that are, you know, two, three inches in diameter. And anywhere that you hit this button, it works. I feel like we kind of did the same thing with deadlines, Boz. Yeah. Because the way that we now do deadlines is we have some very strict deadlines. We have some very flexible deadlines. We have some that are in the middle, and the category of work that has deadlines is all like, there’s an entire category. And what we’ve done is created a way for students to have agency to choose their path through the category of things that has deadlines. So we have, you know, work that is preparing for class. And if you don’t prepare for class before class, it’s not useful. So those have very strict deadlines. We have practiced stuff that has a deadline because we’re like, Hey students, this is probably a good time for you to do this by, but if you do it late, there’s no penalty, but there’s still a deadline on it, right? It’s in the same category in the grading system. So if you don’t want to or can’t do the hard deadline stuff, you just gotta do more of the soft deadline stuff. And we help you navigate that and understand it. And to me, so I tried to design the big button crosswalk so that people can push it anywhere and still be able to get there.

Sarah: Yeah, and it’s great that you mentioned the, the big crosswalk button because a big button is one of the original examples of tolerance for error in, in design. I, it’s actually a good transition to the other kind of big category of note that we got into in our project, which was that of effort and process tracking. So this is something I’ve actually been increasingly talking with folks about on social media and off social media since this series came out. So I’m, I’m excited to kind of try to bring it up and summarize to the best of my ability. But there, you know, there have been certain alternative grading methods that have become popular over the years. One that we investigate considerably is labor-based contract grading that have attempted to place more of the focus for a student’s grade on the effort that they put into their assignments or their attention to and documentation of the process that they use to arrive at their final products. And this seems to be a lot more common in writing classrooms or classrooms that involve a lot of writing or composition

Emily: and a lot more common, I think,

Sarah: now that AI is on the scene, right? Correct. Right. They, it’s actually, it seems to me exploded in popularity. Because I guess the thought is, is that it’s very easy to ask, you know, COD or chat GPT to just write an essay for you. If you want to more clearly verify that students have done their own work, written their own essay, maybe it’s useful to have them document the process of doing that. Okay. First I wrote this paragraph. I drafted this section, I edited that section and kind of show some evidence of that process over time. And I think we saw a couple of pieces that drew some attention to the way that grading based more on process can impact neurodivergent students or some difficulties. That they may have with it. These were examples that were actually very close to home for me. As I’ve thought about this a lot based on my own experiences which is that I think that there’s and we saw this in some of the articles we quote, there’s a fair number of neurodivergent people who may be quite reticent to open up their process to their instructors, because perhaps the main experience of neurodivergence for them is a different way of thinking about things following a different process than most other people do. Not working on a normative timeline when they want to produce something such as a five page paper or a bibliography or, you know, whatever your students are doing in your class. I think you maybe also layering on a kind of non-normative conception of time and how much time should go into each thing, how much time you spend thinking versus actually writing on a piece of paper or a document and different things like that.

From my own experience whenever I’ve been asked to do an activity such as this, I have known in the back of my head, I am producing something completely different than I would without having to track my process and show it to someone else because it’s almost like play acting. I mean, this is a very harsh way of saying it, but for me it’s like play acting and neurotypical process of thinking and writing because I wanna make sure that I do it according to the expectations of what the instructor is looking at. If I’m writing something myself, if I’m gonna be totally honest. It has to bake in my head for a really, really long time, like much longer than you’d think, maybe weeks. And then when I start writing it until about the end of it it’s pretty much done. The editing is pretty minimal after that. And that it does not seem to fit that well with the style of process tracking that’s becoming a bit more popular in the age of AI and all of these things. It’s possible that this is really a me thing, but I’ve talked to a lot of other neurodivergent people who say that this is a very, very similar to how they produce writing and other creative things. So I’ll also let Emily pick it up ’cause she’s done her own investigations into effort and process tracking.

