The Grading Podcast

Boz: Because I was also observed at the Cal State level this last week. And there was a part of my, observational review that I was, or feedback that I was given. There was a line in there where the person observing me talked about the fact that we had this short moment of laughter in my class. And how refreshing that was to see laughter in a math class. That made me feel good until I started thinking about it and then it made me feel really bad. ’cause why is, why was that so unusual? Why was that so uncommon that this reviewer had to put in there that it was so refreshing to see a little bit of laughter in a math class?

Welcome to the grading podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’ learning. From traditional grading to meth 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: Really? You’re going to start with that question?

Boz: Yeah. I know this is only audio, not video. But I think our audience will be able to hear it in your voice as well. You seem like you’re a little bit under the weather there.

Sharona: Well, actually this is me about 80 percent better. I have been flattened all week with an illness, although I never actually felt that bad, but I have generated more runny nose, runny eyes, runny everything for about a week. I have been dragging myself from the bed to the zoom chair and back, and I’m finally coming up and feeling alive, but it’s still in my voice and my throat and my head. So I am feeling pretty good, but I’m not a hundred percent well. So I apologize to everybody for the nasally in my head quality and the candies that I am going to be sucking on to prevent myself from coughing through this entire episode.

Boz: Yeah, I talked to you earlier in the week, and you do sound up much better than you did then, but you can definitely still hear the, the nasalness, congestion in your voice, and it’s going to be funny to see. if you’re quick enough to mute like you just did when you have to cough. Let’s see how many times your

Sharona: I’m planning on your editing skills to to deal with it. So how are you doing though?

Boz: You know, it’s, we just had my midterm grades for my high school just got turned in. So I’m about to get into a really busy part of my high school job. But looking at some of those grades. And, you know, every Friday night I don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned this on the podcast. But one of our things that we do at the college level that we, we work together is, all the professors get together and we calibrate and norm our grading. This is, I think, something very unique at the college level, and we’ve been doing it for years, and yes, we do it Friday night, which seems weird,

Sharona: Friday night at 6 PM,

Boz: but those, the conversation last night, and some of the things I’ve seen from some of my students at the high school level, really get me questioning, and I think this is, It’s a prudent question and topic for us to be talking about right now because this is midterms for most semesters in most settings, you know, if you’re not doing midterm grades or midterm exams, you probably have done it in the last week or so. So I think the

Sharona: Or for anyone on the semester system quarters,

Boz: yeah, for the semester, if you’re on the quarter system at the college level, yes, your calendar is, crazy different. But for anyone that’s in a traditional K 12 setting or a semester setting in a college, this is probably around, around your midterm of your semester. So what topic are we going to be talking about today, Sharona?

Sharona: So the topic that we’re going to talk about is student perseverance as it relates to alternative grading specifically, because one of the four pillars is multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning. And in order for a student to take advantage of those multiple opportunities, they have to be willing to engage. So for a student who gets it right the first time, this isn’t important. But for a lot of our students, you know, we believe that mistakes lead to learning. But what happens and do students actually persevere? So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. And I wanted to start with a little bit of reminder context for anyone who might be coming to the podcast. This is your first episode or maybe you haven’t been following really thoroughly, but we’ve talked a lot about, The behaviorism that traditional grades sort of relies on, you know, traditional grading assumes that you can use grades as a stick to motivate students to do the behaviors you want them to do. We tend to dispute that it does that. But for the first time in a long time, I’ve been thrust back into a traditional grading environment in a lot of my classes. So we’re starting to, and I’m starting to try to bring in some of the principles of alternative grading, even though I haven’t actually brought the full grading system in because I can’t yet. And we’re seeing some surprising things, at least surprising to my mind, except that if we think back to the fact that we’re, You and I don’t believe that traditional grading motivates behaviors. Maybe this is kind of obvious that this is going to happen. But so we’re seeing some some things that we’re trying to unpack in both traditional grading and alternative grading. So would that be a fair assessment of where we want to go today?

Boz: Absolutely. And something just hit me and I just want to point it out because I want to kind of laugh at you about it. Last year during this time, I was in the shoes that you are in now. I was teaching in another coordinated class that I had no control over the grading and it was a traditional class and you made fun and you laughed at some of the struggles I was having.

So.

Sharona: Okay. But I didn’t laugh at you.

Boz: Not only is the shoe on the other foot now, but you’ve got it with like five shoes because you have multiple classes.

Sharona: Well, and the biggest difference is you had no authority or control. And I, in theory, am the authority and control of these classes. And yet, for a variety of reasons, I do not have. the authority and control or the ability to make the changes quite yet. So that makes it a little bit harder because I feel more responsible. You were just sort of the victim of the whole thing.

