The Grading Podcast

41 – Bri and Rob

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Brie: He had implemented it three times. I had implemented it twice. And then we recruited students for interviews. And so, that, given the fact that there wasn’t a super high sample size, we kind of, you know, steered clear of surveys and things like that. And thought that the better approach to this would be a qualitative study. And so, I have a pretty huge lab of undergraduate researchers and so I said, yeah, I’ve got some, some researchers that I would love to get some experience in both interviewing, doing interviews and analyzing qualitative data.

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 students 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 podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m doing well. We’re getting down towards the end of the semester, which I am very much looking forward to. We’re also coming up very soon here in mid June on the grading conference, so I wanted to make sure to mention that at the top of the show. Something we look forward to all year round. How about you, Boz? How are you doing?

Boz: You know, I, I’m getting to that point where we’re about to start all, all of our big state testing in my high school job. So that’s always kind of stressful. So just trying to prepare for all that and just prepare for all that ridiculous amount of testing we have to do in K 12.

Sharona: I feel for you. I feel for you. Well, I’m really excited to introduce, we have two guests in the virtual studio today, and I’m really excited to get to talk to them. Dr. Brie Tripp is an assistant professor of teaching at UC Davis in the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. She teaches a variety of physiology and neurobiology courses that span both lower and upper division, and her research focuses on equity and justice in undergraduate science classrooms and graduate school. In her lab, they work towards creating justice oriented spaces for students through the creation of evidence based teaching practices and critical science curricula. They used mixed methods, both quantitative and qualitative education research, to advance understanding of how science, culture, teaching, grading practices, curricula, identity, and diverse backgrounds affect student learners in science. So welcome, Dr. Tripp. Is it okay to call you Brie?

Brie: Absolutely. Okay.

Sharona: And with Brie is Dr. Rob Furrow, also an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology at UC Davis. He teaches a mix of courses including introductory biology, statistics, and data literacy. He’s interested in promoting equity and inclusion through the interaction of course policies grading practices and classroom pedagogy. His education research explores how student motivation and sense of belonging is shaped by classroom climate, inquiry based learning, and grading structures that prioritize multiple opportunities to demonstrate competence. So welcome, Dr. Furrow. May I call you Rob?

Rob: Yes, please. Call me Rob.

Sharona: Okay. So welcome you both. Is there anything I got wrong or you’d like to add or change about those bios?

Brie: No, that was perfect.

Rob: Sounds great.

Boz: Well, thank you guys both for joining us today. I’d like to welcome you both and one of the things that we like to do on this podcast when we have a guest for the first time is to kind of ask them about their origin story. Like what got you involved in alternative grading or this non traditional grading stuff. So if we don’t mind, I’ll start with you, Brie. How did you get involved in all this?

But of course, you know I also had a realistic reckoning, I guess you can say, because we’re required as instructors to provide grades. I mean, that’s what our entire education system is built on. And you know, through my work of creating justice oriented curricula and reading books from bell hooks and Paulo Freire that, that really talk about giving agency to students in their own learning. I think that ungrading allows for that to happen, allows for that to occur. And It became a much more of a priority to change not only what I was teaching, but how I was implementing grades in the classroom. And then I was just like, man, I have this class that I just created. I have no restrictions because some of these larger classes that you have, they’re taught every term, you have to be consistent, you know, but this one, I had freedom to do whatever I wanted. I was like, yeah, what do I want to do? And that’s when Rob and I were talking and we decided to do second chance quizzes, but I’ll stop there and let, let Rob tell his origin story.

And so I felt this great frustration in teaching this class, especially when things were so hard for so many reasons, and students were doing bad for so many reasons, way outside of their control, way outside of the control of the instructor or the course structure, the campus generally, there were just so many things that were playing into their grades that felt like not like the right things to be part of their grade. And so that that course, I still don’t have much control over the grading practices and policies in that class. But, as I got to develop my own courses, as my teaching load ramped up in the next few years, I had in my head always making sure there were ways, there were ways that students didn’t have to give up. That they could have a second chance to get back on track, that how they were doing when they didn’t know how to prepare at the start of the quarter didn’t define where they finished either with their learning, but also with their grade. So I wanted their grade to be something that they could match with their learning and help them target their effort as we went on.

