The Grading Podcast

81 – Jenni Momsen

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Sharona: If all this stuff that we think works really works the way it does.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, or really works the way it does and does it work the same for various students, right? And in various contexts or disciplines. I think the thing that to me really stands out, and this community could really get at it, is, as our scoping review showed, a lot of work is fragmented. It’s in these different disciplines. And I think a big thing is to get rid of those silos as best we can and to look cross or interdisciplinary. I’m thinking from the perspective of our students. Our students are not just biology students. Yes, they have a biology major, but on Monday they’re in their biology class, then they go to physics, then they go to chemistry, then they go to music.

And so they’re experiencing grading in all of those courses and maybe in very different ways and the messages that are coming at them are not uniform.

Boz: 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: I’m doing well. I think as we said on one of the previous pods, we’re recording several in a row, which is both really fun and a little confusing for the intros.

It’s like, wait, I just talked about this yesterday. Oh, but it’s coming out a week later. So the whole time travel aspect of the podcasting world is beginning to get to me. So I’m still in grade submission time, but I think this is going to come out probably at the beginning of the year. So hopefully by then I will have really enjoyed my vacation break.

How about you?

Boz: I am actually a little bit under the weather, so I’m going to apologize to our listeners if they can hear it. I’m going to see how quick I can be on my mute button. But other than that, I’m enjoying my first, early part of my winter break right now.

Sharona: Nice. And we have a guest! Yay! I much prefer having guests. So with us today in the virtual studio is Jenny Momsen, Dr. Jenny Momsen. And Jenny is at the Department of Biological Sciences in the Discipline Based Education Research Program at North Dakota State University. Her research focuses on systems thinking in undergraduate biology, feedback, and more recently, alternative grading approaches.

And for the last several years, she’s been on the organizing committee for the grading conference. So welcome, Jenny. I’m glad that we finally have you on.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s exciting to be here.

Boz: So, first thing we always like to ask, Jenny, and I almost feel like we need to apologize, Sharona, to Jenny, because.

Sharona: I agree, and I know what you’re going to say.

Boz: Yeah, this, you are the last of the organizers for us to get on.

Sharona: Actually, I don’t believe that’s true. We have one more. I think Melanie Lenahan has not been on yet. It’s more, I thought you were going to apologize that we’ve been podcasting for over a year and she hasn’t been on.

Boz: Well, that’s what I was getting at is that, yeah, we’ve been doing this for almost a year and a half now and we’ve not had you on, so I am thrilled to finally get you on and as always, we’d like to start off with asking our new guests, just how did you get involved with alternative grading?

Jenni Momsen: So, my origin story actually begins in the classroom. It was probably a winter day and I was returning our in class activities. Every class period in my introductory biology class, we do at least one activity, if not two or three, and students write something down and turn it in.

And at that time, and this is pre pandemic time, I was of the belief that in order to get students to complete something with effort, you had to put points on it, right? But you didn’t want it to be worth too many points, so this was five points. So every class period, you could earn up to five points.

Except when I would review it, you could only get five points if really you were perfect. And so otherwise I would take off maybe a half point. Not very much, but I thought this was signaling to students, Hey, you have some work to do. You don’t have all of this biology content down. And I was handing it back and a student looked at it and they’re like, Ugh, another four and a half, what do I have to do to get it perfect?

And I was like, well, you’re learning. And she’s like, yeah, but you’re never giving us space to actually learn. You’re always taking off points. And that was a moment for me when I was like, Oh, crap. Like, that’s profoundly bad of me, what I’m doing. And I couldn’t fix it in the moment, but that nucleated for me a lot of thinking, a lot of reflecting.

And so my mind was just open to anything that came across my desk or my social media feeds or whatnot that was related to grading and ways we could rethink it. And one of our graduate students in mathematics actually was like, Hey, you might be interested in this thing called the grading conference.

And I was like, you bet your booty I am. That was part of it. And in between there, I read Joe Feldman’s grading for equity and that really like Like record scratch of like, Oh, I have to rethink things. And so that’s kind of how I got started with a student basically saying, but you grade everything so you give us absolutely no space to learn.

Sharona: Ouch.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. It was a, it was a Bernie moment very much like, Ooh, yeah, you were right. You were so right.

Boz: So a lot of us have origin stories that focus around students. I think this might be the first one I’ve heard where it’s actually a student calling you out on it.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. Yeah. They just, right in the middle, and in front of like several other students and it was kind of like, well, now what are you going to do? And I was like, well, I’m going to be super more lenient going forward here, but I’m also going to investigate what this is doing and how this is harming students because they were right.

See, these were formative assessments. Meant for me to gauge what did students know what they didn’t know and then create new instruction to help fill their learning needs. Right? And I was saying, yeah, but you still, you still don’t get all the credit for doing that. And I was like, well, that is just telling them they can’t make mistakes at all in their learning.

They have to be perfect all of the time.