Boz: But that’s what you get for making fun of me that you’ve got it 10 times worse.

Sharona: That’s usually how it works between us. Absolutely. So I want to set some context and then I want to ask a question. So the context that I’m operating from is we have the statistics course that is currently running both types of grading system, alternative grading and traditional grading. And I’m going to take the chance that none of the decision makers at my university are listening to this podcast cause I’m going to be kind of frank about it. And one of the things that’s been a little bit surprising in some ways, but I think it’s going to wash out in the end is more students are actually taking and retaking the quizzes in the traditional setting then are in some of the alternative grading settings, even though the quizzes are actually a bigger part of the grade in the alternative grading system than they are in the traditional grading system.

So in the traditional, we have, we have these 10 statistics learning outcomes and we keep giving these weekly quizzes. And in the alternative grading system, they have It’s actually quite a few chances, and they have to master it twice, and then the traditional grading system. They get quiz one and quiz two, and they get the maximum of those two, and then that’s it. And it’s every standard is 3 percent of their grade, so the quizzes add up to 30%, and I’m kind of surprised at how much more compliance I am seeing, at least early on, in the quizzes in the traditional grading.

So that was the first thing that struck me. Because I’m like, well, wait a second. The whole point of alternative grading is you get to make mistakes and improve and get full credit. But we’re seeing this huge drop off of people not even trying. You’re giving up by the second or third quiz. And yet in the traditional grading, where they can’t recover from a bad grade if they get a bad grade twice, they’re persevering more. So that was very confusing to me. At least they appear to be so far. I have thoughts on that. And then secondly, we’re starting to allow retakes in the pre-calculus courses. So if they scored less than a 70% on their midterm, they can retake the midterm to improve that score to make it a 70%. So to get to a passing score on the midterm and the midterms are like 20% of their grade, so they’re pretty hefty percentage of their grade.

But out of 320 students who are eligible to retake the midterm. from the first class. Only 80 did it.

Boz: So we’re talking about a fourth, about 25 percent of. Now, when you said students that are eligible, what do you mean by eligible?

Sharona: So the main eligibility is they have to have scored less than 70 percent to be eligible to to redo their grade. So they’ve already.

Boz: And why is that?

Sharona: So the reason for that is it is my first attempt to mitigate the disastrous damages of a grading scale that is skewed towards failure.

Boz: But, but why? So I, I know the answer. I’m trying to get you to say it. But if I scored a 72 and I wasn’t happy with the 72, Why could I not retake it?

Sharona: Because there are instructor perceptions in a traditional grading system that you need to learn the material by a certain time, or you just can’t, although we have also implemented that they can retake it on the final and improve it. So, It’s a little bit of a of a,

Boz: okay. You, you, you’re going,

Sharona: I’m not saying what you want me to say.

Boz: Yeah. You’re, and you mentioned this when we first started it, but you just did it really briefly. You’re allowing retakes on these midterms, but only up to 70%. So if a student gets a perfect score on the retake their original only goes up to a 70. So if I scored a 72, I’m not eligible to take it because I can’t improve. Cause the best I can. So that’s what I was trying to get.

Sharona: Sorry, I didn’t hear where you were trying to take me, but, and that is the question is why, you know, why not let them improve all the way to where they improve and it has to do with people’s instructors belief systems about what it means to assess learning and when it has to be learned and what’s fair.

Boz: So yeah, this is one of the, I think one of the possible fundamental beliefs that bring people to alternative grading or pushes them away from alternative grading is this idea of what should the student’s final grade mean? And to me, It should mean what they have learned at the end of the semester or the end of the year. I don’t care when they learned it. I don’t care if they learned it in the two weeks that I taught the unit or if it takes them, you know, additional four, five, six, as long as they know it by the time that semester or that year ends, I want my grade to indicate that. That is one of my fundamental beliefs that, that drew me towards alternative grading. And I really do believe that’s one of the things that will also push people away from alternative grading, this idea of, oh no, you’ve got to, you’ve got to study and you’ve got to be successful on my timeline, not on your timeline. Like it’s got, it’s not fair. Somehow, if I gave student A, four more weeks to learn the material than student B, that student B should be rewarded because they got it in those first couple of weeks, where student A, for whatever reason, took longer, but still got it.

Sharona: Now, there is something I want to mention about what you said, because I agree with you. I want to know what they know by the end. And, I know that if I don’t put a lot of structure into my class and a lot of deadlines and a lot of places where I can check in with students on their progress, just because they need to know it to the end does not mean that I’m dumping the responsibility for learning it onto the student. And they try to get it all at the end. Like I want to be clear that there’s a difference between as long as they know it versus I’m not going to check anything in the middle.