Sharona: Yeah, we’d love to shout them out at least.

Brie: Oh gosh, I don’t remember his name, he was, he was the best science I ever had hands down.

Sharona: Well, and that’s, you know, I’d like to pick up on that point that. He was the best teacher and one of the things that you’re able to share is this grading epiphany. And I know that for me, I wanted to be one of those sort of best teacher types and I never felt like I could get there.

But I wanted to say, okay, so that’s how you guys individually came to this. I guess my next question is, and then what happened? Because now you’re sitting side by side. So how did the two of you come together and what did you do when you started collaborating?

Rob: Okay, well, we knew each other from an online journal club after we met at a conference. So we actually were friends even before Brie started here. We were friends who would meet once a month, sometimes reading a paper, sometimes supporting someone else who was revising a manuscript or something. And so Brie and I knew each other as friends rather than as colleagues here at UC Davis before then. And I think, I know when Brie started, I was eager to find a chance to collaborate not knowing what that collaboration would be. I don’t know what your side of the story is.

Brie: Yeah, yeah, I also remember, weren’t we in DBER sit together?

Rob: Yes.

Brie: Which is a committee for grad students through SABER, that professional society I mentioned earlier. And so we also got to know each other. Actually, I found out about this job position through Rob, you know, he had said, Hey, I know you’re looking, you’re interested in, you know, assistant professors of teaching. There’s this job that’s coming up in the department of neurobiology and physiology. And I thought, Oh, that’s such a great fit. And so, yeah, we definitely actually, before I even started, I had been hired, but not started, and we’re collaborating on a grant that had to do with curving and the harmful effects of curving and then we were still trying to figure out okay, what project could we do together? And that’s when Rob came up with with the idea of these second chance quizzes And we got together and brainstormed ways that we could do it Yeah

Boz: So that was your first collaboration, that multi chance on test. Is, how many times or how many different collaborations do you guys have together now? Is that the only one?

Brie: Currently, that’s the only one. Yeah, currently that’s the only one right now. But we’re looking forward to more so, there’s, you know, I think sometimes the assistant professor of teaching role, there’s, instructors that are, are not as driven to do education research, but they more focus on, you know, revamping programs and things like that. But I think I won’t speak for Rob, but for me at least I, I love research and I was really excited to have a colleague already who I knew was a phenomenal researcher and was interested in equity and inclusion.

Sharona: So can you guys go ahead and describe that collaboration and tell us where you’re at, how it’s going?

Rob: Sure.

Sharona: Is there publications? What’s the status of all of that?

Rob: I can start us off and then we can pick up on some of the analysis and where we’re going. Before we do, I want to give a shout out to another teaching professor here, Natalia Capparelli, She was the one who connected us about this curving project, so she had been thinking a lot on campus about curving and which departments curve, what are the potential harmful effects of curving on how students connect with each other on how that might change or exacerbate gaps in outcomes among different types of students. And so that. Yeah, from that grant, we were all kind of thinking about grading practices and what those mean and how those can perpetuate inequities.

So which jumps into what we did, which is going to sound totally trivial because it’s a very small, it’s a very gentle change to a class. And not, not so different from many of the examples of reassessment you might see in the literature. So I piloted it by myself the first year. And all it was, was in a statistics class I teach, we have a series of quizzes throughout the quarter, and rather than have a two hour long final exam at the end, I reduced the length of the final exam, and said the rest of the time, here are new versions of the quizzes. And so if there’s any quizzes that you didn’t do well on, that you want to try again, you can take this new version, and you can and if you do better, it will replace your grade on that quiz. And so that was my way of requiring very little new logistical effort and maintaining some alignment with what’s being assessed the second time and the first time while still allowing it to take some of the pressure off.