Boz: Yeah. And same, for years I would tell my students math stands for mistakes allow thinking to happen. That’s the whole process. But yeah, traditional points, especially if you’re deducting for mistakes and not giving them a chance to make up those points in some way, form or fashion, yeah. It was going against my own beliefs and my own philosophy and what I was telling my students and then wondering why my students never saw the beauty of mistakes.

Sharona: Yes. So first of all, shout out to that math grad student who who told you about the conference. I want to know who that is.

Jenni Momsen: Somewhere in there. Yeah, I couldn’t tell you exactly when. But yeah, early on, I was one of the early people like lurking and like, what are you all talking about? And what are you doing?

Jenni Momsen: I felt like once I heard that and the pandemic occurred, like I was, I was on the Autobahn like full steam, like going as fast as I can into this alternative grading world. And so I wanted to do everything I could to both do it in my own classes, but also promote and convince other faculty to get on board.

And I think it was through chatting with Katie Mattini a little bit and both my interest in being an implementator, but also being a researcher and trying to bridge that and understand, how was alternative grading impacting our students? You know, and I think of it more holistically. A lot of folks are focused on grades and the points and how well are students doing in the class?

And does alternative grading cause more students to do better? But I’m more holistic. Does it reduce anxiety and stress sorts of things? So I think it was Katie who actually was the one who was like, you know, you’re very passionate. You might be a good resource for the conference itself.

Sharona: You’re going to make me pick among favorite children. Really? I can’t pick a favorite. So, well, first I probably should say who they are, because I don’t think we’ve talked about them. So, we have Asao Inoue. He’s a professor of rhetoric and composition at Arizona State. And he really focuses on writing about assessment, race, and racism. So, he has been quoted by a lot of our writing professors as being very influential.

We then have Jeff Anderson, who we’ve had on the pod, in the Department of Mathematics. He’s a mathematician looking at anti racist pedagogies, including assessment.

And then we have Eden Tanner, who we’ve also had on the pod. So I guess we have to invite Asao Inoue on the pod. Eden Tanner is in chemistry and she’s a high level drug delivery researcher in biochemistry and chemistry. And she also has been on the pod. So I’m going to kick it back to Jenny. Which one are you most interested or what are you most intrigued by on those three keynotes?

Jenni Momsen: Well, I’m always interested in alternative grading can be an anti racist tool or or approach to kind of undermining the system as it currently stands. But as a biologist, the chemistry and the biochemist side of things, like understanding that perspective is always kind of close at heart as well.

So again, I’m not picking favorites either. I’m just saying I think they all bring something Really interesting and exciting to the table that I can’t wait to hear from all of them

Sharona: How about you Boz since you asked the question?

Boz: Well, I can tell you which one I’m most intrigued about Because I don’t know as much about. And I know you’ve talked about him before. You know him a little bit better in some of your tangent circles.

But yeah, I Asao Inoue I don’t think I just pronounced that right. But I don’t, I don’t know as much about his work. I’ve heard several people talk about him. I’ve heard a lot of the other organizers talk about him. So that’s the one I’m most intrigued about, but I’ve got to say,

Jeff Anderson. He was a fellow mathematician and we had a lot of fun on his interview. Not that we didn’t with Dr. Tanner’s, but, I’ve got a soft spot for the mathematicians.

Sharona: Well, and for me with Dr. Tanner, I don’t understand, even though we talked to her for an hour, I still can’t believe she did what she did, which is somehow to use scantrons and multiple choice to get students to a level where they pass the American Chemical Society national final. And I’m like, so much of what I do is based on feedback. And so I don’t do any multiple choice assessing anymore. And I’m like, how the heck did she do it with 170 students? And is that scalable? And what needs to happen? Like, so I’m super intrigued.

And yes, I, I’m so excited for, we’ve had great keynotes at this conference.

So speaking about anti racist. I noticed, Jenny, in your work, you do talk about some of the pedagogical approaches for promoting equity inclusivity in your research. So can you expand a little bit about how did you get into discipline based education research, and where are you now with your work there.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, so that’s another transition story because I went to grad school for a traditional PhD in ecology. Although even there I was a little bit outside the scope of normal. Rather than working with things that were alive, I worked with fossil pollen to understand historical landscapes, but it was when I was a graduate student and I was teaching and I was constantly kind of tinkering and trying to figure out how I could do things better so that more students could learn.

And something that still seared in my mind is the nitrogen cycle. We taught the nitrogen cycle and that’s a hard cycle. There’s a lot of microbes and tiny things that you really can’t see that are very abstract processes. And I asked lots of questions of like, well, Could we try this? Could we do this other thing?

How could we make this a better learning experience for more students? And I was very lucky because as I was questioning, we hired a new professor who had a split appointment in ecology, but also in the School of Education. And Rebecca Jordan came to me one day and she said, You do know that what you’re doing right now are asking research questions, right?

We don’t have the answer to this. Like, that is something you could research. And I said, I’m sorry, what? Could you reverse the record a little bit? What are you talking about? And she’s like, Yeah, there’s this whole field of discipline based education research. And I think that’s actually where your passions and interests lie.