Boz: Yeah. And we talked about this on a few different episodes. And you know, this idea came up actually in one of our interviews that there’s an inverse relationship between student motivation of the course and structure. The more the students are motivated to take that course, whether it’s because of major or whatever else, the less structure you need and vice versa. So yeah, when we’re talking about most of the high school math classes or these freshmen before gen ed math classes, yeah, we definitely need. a decent amount of structure because we were serving a lot of students that math might not be their favorite thing. In fact, probably more so math is their least favorite.

Sharona: Well, that’s certainly true in the statistics. But I’m the students who are in the pre calculus in theory, most of them have indicated some interest in doing a science related major. I checked again with this and I know that You know, this is what the thought is, whether or not reality meets expectations. That’s a whole nother conversation, but starting from the premise that everyone that’s taking pre calculus has indicated an interest in a major that requires pre calculus in theory. They should see the interest or relevance or whatever in the class because it is directly related to their major.

Boz: I, I would push back against that so hard because why, why do we force doctors to take calculus?

Sharona: I understand that, but the point is they have self declared a major and the major says you have to have this. Now that may not be enough, but nonetheless, it’s not like some general GE, you know, I’m going to be a music major. Why do I need a math class? Cause the university says it’s a GE and I just have no interest. Like it’s a little bit more directly related because it’s not just the university at large is saying you have to have this. Your major is now saying you have to have this.

Boz: Yeah, no, I get that, but I’m just saying. A lot of those, you know, STEM majors that aren’t the M’s still don’t necessarily like or are highly motivated for the math. It’s still something they have to do because they have to do it.

Boz: So the first thing I saw, cause, you know, perseverance is something that we’ve been talking about and I mean, not just you and me, I mean the bigger we have really been talking about, especially in math education, at least since Common Core came out, if not long before, because one of the mathematical practice standards is perseverance. So this article and like the very first two paragraphs of this article, I, I wanted to get up and cheer. I mean, just, so this idea that A, perseverance might be one of the more important things in student success that is overlooked, and the fact that it is such an easy excuse to put on the students. In fact, I want to read one of the lines from this article. The very first sentence of the second paragraph. "Perseverance can be a seductive explanation of student failure due to the way it shifts attention away from pedagogical factors that may hinder students achievement and instead draws attention towards perceived deficiencies in students motivation." So this is a kind of a catch all of oh yeah, the students are just lazy or the students, you know, aren’t trying hard enough, takes all the blame out of the culture, the environment, and more importantly, out of the classroom and out of the teacher’s pedagogical practices.

Boz: I believe that is Dr.

Sharona: Yes. Sorry. Dr. Eric Toshalis, he points out that to overcome academic struggles. It’s understanding that given the culture of blame that surrounds teaching, that he doesn’t want to say, Oh, it’s the teacher’s fault. And yet it’s the educator’s responsibility to teach the skills necessary for success and to present material using techniques that motivate students to engage. And so he brings up a bunch of research and again, we’ll read soon, but reasons that students tend not to persevere. And I thought this list was, Incredibly valuable.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: So this is, there are nine bullet points, I believe, but it says they feel excluded. They don’t have reasons to value the outcomes or the process. Ability differences highlighted in the learning environment, make them feel stupid. The material they are learning is culturally exclusionary or personally irrelevant.

Behavioral norms alienate and marginalize them. They do not believe they will be successful. They haven’t been taught the skills necessary to achieve. They are given insufficient voice and choice in how they learn and what they do. And their relationships with educators are strained or non existent. So I wanted to look at these nine relative to people who have introduced alternative grading.

Because in theory, I would think that alternative grading addresses some of these things.

Boz: It addresses quite a few of these things. And unfortunately, I think with potentially with the way you implement your alternative grading can actually amplify some of these.

Sharona: So the ones that I think are the most likely to be addressed.

Specifically in a well executed or an alternative grading environment that has been executed with authenticity, is not believing they will be successful if you’ve been successful at doing buy in and things like this, in theory, students should have more opportunity to feel they will be successful because they’re not being mathematically excluded at a very early stage.

I also think the ability differences may potentially be minimized or lessened at least, because we’re making the point that just because someone gets it first doesn’t mean they get it better. And, you know, there’s no comparison between students, but what about some of these other ones?

Boz: Well, one of the big ones I think, and I’ve talked a lot about how, especially when I was doing traditional grading, how my grading was actually contradicting what I was trying to tell my students about my beliefs about math and the fact that, you know, math.