So if a student bombs a quiz in the beginning, if a student has an emergency and they’re out of town, then they just know they get the second chance to do this later. Sometimes we can accommodate it ahead of time too. But not always. And so that’s all it is. That’s all the approach we tried is in the classroom was just creating these second chances. And Brie, was yours pretty much the same? Any differences?

Brie: Yeah, it was the same. I was teaching a neurobiology of mental illness course, and I believe Rob, you were teaching a statistics course. So the context was different, and of course the instructors, but the layout was the same. So instead of midterms, and we had, you know, weekly to every other week quizzes. And during the final exam, we had that shortened cumulative final and then the opportunity the rest of the time for them to retake whatever quizzes they wanted to score better on. And they were tested on the exact same learning outcomes, but they were just slightly different questions.

So they weren’t the exact same, but they were the same learning outcomes. And we really heavily relied on those learning outcomes throughout the entire class. I really said, okay, these slides are related to this learning outcome and these slides are related to that. And students love that. They love being able to know what the goal was. You know, it was, it wasn’t some hidden curriculum about where in this, where in this lecture am I, what do I need to know right? And so, yeah, it was very similar across. across both of our classes.

Boz: So you had these two different classes. Were they the same like levels? I mean, were they, were they, you know, freshmen, sophomore, or were they two different grade levels?

Rob: So the statistics class is intended to be for sophomores in our major. It’s 80 percent students from my major, from Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology, and about 20 percent students from others. And. It ranges from sophomores to seniors, depending on how much they put off taking their statistics requirement. Almost no first year students, but many first year transfer students. So students who are entering in their third year, having come from a different institution.

Brie: Yeah. In my class, almost actually all seniors, , because the prereq, I have a prereq that they really don’t get to until their upper division courses. And so in order to take that prereq, they have to take another prereq. And so it, by the time they get to me, they’re, they’re seniors. And, and they come from mostly my department NPB, but also cognitive science and psychology.

Boz: So both classes with similar structure, but a very different group of students.

Brie: Yes. Very different or very different career aspirations, I would think also.

Sharona: What did you notice? As you were going through the class? What was different? What was the same about your experience with the students?

Brie: For me, there always been this tension between students and the professor. You know, we get irritated when they say things like what’s going to be on the exam, right? Or, or we get frustrated if, you know, they’re nitpicking little things just to get some more points, or at least that’s how we perceive it. But what we don’t always realize as instructors is they were trained to be that way. It’s not their fault. And I think oftentimes Rob, Rob and I have talked about this, it’s easy for instructors to blame it on the students without, you know, looking in the mirror. And when we, when I implemented this, it was totally different. Students were relaxed in class. If they missed one, it was no big deal. If they didn’t do well, I didn’t see a drop in motivation but instead motivation toward understanding why they missed what they missed and it helped target them like Rob was saying, target what areas they need to improve on in order to reach that proficiency level.

And it just improved relations between me and the students significantly. And it, you know, I wasn’t stressed, they weren’t stressed. it was, I had never taught a class where it felt like there was virtually no stress. I mean, there’s still some stress cause they’re all most, mostly pre med students. So and they didn’t really, I don’t think they believed in the beginning that this is how we were going to do it. But I had no pushback. I mean, students were very excited about it and open to it. What about you, Rob?

Rob: I was just going to echo, I was thinking exactly about the last point you made about the sort of trust. They were like, are you really going to let us do this? Can I double check this policy? Like, I’m not sure if I fully understood it because it’s, it’s different and it sounds nice, it sounds like too good to be true, even though this is such a simple version of implementing some alternative grading. Yeah.

A few other things. Yeah, one thing that was nice was you’d get students coming to office hours who would want to just work through the quiz and go through it all, but it was not antagonistic because there’s no battle for, do I deserve a point here or anything like that? I’m extremely conflict averse. And when I have a like a negative interaction I’ll often be like thinking about it all night after and I’m like, is that fair? Is it right? The student is now screwed because they got this thing wrong or whatever it is. And so it really it also changes the the tone of the interactions with students in a really lovely way. And I’ve had students a bunch of times say, oh, yeah, I bombed that but I know I get another chance So that’s what I’m focusing on and I’m like, that is amazing. Say that again. Can I record you saying that?