And I was like, you may be right. And so I went to a postdoc at Michigan State University with Diane Ebert May. I met Tammy Long and Elena Bray Speth and Sarah Wise, just a bunch of amazing people who really helped me learn about this discipline based education research and develop it into my research threads and my career.

And we started, as you alluded to in my biography, looking at how students reasoned about complex biological systems. And we were really dissatisfied with the traditional approach to teaching biology, which is a lot of memorization in all honesty, and students really struggled to see how this stuff they’re learning about DNA connects to this stuff about evolution.

And as a biologist, I’m like, oh my gosh, they’re so interwoven. And so we developed an approach to teaching using systems or concept models that had students building those connections. And one of the things we saw when we were looking at how students were modeling biological systems was that our students who were coming to us with lower preparedness, they maybe didn’t have as best a biology high school experience as others, were able to narrow that achievement gap using this approach.

And that was kind of my first, like the ways we teach could actually make those achievement gaps smaller and so help students who were coming from various backgrounds that might not have had a biology high school course, who could do just as well as their counterparts who maybe had. And then that transitions into some of the work on alternative grading of trying to figure out what mechanisms we can use in our course to support more learners without putting too much burden on them. Here at north Dakota State University we serve a lot of rural students. We are a rural serving institution, which is something most people don’t know a lot about. But our students come from hometowns that are smaller than many of our introductory classes.

And can you imagine sitting in a classroom going there are more people here than in my hometown. And now you want me to make a mistake on the whiteboard in front of all of these students and somehow tell me that’s okay? Yeah, I’m not going to buy that to start with.

Sharona: That’s a fascinating way to put it.

I mean, I knew you were rural serving, but I didn’t think about what that meant for the student experience.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, the students here, having taught on the East Coast and in Michigan, I do see differences in their anxieties and how they interact with me. It’s been a learning experience for sure.

Boz: Yeah. You know, talking with my wife, because she is from a small rural farm town in Oklahoma, that her graduating class in high school was 30 something people. And then, her first class at OU being, you know one of these "weeder courses" that I believe was one of the science courses, I wonder if it was biology or chemistry, with 400 people in it and just the amount of culture shock that that produces. And it’s not something we hear a lot about a lot of different subgroups and, but the rural area and understanding how much of a culture shock that can be is something that does kind of get looked over a lot.

Jenni Momsen: Mm hmm. I mean, one of the things we’ve been struggling with, because we allow retesting in our class, right? And the retesting, just, the nature of the class, it has to happen outside of class. But we have, like, I don’t know, every week we usually have at least 15 hours that the students could come to. But for some of our students, that is a burden because they work.

That is a very common thing for our rural students to be working part time, or we have a lot more students these days working full time, or they need to go take care of family. So they fall into what these nontraditional indicators as well. And so having these retests outside of class can be a burden. So trying to understand what can we do to allow them that opportunity to retest, to make mistakes without penalty, while also not penalizing them for being a rural student.

Sharona: So where has your focus in DBER, Discipline Based Education and Research, taken you since that starting point? Where are you at today with what you’re doing in DBER?

Jenni Momsen: Well, that’s a hard question. The research threads are are still clipping along with looking at how students reason about biological systems.

We’ve adding in the alternative grading. I think where I’ve gone because I’m now a full professor and I’m director of the DBER PhD program here, is focusing on how to structure a graduate program in DBER and how to help more students develop research lines, ideally, and looking at alternative grading practices, but other, obviously, I allow other, other things to go on in the program as well.

Sharona: Is your program DBER PhD strictly for biology, or is it multidisciplinary?

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, we are actually so our our internal acronym that we use is called CIDER. We’re collaborations in discipline based education researchers. So we bring together folks from physics, chemistry, biology. We’ve got some folks in engineering, psychology, math from every now and then, although we need more math people.

Yeah, so we’re really interdisciplinary. And in fact, we published one paper, we did a scoping review about alternative grading. That was a collaborative project across all of the disciplines. So yeah, yeah. We welcome all to come get a PhD here.

Boz: And you said you published a paper on that?

Jenni Momsen: Yes. So we did a scoping review. The lead author is Emily Hackerson, who does happen to be in my lab. That’s just how it shook out. And, because what we were interested in was, what do we know about alternative grading and does it look the same in biology, chemistry, physics, et cetera. And so we, under a big collaborative framework, we scoped through the literature and you can see we’ve got engineering represented, math, chemistry, biology, psychology, I’m probably missing somebody in there.

And we looked over, I can’t remember the exact time frame, but just to see what was published. And we were restricting ourselves to empirical research only. So there’s actually quite a lot published about alternative grading, but it wouldn’t fall under that criteria of empirical research. And we were curious what we would find.

And the biggest finding I think is that we struggle with a common language, we don’t talk about alternative grading in the same way. One of our goals had been to categorize each paper into its alternative grading flavor. That was incredibly difficult, and I’m sure you are both familiar with this, we call things differently in different disciplines.