I, I joke that math stands for mistakes allow thinking to happen, and that I, I valued mistakes. And yet my traditional grading always contradicted that without me really realizing it until I switched. So I think this relationship and again, we’ve talked a lot about this on the podcast about how my conversations with my students changed almost instantly. But this relationship between me and my students, I think is a very healthy, and has become healthier since I’ve gone to alternative grading. And I think that is actually one of the underlinings for a lot of these other things on this list is if you don’t have a good trusting relationship with your students, then you run the risk of them feeling more excluded or of them not believing that they can be successful or that they have a voice in how things are done. Like all of that comes down to relationship.

Sharona: I agree. And in fact, later on in this article Dr. Toshalis says he asked the question, how do we avoid lapsing into counterproductive blame the victim ideologies? And it’s very difficult to focus on students intrinsic qualities. They may not be very malleable or formable, but there’s a bunch of social and emotional factors, let’s call them, that can be influenced, such as the student’s sense of self efficacy.

So if we can demonstrate to students through their own work that they are capable of achieving something, maybe it’s an early win, maybe it’s a scaffolded exercise, something like that, we can build their sense of self efficacy by identifying it.

Boz: Yeah. And that goes way back to our interview with the one and only Dr. Guskey, that was one of his points. And one of the things that they found in some of their research about how do you change, how do you change beliefs and stuff in the, one of them was that early success. So I think you’re absolutely right with that point. Again, that goes back to research from Guskey and many others.

Sharona: Exactly. There’s some other ones mentioned here that we’ve talked about, but the more that I see this research, the more I get a sense that we need to pull back from some of our content to make space for these other things and one of them is the extent to which they feel they belong. Finding the time and the space in the classroom to build the classroom community.

It’s not enough to do it the first week. It’s not enough to do it any one week. We need to find a way to reinvigorate community in the classroom, I think literally every week, if not every class session.

Boz: Yeah. And, and we’re not talking about spending 20 percent or a third of your class doing social emotional check ins or SELs or what we call them at the K 12 level.

We’re not talking about that. Like you can literally do this with just the way you greet students and the couple of minutes before class or at the beginning or even in the middle of class just having a little bit of fun even.

I mean, it’s not I know so many people when you hear, oh, we’ve got to do this social emotional belongingness and stuff and their their first reaction is I’ve only got 55 minutes in a class period and you want me to take more time and I’ve got all these things and my students are already so far behind because they’re coming to me with so many deficit things.

So I’ve got to do all this extra stuff and I’ve got to get all, I don’t have time to do anything but content, content, content. And I’m like, yeah. Go bang your head on a wall. See how fast you get through it. I mean, take a little bit of time to grab a sledgehammer and knock the wall down and then try to go through it.

Sharona: There’s so many other things here. I’m going to mention one more, which is their level of connectedness to peers and adults. I still persist in seeing very quiet, disconnected classrooms. And it’s a complaint I get from instructors all the time. I can’t let them take their phones or their computers out because they do everything except what I’m asking them to do.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Well, again, that goes back to your behaviorism and I’m sorry, you can’t control what they’re thinking about. You might put their phones away and their computers away. Doesn’t mean they’re paying attention to you.

Boz: No. And trying to force compliance, is not gonna work. I mean, it just isn’t.

Sharona: So I want to get into some nitty gritty because I know that you are specifically successful at this. And in my opinion, you’re better at it than I am. So I was wondering if you could give some very specific examples of how you do this. Even from like the first moment you walk in the door, how do you make students feel included on a given day?

Boz: Before we get into that, I want to give a little bit of background of my class and this might seem like I’m bragging or boasting and I’m really not.

I don’t usually like talking in great detail about the successes of my class. But I think we want to, to set this one up. So at the beginning of this podcast, I mentioned our norming calls and some of the things that you were finding where students are not taking opportunities to do retakes or makeups.

I’ve graded all of my re-exams, my retakes before doing this podcast. Every one of my students that needed to take it, with the exception of one student, and then I had another that opened it and looked like they spent a few minutes and then gave up, and so I have two students that should have needed to take it that didn’t, and that’s it.

All of my other students that needed to take it and a few that didn’t, or a few that only needed the argument not the whole statistical standard, still retook the quiz. So I am seeing this perseverance. I am seeing students continuing to attempt, even though they’ve been unsuccessful so far.

So I am getting that perseverance. And again, I’m not trying to brag. I’m just trying to kind of set this up. And I do believe a lot of that comes from the relationship with the students that I have and my attempts to indicate to them my belief that I think they can succeed and try to boost their beliefs that they can succeed.

Sharona: But how do you do that? Get specific, please.

Boz: So it does definitely start with how you build those relationships from the very beginning. There’s a couple of things of activities that I like to do. One of them is an activity that is called how many can you win?

Which is this simple X and O game that I actually picked up from the course that I taught last fall. But the way I do that and the way that we build and have discussions throughout that activity, and I do take a little bit longer on that activity than I think most other people using it did. I know in my high school class we took a good solid two and a half days doing and discussing and trying to build on this activity. And really discussing how each time we got better and how we started off and nobody was able to succeed.