Boz: That brings up a couple of, you know, points that are pretty, I don’t know if I want to go as far as saying universal, but it’s really common amongst educators that use any kind of alternative grading is with traditional grading it really is a points game. It’s all about those points. Whether it’s, you know, the conversation, the reaction to feedback, the reaction to failure, it’s all about gaming the points.

And, and you’re right. It does have oftentimes almost an antagonistic type of relationship between the educator and the student, because it’s all about give me as many points as I can get. Whereas I had the same experience when I, when I changed. My conversations with my students instantly changed from how do I get more points, how do I get extra credit, to what about the learning targets am I not showing you I understand. Or what is it that I don’t understand?

So that, that change in conversation and that change it from focusing on point gaming to actual learning is as, as far as I’m aware of, anyone I’ve ever talked to, that is pretty universal and it’s pretty quick. You, like you, you both said you saw that almost immediately. I, I know I saw it in the first semester of me, of me doing it with my high school students even, but also you’re right about that training. Our students, it’s not their fault that they, that they’re, they’re point hungry because that’s what they’ve been trained for for so many years. Cause that’s all the grading has been is just give me the points.

Sharona: And it’s not just training. It’s actually a very rational reaction to the reality of the mathematics. It’s not just that we’ve trained them, it is the reality. Those points matter more and those deadlines matter more than any learning because we couldn’t have told them what they didn’t know and how to get better, because we didn’t even know. Often when I gave a midterm and I looked at a problem, I’m like, I don’t know if that’s going to be on the final. So I can’t tell you if it’s going to be on the final. And you know, that’s just really, really just weird. There was another thing that you said that I wanted to follow up on. So you said you started doing interviews. So did you know from the beginning that you were going to approach these class changes as a research project?

Brie: No.

Sharona: And I apologize if you already said that.

Brie: I knew because it was during the course creation, I was thinking about doing something radically different than I had done before. And even though it is small, it’s a small change, it was a radical change for me. You know, I had been, I’ve been teaching for eight years now and I hadn’t done anything like that. And I was thinking, I was playing around with the idea of allowing students to write part of their final to increase agency in their learning. And when Rob and I were just brainstorming, it just, it was, it was the perfect timing because I was creating this course, but I believe that he has a different, a different story.

Rob: I was going to say. Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t know my first year and it went super well. And I was like, this was great. Maybe I should, partway through the second year I was like, I should study this in some way. I should gather some systematic data to see what students are actually experiencing. And I would always check to see who benefited the most from doing it and how much grades changed and little quantitative things. But that was as far as I had gotten no systematic research in the, until kind of, I think Brie provided a good push to approach it more systematically.

Sharona: So when did you do that systematically?

Rob: Yeah, it was 40 the first year I taught it and then 60 and then 70 maybe over the three years?

Brie: Right, yeah. So he had implemented it three times. I had implemented it twice. And then we recruited students for interviews. And so that given the fact that there wasn’t a super high sample size, we kind of you know, steered clear of surveys and things like that and, and thought that the better approach, this would be a qualitative study.

And so I have a pretty huge lab of undergraduate researchers. And so I said, yeah, I’ve got some, some researchers that I would love to get some experience in both interviewing, doing interviews and analyzing qualitative data. And so two of the undergraduates in our lab helped out with the project and that was really critical because well, one for the interviews, it was great to have, I think, their peers interview them because they’re much more relaxed talking to their peers than any profession professor and, you know, peers are more relatable.

So students really opened up. And also I think it was really important ,because they both provided a unique lens during the data analysis that I don’t think Rob and I would have picked up on because we’re not at least undergraduate students anymore. We’re still students, but of a different flavor. And so I think that that was, that was a really critical part was to have undergraduates lead the way and doing the interviews and being an integral part of the qualitative data analysis.

Sharona: Interesting. Did any of your undergraduate researchers, had they experienced any of the second chance grading? I would just.