We also lacked a theoretical grounding, like what theory of learning or motivation was this research connected to? A lot of it had more of the feeling of I’m gonna try this thing out, I’m gonna do the best science I know, but I’m not necessarily gonna connect it to the theories and motivation that we know are at play in the classroom.

Sharona: Well, because many of us don’t have any pedagogical training, let alone any training in the ways that human beings exist. I never studied motivation theory and goal theory and all those different things. I’ve begun to become exposed to it through my connections in the community.

But all of my training is either in mathematics itself, or potentially in education as far as pedagogy. But a lot of it is not directly tied to motivation, even if it’s good pedagogy.

Boz: So yeah, we’ll definitely have to link that paper if it’s somewhere where we can find.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah.

Boz: Yeah. I had not heard of that before. I would actually want to go and read it myself. I’m curious to see what some of your findings were. And yeah, we’ve actually talked about with a few different guests, just, because of the way a lot of this seems to have developed in these different pockets, we do. We have a lot of very uncommon language, amongst the groups that is causing some issue and might be some of what’s, I think, slowed the progression of this whole movement down is this lack of common language or common understanding of language, even when the language itself is common.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, because we might use, like, I might say I use standards based grading, but how I use it doesn’t look like how Sharona uses it, right? And so, I think adding to our manuscripts, our papers, these rich descriptions of what it looked like in the classroom so that we can say, yeah, actually, That is the same or actually, no, there is a substantial difference here that we should just be aware of and that that’s fine.

We don’t have to do things exactly the same way, but just to be able to describe those and know where where those differences exist.

Boz: Well, even even more base language than that. I mean, we’ve seen where people have different meanings of standards and learning outcomes and learning targets where some of us might use them interchangeably, others, those are three very different things. Or even talking about grades versus marks. Who was, do you remember Sharona what interview that was where we were talking about actually? The possibly needing different meanings between marks and grades.

Sharona: The first time I heard and saw that stuff, it was Dave Clark. So he was one of the first ones that started to use the distinct language and wrote about it. So I don’t remember if that’s the first time it came up on the pod, but he’s the one I think of when we think about the difference between grades and marks. And it’s the same thing when I started, I used grades and assessment, right?

Like to go back and forth, you know, grading practices, assessment practices. But at universities assessment is almost always program assessment. In high schools and K 12, they’ll use assessment in the formative, summative language, which I have an issue there too. But at the universities, at least when I say the word assessment, most administrators go to program assessment. They don’t think grades.

So I’ve gone to grades, even though we might be in a place where we want grades to go away. We might not like the language because it came from grading of meat in the USDA, historically. But still this language, and so I wonder if we can set a norm, at least within our community, of starting off most of our papers with a glossary that says, in this article, this is what I mean by these things that I’m going to use.

Jenni Momsen: I think that could actually be helpful for the community to both solidify what we mean by terms, but also develop a much more rich vernacular. Because I think there’s a lot of things happening in the classroom that don’t get captured when we just say standards based grading. There’s a whole bunch of other things going on in there. And so I think that would be a great tool to build out the community a little bit more.

Sharona: And in some ways it can get bigger. I had a very fascinating experience this past week. I was doing a professional development for an English language arts team of teachers. And they are in a K 12, well, they’re in the middle school standards based graded school environment.

They’ve switched to standards based grading. What they mean by that usually is something way too close to the common core state standards, but, slightly tweaked. And I said to them, have you talked to your students about the purpose of writing? And they kind of said no. And then I said, okay. Do you guys do a lot of writing?

I’m talking to a bunch of English teachers. I’m thinking, you know, what’s the answer going to be? Of course. One of the first people that answered made the assumption that what I meant by saying that, handwriting. Like writing things by hand. She’s like, no, not really. I write my grocery list. I’m looking at her like, you’re an English language arts teacher.

How are you not using writing in your world? Right? And so because I didn’t define writing and then other people were like, no, I don’t really write. I type and I’m like, okay, I’m talking to English teachers. We’re talking about writing in your discipline area. So like this glossary concept has come up recently, which I thought was fascinating.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. And I know like David and Robert have a glossary on their sub stack. But it’s narrow, right? Necessarily. So they had a finite number of words, that they were filling. And I think we could continue to add to that and yeah, build it out. Yeah, it’s helpful. Define your terms.

Sharona: So did I just hear you volunteer to start developing a glossary on the Center website?

Jenni Momsen: Wow, that is not something I saw coming.

Sharona: I’m kidding. Might not be a bad idea. So, Drew, if you’re reading the transcript of this, because he doesn’t listen to the pod, maybe we’ll volunteer him for that. But anyway, sorry. A little side, side.

Boz: Well, no, that’s, that right there is, is how Sharona gets people to do work. Let’s have a great conversation and then somehow that gets, oh, you just volunteered to do that. That’s how I’ve gotten roped into half the stuff I do.

Sharona: Okay, but I feel comfortable voluntolding you for things. I’m kidding with Jenny, mostly. So what do you see as some of the future trends that you would like to explore either in alternative grading itself? Are you still teaching? Are you doing alt grading in the classroom and also on the research side?