And by the time we had ended, everyone was succeeding and some groups were exceeding expectations. And that those conversations and just taking the time to do that and giving students that, that early win and really praising them for that early win, I think is one of the things that helps start off that, that relationship.

Sharona: So I’ve done that activity. I have no idea how you can make that two and a half days. And this is what I’m saying about getting into details. I, at the longest, if I gave it as much time in the world as I thought I could possibly have, it’s like 45 minutes. So when you say the conversations, literally, what are you doing?

Are you going group to group one at a time? Are you talking to them individually? Are you talking to the hole class? Are you letting them talk? Like, what are you saying? Cause again, this activity, the general idea is that people make false assumptions about the rules at the beginning. They start by competing. Right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And then how do, like, okay, so they finished the first go around, which takes I don’t know what, three to five minutes. So, what do you say? What don’t you say I should say?

Boz: So, first, I and when I said two and a half days, I meant my K 12 world.

Sharona: Right, I understand, but that’s still like two hours of time, at least.

Boz: Yeah, oh no, it’s, it’s a good two, because my classes are 50, 51 minutes, so.

Sharona: And I can do that activity in 20 minutes, and the longest I’ve ever been able to take is like 45. So I really want to know.

Boz: So the first thing is that the half day is actually the first day.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: So we set up some things, do some other classroom norms and some other things at the beginning of the period.

And I do this because, so we do that, we do the first activity where exactly I give very little directions. I’m saying, okay, here’s this six by six grid, one person’s X, one person’s O, see how many you can get five in a row, alternating turns.

And like you said, almost every single time. In fact, I’ve never had a group not do this. They instantly compete. They turn it into like this extended tic tac toe and no one. Yeah, nobody gets any fives in a row. So the first, like I said, the first time I do it, I have them do that. I have them compete and I go group by group, putting either a mastery check or a non mastery check. We don’t mention anything else. I’m like, okay, you guys all know, no one got mastery. So don’t feel bad. I put up on the board exactly how many attempts everyone’s had. I’m like, okay, first attempt, no one’s got it. So don’t feel bad.

Sharona: Did you give them a criteria for mastery ahead of time? And what was the criteria?

Boz: The criteria was get at least score at least a four. So they’ve got to get.

Sharona: You didn’t say whether it was the team is a four or an individual is a four. You just said score at least a four.

Boz: No, the, the directions said count how many times can you get either five X’s or five O’s in a row?

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: So their, their goal was to get five of them in a row, at least four different ways.

Sharona: Got it. Okay.

Boz: But yeah, with very little explanation that, I mean, it was there, but..

Sharona: So that’s something I didn’t know you did is you put on a criteria of mastery, get four of them and then you mark their papers. So we’ve already started to introduce alt grading, at this point.

Boz: And yeah, and that’s it. That’s why I do it partway through the day. So I know it can end right there, which gives me time to go and actually give them feedback because I also have them turn this in digitally. When I say I give a stamp, I don’t like physically mean a stamp.

I go by and mark on the rubric that’s also there electronically, but I go back and give feedback and the next day, that’s the first thing we do is take a minute, look at your feedback, because it’s, it’s group feedback, then, we come back, do we have questions on the feedback? Okay, turn to a group next to you. Share your feedback, have them look at each other’s feedback.

Sharona: Okay, so I want to stop you right there, because I see several things happening. So first of all, you don’t really have a relationship of trust with them yet. I mean, you’ve started to build one.

Boz: Yeah, we had started, cause this is usually, at least in the high school class, this would have usually started at day two and a half. So I’ve had two days.

Sharona: Right. But two days does not build actual legitimate trust between students and teachers. So yes, you’ve started that, but we’re not at full blown "I trust Mr. Bosley", especially in the college class, I don’t think you have that much time. You don’t, you do this on the first day?

Boz: Especially this year with, with the way our university started on a Wednesday instead of a Monday followed by two more Monday holidays. So, yeah, I, I had to do it really, really pared down version of this.

Sharona: But so I want to point several things out. So you don’t yet have, you have a little bit of trust, but not a lot yet.

But yet this is a very low stakes activity. There’s pretty much no one who cannot handle putting an X or an O in a square, right? So there’s a sense of even ability. There’s a little bit of common shared experience, because you can sort of assume that most people have had experience with Tic Tac Toe.