Brie: Yeah. No, they, they actually hadn’t, but they were very interested in the study, because they had first hand experience with how awful grades can be. And so, yeah, they were very, very interested in that. I actually think I’ve had more interest in that study from the undergrads than some of my other studies because it’s, it’s hit so close to home for them.

Boz: So what were some of the results? Like what came out of this research in those interviews?

Brie: Well, first off, Rob, did you want to talk about Self Determination theory?

Rob: Sure. Yeah. So we got responses all over the place. We’d asked, the interview protocol had quite a few different questions, not, not particularly leading towards a particular kind of way of thinking, but questions gauging their experience with traditional versus alternative grading practices and how they felt experiencing different kinds of classes. And then as we were analyzing things, we realized that in a sense we were thinking about some combination of motivation for learning and well being. And so we decided to try to anchor things in a framework called self determination theory. Which is this framework about basically about, like, well being and health, but often thought of in a motivational framework where you think about for someone to be able to be internally, intrinsically motivated to do things, they need to satisfy some basic psychological needs. They need to feel a sense of autonomy, like they have some control over what they’re doing, and it’s not just driven by forces outside of their control. They need to feel competence, like they are able to achieve the things that they want to set out to do. And they need to feel relatedness, some sense of connectedness feeling cared for, caring for others. And these three things interact, sense of autonomy, sense of competence, sense of relatedness, interact to shape motivation.

So this is a theory to think about student motivation and wellbeing. The sense of autonomous motivation and control is very strongly related to many measures of feeling better psychologically and to being motivated to engage in actions. It’s used in a lot of different fields, including the health sciences, including education. And so we decided to anchor our coding in the way students were talking about how this influenced autonomy, like their sense of control in their learning, how this influenced their competence, like how much did they feel like they were learning and getting better and their sense of relatedness to what extent where they was this related to them? Connecting with peers or connecting with their instructor and feeling heard and seen.

Brie: Yeah. So out of those three tenants of self determination theory, perceived competence or a person’s sense of proficiency or opportunity to become more proficient in a task, 70 percent of the students we interviewed felt this perceived competence when talking about alternative assessments. Specifically the second chance quizzes, but also other alternative assessments that they had experienced in other classes, although that was either usually not there for students. They hadn’t experienced it, or it was very few and far between.

And then roughly the same amount, 72% of students, reflected on these aspects of autonomy when provided opportunities to engage in the second chance quizzes or in just lower stakes assessments in general. So the classes that have midterm and the final as your total grade, those would be considered high stakes. And then also same amount, 72 percent of students discussed relatedness in terms of their comfort and particularly when talking about the connections with them and their instructors, we didn’t see too many talking about related relatedness to their peers. But again, we didn’t set out to ask about these three tenants. They kind of just emerged from the data when we started analyzing it.

And, I think one of the most disheartening things that we found was we asked all students what they thought the purpose of grade. And so I think I’m just going to ask you to what do you think the purpose of grades are?

Boz: So, I’m laughing right now because Sharona and I do several different types of training and workshops. And usually our first question is what is the purpose of an end term grade? And then what is the meaning? So what’s the difference between an A to a B or a B to a C? So yeah, we, we ask those exact same questions with our class.

Brie: Oh, tell us!

Sharona: We have thoughts. We have thoughts. So what I would say, because I’ve done quite a bit of study on the history of grading and things, is that there are actually two very distinct, and often at odds, purposes for grades in the bigger world. And then I have a purpose for my grades. So the two purposes, in theory, are to communicate what a student has learned, that’s one purpose, to other people, to the student, to other instructors, to future stakeholders. And the second purpose is to rank and score students. And both of those are, at times, legitimate needs. I would argue that they are both overused and poorly executed in both cases. My personal purpose for grades is to communicate true student learning and incentivize that learning.

Boz: Mine is similar and also very similar to something that, you know, you might read in, in one of Guskey’s things or in one of Feldman’s things. But, I think the purpose of grading should be to communicate a level of student’s mastery of content at the end of the term, whatever that term is.