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, so I’m still teaching. I’m getting ready to teach intro bio in the spring semester, our second semester. And we will use alternative grading there. It’s a collaboratively taught course. So there are three sections, but we all teach using alternative grading approaches. And so we’re still working on how to structure that. Our sections tend to be large, about 100 to 135 students in each of those sections and how we can create these alternative graded experiences without overburdening our research based faculty. Because that’s who’s teaching with me. I mean, I’m also a research based faculty, but what does that look like? Because we know what a best practice could look like, but that burden on us is enormous as an individual faculty member.

So yeah, still in the classroom, still teaching, using standards based grading with retesting. And on the research side of things, we are looking at kind of, I mean, we have a bunch of small projects going. I guess I’ll just talk about two of them. One that I’m working on with a master’s student who’s starting with me this spring is, part of what we learned with our alternative grading approach was when we redesigned our assessments, they became case based.

So we give students a case, and then we ask bunches of questions about that case. And we learned pretty early on that case is really rich and students learn a lot from it, but for them to both read and digest that case and then take a test is too much to happen in a single 75 minute period. So we’ve started releasing the case study about 48 hours ahead of time, and so we’re trying to understand, how are students using that?

For one thing, who’s using it? Are we seeing some groups of students more likely to use it? And are they using it in ways that are evidence based, like creating a practice test for themselves based on their homework and the in class assignments? So that’s one sort of a thing we’re looking at, which is what I would call these I think they’re called wise interventions, but they’re very small, really tiny things that can have a really big punch.

We saw Elizabeth Canning’s work, where you send a short email to students about, hey, I saw that you struggled on this test, but I know you can do this. It’s a mindset intervention, similar idea, just something small that we can do.

And then more broadly, I’m working with a postdoc. Well, actually, she’s now will be faculty at NDSU, Tara Slominski, and we are working to understand, like I talked about previously, how rural students experience both alternative and traditional grading and how that intersects with their lives and whether it causes anxiety or reduces anxiety, whether it helps them engage and persist more in biology or stem more generally, or whether it has no impact on them.

So those are kind of the two big research areas that we’re working on right now.

Sharona: You just have so much fascinating going on. That I want to sit in the classrooms of everybody. Maybe I’ll write a research grant that just causes me to go observe all these people.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. I mean, when you say observing people, I think one thing that we really could use is better descriptions of, I mean, I’ve talked about this, right, but people come to me so often and they’re like, what does it look like in your classroom? Give me your syllabus and I can give you my syllabus, but invariably you have 50 questions because you’re reading.

You’re like, wait, what is this? Why are you doing this? Where did the standards come from? How do you handle, right? And so like, how do I describe, how do I transfer all that I do, all that’s in my brain? To another individual who is really excited and interested and wants to do this as well so that they can unroll it in their classroom.

And I think observation is actually a great tool because my classroom is an open door. Lots of people come in and see what we do and they always say that observation was worth like 100 conversations with you. Just 75 minutes of seeing what it looks like.

Sharona: Yeah, because I can’t imagine from the little conversation we’ve had, what does your classroom look like on a typical day? You have 135 students, if they’ve all shown up.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, most of them do.

Sharona: Right? Okay. So that’s, that’s question number one is why are they showing up? What is the environment like that they are incentivized to show up? And what does it look like there?

Boz: So, because you’re talking about attendance have you seen a change in attendance patterns post pandemic? And have you started to see any change to that? Because that’s been one of the things that has been a big topic, not necessarily in this community, but in a larger education community of just attendance.

Attendance is a real issue. I know this is a real issue from at least high school through college. It might be even earlier than that, but since pandemic, attendance has seemed to have really become an issue for a lot of areas. Did you see that kind of attendance drop in your setting, or?

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, I mean, we’re not that different from anybody else. We did, I mean, and we still see an attendance. I call it. I’ve got kind of like a bimodal attendance pattern. I’ve got my generally attenders, right? They’ll miss a few classes here and there and then I have a core group that is that is really going to be missing class and part of that is I don’t penalize it if you’re not there. You don’t have to come, right?

If you feel you can learn this on your own, that’s baked into our grading, our assessment approach. But you still have to come in and demonstrate you can meet the standards. But I have a group that just doesn’t come, even though they’re not making progress on the standards. And I reach out to them repeatedly. I say come talk with me, talk with your advisor.

And for various reasons, they’re just not coming to class. And they’re all different why they’re not there. Some are experiencing some mental health issues and really they need to take a break from college at this moment. Some are being scheduled. They’re working and they can’t get there and and others, I’m not sure. I think Others just think they maybe can make it up in the last assessment, and I’m not sure what’s happening there. But yeah, we do have, like I say, kind of a bimodal. I’m very pleased to say that the people who attend, that mode is much higher than those who are not attending but we’re really struggling with how do we engage those students.

Because they’re not just disengaged from my class, it’s usually all of their classes they’re disengaged from.