Emily: Yes. And I haven’t looked into writing. I, I have been meaning for a long time to do more research about how the writing process works for specific types of neurodivergent students. But I will say that I have a neurodivergent friend who writes in a way, very similar to the one that Sarah described, where she spends a long, long time thinking and a really short time drafting. And if I were instructors, say, I, I teach writing. So sometimes a thing that I do is my students writing Google Docs, and I look in their version histories to see how the paper came together. Sometimes that includes things like you know, how long they took to write it, often, you know, the order in which they wrote it, how much editing they did, how many times they came back to it, that kind of thing. And if I were to look into the version history of a assignment that Sarah, or that my friend had done I might see something that is just kind of typed straight through. From beginning to end with a little bit of editing on the back end, moving some commerce around or whatever, and then done. And I wouldn’t see that whole thinking process that went on before and it might look a little suspicious to me ’cause I might start thinking, wow, I maybe that student like did this on chat GPT and then they were just transcribing from chat GPT and you know, then I get really suspicious and then I start accusing the student and it’s not good. Right?

So I think at base here is we need to think about what our assumptions are for what an appropriate or good process looks like and start questioning those. But I will say even as a neurotypical person process tracking I think would affect me a little bit more than I might initially have assumed. So I tried an experiment because I was thinking about at one point having my students record their own writing processes as a way to not for me to track to see if they’re cheating, but as a way to help them reflect on those processes and, and how their writing process works. I’d considered having them, them record them. And so I thought, I’m gonna try this myself. And so I wrote a blog post about process tracking that I recorded myself writing, I screen recorded with the intention of using. Making, taking that whole video, speeding it up, and sharing it along with the blog post, which I did. And you can find it on my blog.

And I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked at how much just the knowledge that I was being recorded changed the way that I wrote. It made me reluctant to sit and think and write slowly. It made me, I was, I guess I would say I was more focused because I was afraid of being judged for like, drifting away from the screen or for pausing too long when I was writing. It made me enjoy the, the process a lot less. I started dreading coming back to the draft after I had let it sit for a while because I didn’t like the feeling that I was being surveilled, even if it was just hypothetical and even if I was doing it voluntarily. So it not only kind of surveillance, but that it actually changes how you undertake the process when you know that not only are you gonna be monitored, but that you might be graded and evaluated based on that.

So, I’m not saying that all forms of process tracking are bad, , but I think we should be thinking about those kinds of experiences. And, you know, I will say also, I, I had a student one time, I looked at a student’s version history for a document. And I saw that she had spent, this was a kind of very easy diagnostic assignment. It was supposed to be low stakes little time. And I saw that she had spent several hours working on it between like three and 6:00 AM. And so I said to her in my comments, I was like, listen, you don’t need to lose sleepover assignments like this. If you, if you need a little extra time, let me know. Please don’t spend hours and hours on, on these low stakes things. Right? This is an important thing for you to know about the class. And I found out later that she was mortified by the fact that I knew that she was working at that time, and that she had spent so much time on it. She was so embarrassed. She confessed to me that, that I had seen that. And it didn’t even occur to me that, that this might be a kind of invasion of her privacy. So I think when we’re thinking about process tracking, we really do need to be thinking about that, not even just for neurodivergent students, but for neurotypical students as well.

Sharona: I have something on that for both the labor and the process. I kind of have in my own head, a a check your privilege at the door button in my head because I have, you know, I work with students who are severely underprivileged. And so if you’re gonna grade somehow on quantity of effort or their ability to track their process time, and I have a student who’s 18 years old who’s working a 40 hour job and taking 15 units. Like that extra layer is inequitable in or, or could be. So that’s not even neurodivergence, but I’ve always had that problem. But Boz you were gonna jump in there too.

Boz: Well, no, I was just gonna say what you guys are describing is the exact same thing that natural scientists have known for decades, that you can’t observe something without changing what you’re observing. That the fact that you’re there observing, and I, I’m trying to remember, of the scientists that worked with the gorillas that really kind of Jane Goodman pointed. Thank you.

Sarah: Jane

Boz: Goodall.