Brie: Well, that, those answers very aligned with what students said as well. Not maybe not as coherent as that, as we both have been studying this and have an entire podcast on it. But the horrific thing about what our students talked about was that half the participants attributed the purpose of grades to white supremacy and the history.

Sharona: Only half?

Brie: Yeah.

Sharona: Cause I’d actually go much higher personally. But I, okay.

Brie: I was astonished by this because, most of the professors I know, this does not come to mind. I mean, I just gave a talk on this at a conference, and when I said that, there was laughter in the room, because people were so shocked, they didn’t know how to respond. Like, people came up to me after and was like, I think that there was laughter because I didn’t know how to respond. I was not expecting that. And it just goes to show, our students are more critical sometimes than the instructors. You know, have more of a critical lens to this and just to give you one quote.

So Maria, which is a pseudonym, they said, based on what I’ve learned, education is very subjective. Grades are just there to measure people based on the white education model. It’s unfair. A lot of the time they don’t consider people’s different backgrounds and people learn differently. And sometimes these courses that offer exams as the only way to grade people, it’s biased toward white students. I think that that our grading system and the history of that. I mean, they don’t, I’m not, I’m not sure they even know the history of how grades were first, you know, brought into the education model. But yeah.

Sharona: So they’re not familiar with Horace Mann and the Prussian side of grading and, and Harvard and Yale with their distinctions. I don’t know. How could, how could they not know that?

Brie: Yeah. So I think that students are a lot more aware than, than we give them credit for. And.

Boz: Well, but I’ve brought this up before in a past interview. Actually, it might have been with Dr Jeff Schinske, thank you. But at some level, us educators, we were successful at this traditional system. At some level, we had to have we’re the products, you know, the successful products of the system. So a lot of the like negative consequences of it we don’t think that much about because we were the ones that succeeded to get through it.

At some level, if we’re in the position we’re in, we had to have succeeded. So hearing from people that aren’t necessarily in education, what they think the purpose of grading is, and some of the facts of or the aspects of the racist nature of the history of grades and things like that coming up actually doesn’t surprise me that much. Like I’m really, I’m thrilled that, you know, students can see and understand that, but I’m actually not that surprised and also shockingly not surprised when you said about when you presented at that conference that so many educators don’t think about it. Cause again, we were the ones that succeeded through this kind of model.

Brie: Right. I think often our view is myopia because of that.

Again, all white, all male, all supremacy. And then of course you’ve got, you, you talked about that person doing the curved grading. And I wonder if the person looking into the curved grading is aware of the eugenicist nature of the normal curve and its design. So, so much fun.

Rob: Oh yeah. Oh no, she definitely is. There’s a, there’s quite a few people on campus on a bit of a crusade to address curving on our campus at UC Davis. There are big structural barriers and big pushbacks from particular departments that sort of rely on it in part for one of the least, in my sense, least valid ways, which is to normalize among instructors, to fix a fail rate to be high enough in some cases in some departments, which I will not name

Sharona: . Well, and that is the place where these changes that we’re trying to make to alternative grading are the biggest threat to the power structure. Because if we’re able to redesign our courses to be based on a coherent set of learning outcomes, giving our students multiple chances to achieve those learning outcomes to the point where we can hold our students to higher standards, but they still get high grades, then suddenly everyone, if not everyone, everyone, 95 percent of people can succeed. And then who’s the elite?

Brie: Right, exactly. Exactly. Well put. And, and another, another one last finding from our study was almost 90 percent of students expressed dissatisfaction with traditional grading, light curving or these opaque distributions or the hidden curriculum of how they’re going to be graded. And, almost 80%. talked about how these practices were detrimental just to the overall mental health and well being. How much it causes stress and anxiety. That was also pretty ubiquitous finding across, across their responses. And then also many students identify excessive content coverage on exams in these high stakes, which actually Jeff Schinske and Kimberly Tanner and I just published a paper on the content beast.

Boz: I actually think that’s what’s going to be a big part of Jeff’s keynote at the grading conference is going to be about that.

Brie: Yes, it is. Yes. Yes, it is. Yep. He definitely talked to me about it. Yeah. So you’ll hear all about that at that grading conference.