Boz: But that’s a area of research that I would like to see kind of happen is that connection between does the grading modality, whether it’s a traditional grading or some sort of alternative grading, have any effect on trying to grab those students back in?

When you’ve had a student that’s missed a chunk for whatever reason, does either of those help or hinder in trying to reach out and grab and pull that student back in?

Jenni Momsen: I think that’s going to be a mediated impact. Because I can’t say that my grading policies are going to directly impact that.

But what I do think happens is the grading policies I use, I have a very philosophical reason for why I’m doing those, and it causes me to be a teacher who both holds a very strong growth mindset, but espouses it. I talk about it all the time, and if a student has missed my class for a chunk, And they come back, I say, we’re going to get you there.

We’re going to figure out how to get you to where you need to be. Right? So that is not necessarily my grading approach, but that is how my grading approach has changed my own philosophy about teaching and learning and grading. And it’s that growth mindset I think coming through. And I’ve had students who have said, look, I’m going to be gone for whatever reason, what can I do?

And I’m like, you know what, here’s, we lay out exactly what it is. And where they want to go and, and we get them there as, as they need to be. And so students know that, so they’re less likely, at least my students, I feel are much more likely to come talk to me, less likely to hide and just like go silent and not communicate with me.

They’re more likely to talk with me and see if there’s something that can be done for them.

Sharona: See, and I think that’s an interesting point. Because what I’m thinking about is you’re distinguishing between grading, the grading policy and your personal affect, essentially. And I really see that because I teach in a coordinated class. I may have 20 plus instructors, the grading policy only goes so far.

There’s a tremendous variation within those instructors based on affect, based on personal belief. I have some instructors for whom the grading policy, it still helps, but they don’t go nearly as far with it as some other instructor.

Jenni Momsen: Right, right. And that’s where those of us going through our education experience, higher education, getting master’s, PhDs, et cetera. Even if you took a pedagogy course, like as a graduate student, like some introduction to college science teaching, you really spent very little time talking about grading. You talked about assessment. But grading, you really didn’t interrogate your grading practices. Why you did what you were doing in the classroom.

Why do you have three midterms and a final exam. Like that was something that was never really interrogated. And I hadn’t either until that student kind of called me out where I started looking at my assessments and how I had thought about structuring my course. And I think that’s something more faculty are starting to do, but still too few faculty have actually done that real deep interrogation of grading practices.

Boz: See, and that’s something that’s come up several times in several different discussions, is, Sharona, you and I ask this question on our PDs, but considering how much time and how much energy educators spend on grading, why there is no grading one on one course in most of our pre service undergrad, I don’t understand.

I mean, like I said, Sharona and I’ve asked literally thousands of educators from elementary up through higher ed, where they learn to grade. And we’ve had less than double digits that have said they have had any official education on grading, and usually even those, it’s one part of one unit.

Jenni Momsen: Mm hmm.

Boz: So this, I don’t understand. And what’s the most common answer we get, Sharona? It’s either educators grade the way they were graded, or they grade the way their teacher did in their student teaching year if they’re a K 12 educator.

Sharona: Exactly.

Boz: So it’s, it’s what we saw. It’s what was done to us. Therefore it must be what’s right.

Sharona: Well, and another thing that’s fascinating to me that I’ve been thinking about recently is because my mom was a math educator, she was a university professor who taught K through eight pre service teachers. So I saw a lot of it growing up. I saw all of the the beginnings of like sort of the cooperative learning, active learning world. And there was never a conversation about grading even within my mom’s world. I got probably more so called professional development by spending a decade listening to my mom at the dinner table on all of these topics. We never talked about this ever. It was never.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. I mean, to kind of add on to that. So in the biology world we had some really great research done by Scott Freeman and colleagues looking at high structured courses. And we know that a highly structured course for biology students leads to good outcomes, good learning outcomes.

And what does high structure mean? It means having homework and readings and regular activities in class and regular opportunities for feedback. And as a community, we’re like, great, that is the standard. We’re going to all do high structured classes because we know that promotes learning. And then we said, okay, now we’re going to put points on everything.

Every piece of that structure, we’re going to put points on because that’s what we’ve done before. That’s how we were raised. That’s how we learned we had points and we want to earn points and we want to gather points and we never stop to say, wait a minute. What is that high structure actually doing for students? And should we be putting points on that?

So that’s a very common I think thing for us to do as academics is just to say this is how we learned, this is how we were taught, so we’re going to recreate that as well.

Sharona: Okay, so I had not heard of this, High Structured Courses. Thank you for giving me yet another set of education research to read.

I think I need to become eligible for a sabbatical just so I can read everything. Except, of course, as an adjunct, I don’t get sabbaticals.

Jenni Momsen: There’s a lot out there, for sure, yeah.

Sharona: That’s amazing. So, I know that one of the things we’ve been talking about, just to pivot a little bit, is we want to develop some of these research strands at the center, at the Center for Grading Reform.