Sharona: Yeah,

Boz: Goodall. But yeah, you’re right, like you were saying, Emily, when you were, even though you knew you were observing yourself, but just that observation changed dramatically , your routine and your behaviors. It’s so that’s, you know, an interesting thing, you’re right. When we, I I have also seen a lot more explosion of contract grading since ai especially with a lot of, not just writing classes, but any class that’s writing heavy. But, that’s a really interesting point that, and you know, like you were saying, Sarah, with our neurodivergent students having experienced, you know, by the time they get into college, they know that their process is different than what typical is assumed. So that knowing that you’re gonna, going to observe and possibly grade on that, of course you’re going to absolutely change or even, you know, fabricate what that process is because you’ve learned from your experience that yours is different and it’s not considered appropriate, or not considered correct, or not considered whatever, but

Sarah: yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I guess kind of my summary comment that spans across these two categories of the kind of like deadline structure, executive functioning support, and the effort and process tracking is that, I think if we consider any one element to be a kind of qua non of what it means to do alternative grading, we’re probably gonna run into problems. So I think what was behind Karen Costa’s original comment is it seems like a lot of people are saying that the true substance of alternative grading is no deadlines. And she was pointing out that that’s not really great for everybody. I don’t know if we’ll say a majority or minority.

Sharona: I don’t know if you’ve heard about why we call it alternative grading. This came up a few years ago when we were grappling with nomenclature, but basically it’s anything that’s not point percentages in averages, like that’s actually the centrality of alternative grading, is it doesn’t use percentages and averages or numerics to attempt to measure learning. Everything else counts. Now we have some fundamental principles that we think feedback loops are critical. We think that multiple opportunities to show that you’ve learned something in a given defined term, if you’re gonna have a defined length of time, at the end of which this assumes that you’re in a educational system where you have to give an end of term grade. Like if you lose end of term grades, either ’cause there are no terms or there are no grades, like everything blows up even differently. But given certain assumptions of the structures that we’re currently living within, it’s just trash your percentages, averages, and ideally as many numbers as you can get out of your course, use feedback loops and know what you’re trying to accomplish teaching. So for people to say, oh, it’s about getting rid of deadlines. No, no. It’s about not having artificial ones in the middle of a set term. ’cause we’re living in a set term, so.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or I mean also it, it may be that some of the general discussion that she was responding to was among people who felt like a strict deadlines were a really big sticking point and barrier in the way they had previously been teaching or the way other classes they saw were running. And they’re like, well, this is a really big priority for me. So, so like one element I think of what we found, I think Emily will agree with me, but I’ll give you a chance in a second, is to say, okay, maybe there to reconsider, is there any like one thing or posture that is essential to alternative grading? And if that’s not true, that like we can kind of continue to grow in the practice and be responsive to new things that we learn about different student groups. In this case we’re talking about neurodivergent students. It also extends to the effort and process tracking question. I think that for people who have been really involved in some of those grading methods maybe have a certain attachment to the idea that the learning is demonstrated in the process rather than the product. And I think some of the discussions we had and perspectives we read helped to complicate and maybe reframe that conversation as well. But I’d, I’d love for Emily to weigh in as well.

Emily: Yeah. So Lindsey Masland one of the pieces that we considered she wrote a piece called UN Grading and the, the Joys of doing everything wrong or something very close to that. Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah. And so she was talking about, you know I think she was responding to a specific converse in part to a specific conversation that was ongoing at that time about whether or not there was a right or wrong way to do un grading or alternative grading. And I think the answer to that is, you know, there are things that are more or less supportive of learning. There are things that are more or less liberating to students. There are things that are more or less manageable for ourselves as instructors. There are things that are more or less meaningful to ourselves and our students. And so there’s, I would say, you know, there’s not right and wrong, just in the same way. There’s not good and bad, in terms of alternative grading for neurodivergent students. But there are a lot of practices that we need to be considering in light of how they affect neurodivergent students. There’s a lot of ways that we need to be thinking about how can we make our teaching more neurodiversity informed as kind of Sarah says.