Sharona: So. You found all these things and you’ve done these things and we just talked about the fact that the power structure is going to start to hit back. Have you experienced any of that backlash yet?

Brie: I haven’t.

Sharona: Have you?

Brie: I mean, I haven’t the, but again, it’s in a, it’s in a course that I don’t think that my department really blinks an eye at because it’s not a course that’s required and it’s not a course that all majors in our department take. Once you start looking at the courses that apply to hundreds to thousands of students. That’s when I think it’s, it’s more regulated. What about you, Rob?

Rob: Yeah, so I have been waging a soft campaign in this giant intro bio class towards us reconsidering our assessment strategies. And it got all the way to the point where I was like, well, if we’re doing two midterms in a final, no matter what, can we at least modularize the final and map it to the same learning outcomes and let students choose if they want to replace it. So they at least get one extra chance or something. And it’s, and it’s the point where everyone’s like, Oh, that, that sounds kind of nice. And then they’re like trying to figure out what, but they can say, because it’s so it’s, it’s hard not to resist something that’s different.

Sharona: I would recommend talking to Dr. Eden Tanner at Ole Miss. She teaches 170 person Gen Chem class. And she, I don’t really understand what exactly she did, but whatever she did involved scantrons and multiple choice quizzes, but multiple chances. And she got 169 of her students to take the final exam, which is the American chemical society exam. And I think 168 of them passed it, which is unheard of.

Brie: Yeah. So

Boz: I did have a question to kind of clarify something. The classes that you guys did this redesign, this multiple our second chance testing on. It was still graded in a lot of traditional other ways. Correct? Like it still uses an average in percentages. Is that true?

Rob: Yes. Yeah. So ours still mapped into the kind of linear weighted addition of points in my class, which is something I’d love to break away from as well, but I still want.

Boz: So I wanted to point that out to point out to our listeners because we just did an episode not too long ago. about Robert Talbert’s, or Dr. Robert Talbert’s blog post on 20 small things that you can do right away. And this is exactly what you, I mean, you guys addressed a specific problem, which is those early mistakes, just tearing up grades. You didn’t go completely, you know, away from all the traditionals. You’ve made this, you know, one or two, Actually, I think you guys made two really big changes. The fact that you’re doing the second chance testing, but also that direct alignment with learning outcomes that just those two still had a huge impact. It sounds like it had a big impact on both your students and on you as educators and how your relationships with your students change.

So for those listening like it really can, those small changes, you know, you don’t have to jump off the deep end like Sharona did, like she did a running cannonball. I did more of approach like what you guys are talking about where I made a few you know several changes till I got to the point where I was just like, forget it. I’m throwing all of it out. Yeah, this is a perfect example. And we did, it was what three or four episodes ago where we did this 20 small changes. And I love the fact that you guys have the whole research on just making those two small changes and the impact that just those two had.

Office hours though, we offer a bunch of office hours. It’s especially great when there’s co instructors because then we can have a whole bunch spread across the week. And so you still get to talk one on one with students during office hours, except maybe the week before an exam when there’s 50 people in the room and you’re basically just working problems together.

Rob: Shouldn’t it be the opposite? That these are the students who are the least experienced with the structures of college and the most likely to get blindsided by misalignment between their practices and what’s happening in the classroom? And the ways in which you can make your grading more flexible and more transparent, more aligned, should all be especially helpful for them.

Brie: Yeah, that’s, that’s really, is it students saying that or is it instructors saying students are saying that because

Sharona: I would say it’s people one step removed from the instructional team. So administration and or departmental leadership who are hearing from the students that are not succeeding. And because there’s been some pushback on some lovely DFW rates. It’s just something that I’m having trouble discussing back to say, it’s just like I’m looking at them going, I don’t get what you’re saying, so I’m not quite sure how to address it.