What are the big challenges you think we face as we start to look to try, what’s going, research feels very fragmented to me. So what are the steps that we need to do to get everybody sort of pulling in the same direction to say we need to really understand if all this stuff that we think works really works the way it does

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, or really works the way it does and does it work the same for various students, right? And in various contexts or disciplines. Yeah, I think I think the thing that to me really stands out and this community could really get at it is, as our scoping review showed, a lot of work is fragmented, right? It’s in these different disciplines, and I think a big thing is to get rid of those silos as best we can and to look cross or interdisciplinary.

I’m thinking from the perspective of our students. Our students are not just biology students. Yes, they have a biology major but on monday, they’re in their biology class, then they go to physics, then they go to chemistry, then they go to music, right? And so they’re experiencing grading in all of those courses and maybe in very different ways and the messages that are coming at them are not unified. They’re kind of all over the place.

And so how do we how do we build unity? And I think that comes through research that looks not at isolated disciplines necessarily, but across several disciplines. I think those theoretical underpinnings are going to be important and really critical for us to investigate. I know a lot has been done in trying to connect mindset to alternative grading practices and the results, largely unpublished, but I’ve seen them at conferences show not really much impact that alternative grading doesn’t, yeah, it doesn’t really shift student mindset necessarily.

And that may be because that construct is a little bit more entrenched and harder to change over the course of a single semester. It might be something that we see change over a curriculum, like four years. But there may be other theoretical frameworks that help us better understand. And once we have those theoretical frameworks that can then help us ask better questions and, and really narrow in on, oh, I’m going to do this thing in my classroom because this theoretical framework says it’s something that should be good. And, oh yes, it is something good.

So right now it feels like we’re kind of throwing pennies at the cash register and hoping we have enough. And so a theoretical framework allows us to know, oh, I need this many pennies to be able to answer this question.

And it should help us, yeah, be a little bit more focused and refined in the questions we ask and how we answer them.

Boz: That’s hilarious. You described almost exactly the results that we get and the project that you and I were involved in with the CLIMB grant.

Sharona: Yeah, we did a research grant and did not see connections between growth mindset and the alternative graded courses, which is very confusing because we’re looking at this and going, how could this not be the case? I mean, the fundamental principles are so aligned. But I also realized that it’s so much more complicated. I’ve started using a new analogy for alternative grading. I used to use the climbing a mountain analogy. And where in traditional grading, the helicopter takes you to the top of the mountain and you spend the whole semester not trying not to fall off. And then alternative grading is climbing the mountain.

I have a different analogy, which is that grading in general, traditional grading especially, is the cinder block wall at the start of an obstacle course. So it’s tall, it’s big, you have to climb it, and you can’t see the rest of the obstacle course until you get past it.

Whereas alternative grading destroys the cinder block wall. It hasn’t gotten you any further on the obstacle course. But you can now see the course. So maybe it’s not that alternative grading by itself has the impact. It’s that it opens the space for everything else. Because one of my motivations with going to alternative grading was I couldn’t make active learning work in my classroom.

I mean, it was fine. It wasn’t terrible, but it was really hard and it didn’t show up in their grades. And I had been inculcated into this active learning is the answer. All this research shows that active learning is the best pedagogical practice. And so it’s supposed to work. But it wasn’t doing what I thought it should.

And when I layered alternative grading on top of active learning, that’s when I started getting real results. So maybe that’s also part of it. We need the theoretical framework. But grading itself is more a barrier to success, and the removal of that barrier is really important, but I don’t know that it incentivizes the success itself, by itself.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, yeah, and it’s, I like your analogy of like getting rid of that cinderblock wall, that is, You’re right. And it exposes the rest of the field for the student. But it has no impact then on mindset necessarily, right? Because the student still is being strategic and trying to figure out how to navigate this new field.

And at least they now know the rules. Whereas before they would climb the wall and be like, Oh, crap, that wasn’t the rules that I was expecting when I got over this wall. And now I’m gonna have to really scramble to get to the end of this obstacle course.

Sharona: So the interplay is just fascinating. I wonder if alternative grading provides the space for high structured classrooms, for active learning classrooms, for thinking classrooms. It’s a removal of this thing that we didn’t understand was smothering everything else.

Jenni Momsen: I think it can, but it does take a fundamental shift in our mindset about whether students will engage in the active learning exercise. I still, in my classrooms, every day we do an activity and students do actually do it. Even though I put no points on it, the next class period, it comes back with feedback and the students and research supports this are now more interested in the feedback. They’re like, I want to know what the professor thinks.

Am I on the right track, or am I not yet on the right track? And they’re more likely to engage with those comments that I leave for them. But it takes that shift of like, high structure doesn’t mean points on everything. High structure just means very carefully thinking about the structures that students are going to interact with and having a pedagogical reason for each of those things that we’re going to do.

Sharona: I think the thing I love best about these conversations is I walk away with 13 more things to think about. This whole podcast is just a self serving mechanism for me to get to talk and think about these things. That’s just, you know, I’m kidding, sort of.