So there’s very little barrier to entry on this. But yet you’ve already introduced the grading system and now you’ve introduced feedback, right? So you’ve introduced a feedback loop. You’re already working in groups, but again, on this very low stakes activity, because this doesn’t count toward a grade. You haven’t told them it’s part of the grade. You’re just like, we’re doing this thing.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: And in fact, I had at this point hadn’t, at least in the K 12 class, I hadn’t really explained that much about my grading system yet. I use this activity to introduce my grading architecture and my grading philosophy.

Sharona: So then you get them in groups to discuss their feedback with the other groups and what happens from that?

Boz: So give, give them a couple of minutes to work with the multiple groups, and then we have two or three minute conversation. Okay. What did we do wrong? What happened?

And then I let them go back and try it again. Now, this time, the second time, I definitely have groups that will get at least four. But I still have a lot of groups that don’t. And it’s usually for little things. So like we said, this is a six by six. Imagine a six by six tech Tic Tac Toe grid. They’re supposed to make 15 X’s and 15 O’s alternating between X’s and O’s. And they only have a little bit of time between each to do it.

Sharona: What happens if they use too many X’s and O’s?

Boz: Well, yeah, and that’s usually what happens is at that point, a lot of groups will fill up the entire thing.

And again, no mastery. Like I give them.

Sharona: So even though they might have four. Of these things in a row. They’re not legitimate because they use too many X’s and O’s.

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: Then again, quick round of feedback or of reflection. What did you do wrong? Don’t do the whole written feedback and discussion and multi group discussion, but give them a couple of minutes to reflect.

I’ve got marked on the board. Some of the groups now have gotten it. We do it a third time. Okay. And this time, by this time, almost every group ends up getting it. And I’m starting to get groups that are getting the exceeds level. That are getting more than, scoring more than four.

And I will have one more reflection. And I’ll talk to some of those groups like that got the exceeds asking them how did they do it? And it was, Oh yeah, we actually, before we started our timers and before we started, we made a plan. It’s things like that. I do it one more time. And by this time, everyone’s gotten at least mastery and vast majority of the time, most groups will have the exceeds.

And then we go into a conversation about, okay, which groups deserve an A? What grade do you think each group deserves based on how many times it took them to get mastery or exceeds?

I had, for the first time, this year, in my high school class, one student that says, we all met your Goal, we should all get A’s. It’s the first time I’ve ever had it. And I was like, I, oh my God, I almost said her name. I so much want to say her name, but I was like, you’re right. And I agree.

Everyone deserves an A because we all got, even though we didn’t all get the exceeds, we all got what my expectation was. And that’s kind of how I introduced the grading. And again, a lot of groups are like, wait, but they got it first, or, but we got it first, or, but we got the most.

Doesn’t matter. This was my goal. This was my bar. All of you got or exceeded the bar. Don’t care how many times. I don’t care if you exceeded it by how much everyone got the bar. Everyone gets the grade. At which usually people like, are you sure? Like that doesn’t..

Sharona: Well, you’re right. Cause they don’t trust you yet. But so you feel then that that activity, out of all the activities that you do at the beginning of the semester, is that the one that is the through line to why your students are persevering and continuing to take their checkpoints?

Boz: I think that, and just the whole practice of setting up group or classroom expectations that involve the students in that process. I think those are the two things that get me started in that direction, and then as things come up and get opportunities to reinforce it builds upon that, whether it’s giving feedback and allowing the reattempts, whether it’s the first couple of assignments that they don’t do well on, but because they’re meant for practice, they’re still getting full credit and a lot of feedback.

And they’re like, wait a second, this doesn’t quite compute with me, but yeah, those, like I said, those two activities plus the continuance. is what ends up doing it.

Sharona: And so when I look at these perseverance factors in this article, and I think about the detailed story that we just went through, the factors they talk about for students, perseverance or sense of self efficacy, how confident they feel they can rise to challenges and attain success, which you literally just demonstrated for them, their expectancy value calculations, whether current supports and competencies make eventual success plausible, you showed that to them.

Ability to self regulate, which is initiating and sustaining a focus, and then techniques learners use to reflect on their performance to guarantee continual improvement, you just showed them they could do that. The extent to which they feel they belong. Again, you picked an activity that, although there might be a few people who don’t have the cultural reference to tic tac toe, they’re gonna pick it up pretty quickly because the barrier to entry is pretty low.

Level of connectedness to peers and adults. Again, you’re putting them in groups, connecting, and everyone’s having a shared experience. Culturally responsive, this particular activity is somewhat, not entirely, it’s culturally neutral as far as racial or ethnic or linguistic. It’s not language based, but it is mathematically culturally appropriate.

So you’ve actually brought students into math culture, whatever their culture they’re coming from is. And then the extent to which self determination is integral to their academic work, it talks about the frequency that students experience competence, relatedness, and autonomy in learning activities. And they have all those things in this activity, or they can get them.