Brie: Oh, and interestingly, the students, my seniors, when I’ve talked to them about, you know, these alternative grading structures, they’re like, Oh yeah, it kind of brings me back to high school because I had something similar in high school. Or so it would seem to me that it would be easier for freshmen to get behind it. I feel like they’re the most malleable ways that they’re not yet versed in how oppressive education can be at the university level. And so that seems, sounds like more of a fear from the powers that be. It’s more about speed than it is students.

Rob: This sounds like a research project.

Brie: Yeah, it does.

Sharona: Yeah, well, I’m an adjunct, makes research a little more tricky.

We’re coming up towards the end of our, our time here. Is there anything that we haven’t asked you that you would very much like to share? For those of you that can’t see our video screens, they’re looking at each other with this look of, I don’t know. So let me rephrase the question. What’s next for you guys with alternative grading?

Brie: Well, I’m really interested in playing around with specs grading, I’ve heard some really great things about it from some of my community college colleagues that they’ve tried. And maybe partnering with them. I would love to see and learn from them, you know, how they’re doing it in their community colleges and if a partnership could form between, you know, my, my, I work in R1 university, but somehow involving them.

Because I think that people in adjunct positions and people at community colleges that teach, are much better teachers because they have time, right? They have, they’re not pulled in the direction of research or grants, you know, and I’m the product of a community college. And, and it was an amazing experience. And the only reason that I’m in science is because of that experience. So that’s kind of my next step.

Rob: Yeah, I guess I got really excited as we were connecting our interviews to the self determination theory approach. And then I sort of fell down the rabbit hole of autonomy supportive instruction more generally. And so now I’m like seeing everything, this lens of like, what are the ways in which I’m not ever coercing my students. And so I, that’s sort of my guiding approach is I want to like, keep on finding ways to be the coach with no coercion somehow in the classroom and exactly what grading approaches I do, I’m not sure about, but I’m kind of just, I’m really excited about student agency and involvement and seeing where I go. I’m still afraid of going all the way off to ungrading.

Sharona: Yeah, I haven’t gone there yet. And I’ve been doing this for about eight years. So.

Brie: Eight years?

Brie: Oh, wow. You are a pioneer.

So, all right. So before you guys do go and before we wrap it up, I do know we’re coming close to time, but we’ve talked a lot about this research. Where can people find it? Like, has it been published? What’s its title? Where, where can we find it? And, we’ll of course make sure we link it in this episode show notes.

Rob: Well, it’s a paper in prep, so it’s mostly nothing. But we are going to submit it, hopefully by summer. We’re both competing busyness of other things going on, but we’re both really excited about it. So we’re working every week on it.

Brie: Yeah. So, and we, we have a particular journal in mind and so, yeah, it’s, and it’s almost done. So we’re, we’re going to get it out the door here pretty soon

Boz: That’s great. I do. You know, we’ll invite you in and if, once it is published, if you want, let us know, we’ll be happy to go back and link it to this episode retroactively then, and then maybe even have you guys back on and talk a little bit about kind of the reaction and stuff a little bit after it’s been published and gets out a little.

Sharona: Well, thank you both so much for coming on. This was a wonderful conversation and it’s so exciting to see, it’s exciting to see this happening also at the R1s because that’s the other excuse we get is either, well, this belongs only at or we have to be like, and so having the R1s come along. It’s a huge benefit to everybody because as I was just recently at a workshop, they said almost all of our future professors who then become the future teachers of teachers, they’re all coming from R1 institutions. All of our disciplinary based educators for science are coming from R1s. So if we can introduce this to R1 students. It’s just phenomenal. So thank you.

Brie: Just FYI I’m not from an R1.

Sharona: No, no, no. But you are working. No, no, no. But the both of you are working at R1s and you’re teaching R1 students. And the point we’re making is, especially if you have graduate students that you work with, those graduate students from UC Davis are going to go off and become professors somewhere else and be teaching future science teachers and future math teachers. And we need to impact not only our current teachers, but our future teachers. And so getting more and more people at R1 institutions to consider changing grading practices at R1s is going to be critical for this work. So thank you for that. Boz, you want to take it home for us?

Boz: All right. Well, again, thank you guys both. And thank you all for listening. And we’ll see you next time.

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.

Rob: 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.