So yeah I think the, the kind of baseline here is, is we need to be constantly questioning our assumptions, right? Part of alternative grading is questioning our assumptions that you know, these kind of traditional systems are the things that work best for our students. I think we found that in many ways that’s not the case. And so I think we can continue that process even as we move more toward alternative grading of, of constantly being able to go back and reexamine our assumptions about what, what learning is, what’s working or not working for our students. And how, you know, I, I think questioning our assumption is, is the way to, to make our grading systems better. And, and that’s a continuous process and it’s not gonna end, right? Because students are constantly changing and we’re constantly changing and the world is constantly changing. So yeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’d say is the most important thing going forward.

Boz: So we, we are kind of coming up on time. I think we easily could talk for several more hours about this subject, but we are coming up on time. I did want to mention one last thing, and that’s really asking you, Emily, one of the things that as I read these and as I listen to both of you, it sounds like one of the biggest things that we need is just more research like, it’s to really look at all these different you know, aspects and different types of neurodivergency and different types of alternative grading and how they interact with each other. So do you, and then my understanding is you are actually working on a project right now, Emily, about trying to bring in some more of that kind of research. Am I correct on that?

Emily: Well, I’m working on a book about collaborative grading. Yeah. So that’ll be a, a more kind of practical guide to collaborative grading. Okay. And I’m also working on a book with Josh Eiler on alternative grading in general, where we’re gonna kind of provide a guide to the various different models of alternative grading. So I’m not directly involved in research on neurodivergence and alternative grading. Or for example, like I’d love to see a study of how ADHD students experience specifications grading or how students with autism experience collaborative grading or things like that. But a lot of the work that I am doing would rely on that kind of research. So I, I would love for people who are more practiced particularly in, in that kind of educational research. I have some experience, but and who are able to do more kind of large scale studies or even, you know qualitative interviews with the students in their classes. I’d love to see more of that kind of work as a way to inform the work that I’m doing on, on alternative grading. And I think Sarah would also appreciate it for the work that she’s doing on neurodivergence.

Sarah: For sure. And I guess I would also add emily and I talked a couple times over the course of this project about the, there might be research approaches that could help answer some of the questions that we feel are the hardest questions, which is, you know, what if your needs as a neurodivergent student come into conflict with those of other students, whether they be different neuro divergent students or neurotypical students. And I, I have, I have the idea that research that uses like a focus group methodology or something called Q methodology, which is a methodology that involves trying to surface differences of opinion and differences of perspective might be really interesting. ’cause for me, I would love, as Emily said, to see the results of a study of, okay, what do students with ADHD think about specifications grading, how do they experience it? But that doesn’t necessarily help me in the most practical sense, which is okay. So I know that maybe I do have some students with A DHD, but I have a lot of other students Also, how do we negotiate and balance between the different needs or preferences present in the same group of students? So, you know, I, I would love to see if there’s anyone who’s interested in collaborating on that. You can feel free to be in touch with me. That’s something I’m really interested in.

Boz: All right. Well, we are coming up on time, Sharona. Is there any last minute thing that you want to say or ask before we sign off?

Sharona: I just wanna thank you both for, for coming on the podcast. I know that both of you are large writers and you do these blog posts. I claim I don’t write, that’s not quite true, but I do prefer speaking and I think these conversations add a important layer to the whole work that is not always conveyed, just in written form. So thank you for taking an hour of your time to come on and join us for this conversation. It was just absolutely wonderful.

Boz: Yeah. And for anyone that hasn’t, and this of course will be linked, but for anyone that hasn’t and has any interest at all and how neurodivergence and alternative grading works together, your three part series is absolutely phenomenal. The collaboration between the two of you. This, I will admit, I had not read all three of them beforehand, but, I have now and absolutely phenomenal. Go check it out. We’ll link it and. To our guest thank you both for being here and to our audience. Thank you for listening. You’ve been listening to The Grading podcast with Sharona and Boz, and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.