Boz: They can. And I think there’s, again, this starts to build some of that. And then there’s other things built into the class and into the grading that builds onto it. The self determination of their academic work, letting students, I do try to give, especially in my K 12 class because it’s not a coordinated class, I do try to allow students a lot of choice in the class. We’ll often literally vote okay, do we want to take this master check here or here?

I had my first mastery assessment in my high school class wasn’t a like traditional quiz like assessment. It was a project and I think I told you about this I had one student that kind of found a loophole and made their project much easier than I had ever planned on because of this loophole. And without bringing the student’s name or without trying to bring any kind of shame to the student, I brought it to my class.

I’m like, okay, what do you guys think? Should this student that found this loophole because they found the loophole get mastery? Or should they have to do a revision like so many other people? So I brought that to the class. So them feeling like they do have some determination in how the academic setting is done in class is one of those that I try to maintain throughout the entire time of my course.

And what happened when I, when I shared this article with you? What rabbit hole did you go down?

Boz: So first again, I love this article. I can’t agree more. That I really do think that the perseverance is one of those underlining things that has a huge effect, and it’s underplayed, and even when it is recognized, it is overly blamed on the students for not having it.

But yeah, they looked at some of what they called the most important skills, and they linked this to several other studies that were done by Rice University. I hate giving Texas any kind of credit for anything, because this is OU Texas weekend.

Sharona: I would say especially today.

It’s only a 12, 13 page study. So it’s not a hard read., It’s not one of these hundred page studies, but I found it really interesting. One of their key findings is that the lowest amount of agreement between students and teachers.

Sharona: Well, let me just jump in here. This brief is about teachers rating of student skills and student rating of student skills, right?

Boz: Yes, of not content skills, of social emotional criteria or skills.

Sharona: So what teachers think of the students skills in this area and what students think of their own skills in this area. Okay.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: So.

Boz: And like I said, one of the things that I found really interesting is one of the lowest matching between student and teacher were questions regarding trust and stress resistance. So questions asking teachers, how much do you feel students trust you? And asking the students, how much do they trust their teachers?

And the teachers rated this much, much higher than the students did. Same thing with the stress resistance. Students, again, huge disagreement or huge mismatch. Students rating themselves much higher and faculty or teachers rating the students much lower. So teachers are thinking

Sharona: and their ability to resist stress?

Boz: Yes. That that students can resist stress and that they believe them. That students trust them is high, but students can’t handle stress. Whereas students are saying, we don’t trust that teachers believe us and we think we can resist stress. So I found that those particular mismatches really interesting.

And I think that goes back to the first article we talked about this list of why students don’t persevere going back to the relationship with educators are strained or non existent. I think this study kind of shows some of that mismatch of what the relationship from student to teacher really is.

Sharona: Well, and this study overall found significant impact of the perseverance or persistence on those grades, or at least significant correlation. I don’t know, I mean, they put a causal relationship on this in the headline that they make the biggest difference. I haven’t looked into the data enough. I would say it may be correlative more than causative. So, but basically they’re saying that the students who reported the highest levels of persistence, so their self reporting of persistence are the ones who had 10 percent higher grades in math and 12 percent higher in readings than the classmates who reported the lowest levels. So not so sure about the cause and effect here, but..

Boz: I don’t, I don’t know if I agree with you.

Sharona: I, I just haven’t looked at it.

Boz: Yeah, I, I don’t have the research to back it up, but I’m just saying, I, I would love to see someone do some research out there, you know, to really try to show the cause, the causal effect, but

Sharona: Right.

Boz: No, I.

Sharona: No, I’m, that’s what I’m, it’s definitely correlative. I just don’t wanna I don’t want to make a causal link. However, students who report the highest level of trust, which is assuming that others generally have good intentions, also have significantly higher grades in math than those reporting the lowest levels of trust, but not in reading.

Boz: That’s interesting.

Sharona: So, and then they also are finding a negative link between empathy and grades. So students who self report the highest level of empathy had grades 8 percent lower than people on the other empathy scale. So there’s some really interesting emotional nuances coming into the classroom and especially as STEM educators and math educators, a lot of us perceive ourselves to be less competent in the area of emotional and social skills. I know I certainly do. And yet, if we really want to make a difference with our students, this is an area where we can possibly have a significant impact. And for me, this is especially important because I’ve now moved into this more instructional coach arena of being a course coordinator.

So I need to figure out effective ways of working with my team to bring this to awareness among a wide variety of instructors.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So long and short of the whole thing to say this was both surprising and not surprising to see these behaviors, especially at the scale that I’m seeing them at, both in traditional and in mastery grading or alternative grading.

And although it’s, I think that a lack of perseverance is really going to hurt students in alternative grading, obviously it’ll hurt students in traditional grading too, but there’s so many other factors that it’s, it feels a little different to me. But if you’re someone who is trying to insert certain alternative grading practices, even if you’re not going to a full blown scheme yet, this could be a way to get some early wins.

Is making sure that you’re consciously and intentionally building perseverance skills with your students through the activities in your classroom so that they could show those on multiple attempts or learning from feedback.

Boz: Yeah, and I think these two things, student perseverance and alternative grading, have kind of like the snowball effect with each other.

Like one can affect the other. And vice versa. And as one builds, they both built. So I do believe that you do need both, but a little bit of one is, they’re going to end up building on each other and really kind of snowballing. Once you start building the perseverance because of the relationships that’s aided by the grading, like all of it feeds in together, but just doing one doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to happen. Like I said, I for years was using traditional grading and I tried to do a lot of this relationship building and you can go back and ask some of my students. I was successful at building relationships before I went to alternative grading. Don’t get me wrong.

But that grading was definitely hindering it. And the relationship building, if not stronger, is broader with my students since going to alternative grading.

Sharona: Well, and people who’ve been listening here for a while understand that one of my main impetuses to going to alternative grading is that I wasn’t having the success I wanted to have in building those student relationships.

I was trying all the things, all the active learning, all the group work, all the everything. And I wasn’t getting to, I was having success, but I wasn’t getting the kind of runaway "this is the teacher that changed my life" kind of success that I wanted to have.

Boz: And then just, I know we’re coming up on time and again, I hate to sound like I’m tooting my own horn, but there is one other thing I wanted to point out. Because I was also observed at the Cal State level this last week.

And there was a part of my observational review that I was, or feedback that I was given, but there was a line in there where the person observing me talked about the fact that we had this short moment of laughter in my class and how refreshing that was to see laughter in a math class.

That made me feel good until I started thinking about it. And then it made me feel really bad. Because why was that so unusual? And I do think that kind of goes back to this perseverance and the students relationship. That, why was that so uncommon that this reviewer had to put in there that it was so refreshing to see a little bit of laughter in a class at a math class.

Sharona: Well, and I think that ties into something bigger that I think is of particular import to higher ed. I think K 12 has recognized this possibly a lot longer, but we are facing a real crisis in higher education. We’ve got an enrollment cliff coming, and we also have a lot of students really questioning the value, not only of a college degree, but also of the actual classes they have to take and whether or not it’s worth taking them in person.

A lot of students are opting for asynchronous online courses that a lot of universities are now offering. Which has the least relational piece to it, in my opinion. I mean, if you never are live synchronously with your classmates and with your teacher, what is a college course?

And I have come to feel that it’s a real effort for students in our setting, regional public universities, mostly commuter. It is a massive effort to get to class. The amount of time that our students have to take commuting and finding parking and dealing with their schedules and the huge gaps of productive time, it has to be worth it to show up physically in the classroom. And if we can’t figure out how to make that hour, that hour and a half, a valuable moment in your day, mostly relationally, because if someone is up there just lecturing on something, there’s a lot of those lectures out on YouTube, especially in mathematics.

Boz: And if it’s just pure lecture and on top of that, the student doesn’t see the relevance to their life goals or beliefs. Yeah, it’s hard to continue to make that hour commute to go there.

Sharona: And people say, well, they have to do it for the grade. Well, they only have to do it for the grade if they bothered to register for the class at all.

And what I’m concerned about is that students will look at this and say the class, the whole class, it’s just not worth it. And so colleges that are able to create those learning environments where being there matters beyond just whatever behavior controls you built into your grades. I think those are the colleges, those are the professors, those are the courses, those are the disciplines that’re going to be the most successful.

Boz: Yeah, I agree.

Sharona: So do you have any closing thoughts for this week?

Boz: You know, we’re going to have a lot of, well, you’re going to have a lot of work to do to putting in the show notes. I really encourage people that are listening to this, that this is kind of sparked any kind of, of ahas or, or any kind of questioning.

Both of these articles and the Rice research, this is some really good stuff. I would highly encourage people dive into some of this research. There are some really interesting and a few surprising results that I think a lot of people should look at. You got any last thoughts?

Sharona: My only last thought is a little bit of a tangent. I did get an amazing email from a listener who wants some help looking at some great architecture options specific to their situation. And I would love to get more of those kinds of comments and questions. I have some ability to correspond with people at this point.

And I know you have a little bit more limited, but we do try to be responsive. And some of that stuff can generate really interesting topics for the podcast. So please feel free to write in with some very specific questions to your situation. And it just makes this whole experience of community that much more fun.

So please use the contact us form on the website and let’s hear your thoughts.

Boz: And with that, thank you all for listening 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, 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.