So, Boz, how do you think that this type of information plays out, moving more into the K 12 world? Like this idea of these theoretical research underpinnings and bringing this stuff into the classroom. I mean, is there as much of a direct connection as much as there is in higher ed, but at least I can like talk to people and be the research says, and they can either say I don’t care or sure I’ll listen to it. But what about how this impacts K 12?

Boz: Well, but I think it has the same the same issues that you’ll see in the higher ed. First there is, like Jenny was saying, there’s so many different silos of this and so little agreement on some of the base terminology and just putting that research together.

And really for so many different student demographics, because, you know how many times I’ve been and I’ve done a PD and I’ve shown the research. And first thing I get is, yeah, but those aren’t our kids. And there is a lot of research out there that yes, for this group of students, it worked really well, but my group looks very different and sometimes that might not make a damn bit of difference.

Other times it really might, for one reason or another, that those demographic differences, those, whether it’s social economic, whether it’s urban versus rural, whether it’s, whatever A versus B, I think in the K 12 world, there’s a lot of research that needs to be unified.

And we do need to, I don’t know if we’re to a point to where we can do something, as large, not as large, but something, some sort of meta study, like what John Hattie did with making visible learning with just really looking at all these different aspects of the research that is there and start to try to find those high leverage common threads, if there is any. Because again, maybe some of the things that are ideal for one group is different than what’s ideal for another group.

I think that’s one of the biggest questions with K 12 is just trying to get that research more unified and just more visible. I know there’s tons of writing out there from, the Guskeys and the Feldmans, and there’s a lot of research tied to the theoretical behind it. But there’s not as much or it’s not as visible to see the research of it actually in classrooms and and being done and having that really scientific look at in comparison. That’s something that it’s harder to find if it is out there.

Jenni Momsen: Where are we now?

Sharona: Where are we now? So, anything else, Jenny, that we haven’t talked, touched on that you really thought you wanted to bring to the table that we should be considering thinking about? As we’re all moving together through this world of alt grading.

Jenni Momsen: Oh, I don’t know.

Sharona: That’s a really big question.

Jenni Momsen: It is such a big question. It’s an important one though. Like what, what are basically, you know, what are the holes? What are the needs?

Sharona: What are we missing as we try this work?

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. I come back to, you know, we’ve talked about all this need for research and evidence and. I don’t want us to forget the stories because we know, I mean, I feel like I’m like the snake eating its own tail, right?

We know that behavior doesn’t change based on evidence. I can give you all the evidence in the world that alternative grading is the best thing ever. It makes it so that everybody learns and there’s puppies and kittens and rainbows and it’s just sparkliness everywhere. But that doesn’t always change people’s behaviors.

Whether it’s the instructor or whether it’s the student, and so it’s really important to not lose those stories that can be so engaging and can really powerfully exemplify what the research shows us.

To be able to say, I had a student who had to leave us because she found out her mother passed away. But she came back and she was able to succeed in the course. And the only reason she could do that was because of alternative grading. Those stories are really critical.

Sharona: Well, and the other thing is experiences both through the stories, but also convincing people to try something and let them experience it for themselves.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: Because I mean, now that we’re six years into this experiment with our statistics class and I think back, I’m like, oh wow, we went about this all wrong. We kind of forced this down people’s throats. We didn’t train them. We didn’t do this. We didn’t do that. Cause I just didn’t know back then.

That’s what I know now. And yet almost every day I have a conversation with an instructor that surprises me. Like an instructor that I thought has been begrudgingly going around for six years and muttering under their breath and ticked off that they have to do this.

And they get the opportunity to go back to traditional grading. And what I hear is God, this traditional grading stuff is terrible. I’m like, Oh my God, like, yeah, you were for six years. I thought you were mumbling under your breath how bad standards based grading was.

And in reality now that you’re back in traditional grading, you’re like, yeah, this is horrible for them and they still have complaints about our implementation, but this literally came out of an instructor’s mouth like two weeks ago, where they’re like, this traditional grading doesn’t work at all. And we don’t know what they know. And it’s very grumpy. And I’m like, Wow. So maybe if we can find a set of people to try pieces of it could also be very powerful.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Boz: I know. But I like what you said about, I am someone that is moved by research. You show me the data, you show me the research, you show me the evidence, but if you, you know, especially if you, if you’ve ever read or looked at any of Elena Aguilar’s work on. Coaching and on transformational coaching on the three B’s of behavior beliefs in the way of being that people’s behaviors are directly tied to their beliefs. And if we’re not addressing and appealing to those beliefs, behaviors will never change.

Why does research work with me? Because my beliefs are that research is unbiased and are, not necessarily always unbiased, but research is the best evidence for me because of that goes back to who I am and what I believe. But that’s not always true with everyone. And just, you can’t change people’s behaviors without really looking and addressing at those underlying convictions that are their belief system.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah. I think that’s so critical. I mean, that’s why in my, I teach an introduction to college science teaching. We explore our beliefs about teaching, but also about grading. And how does that intersect with, you think learning is this, but then you do this in terms of grading. Can you see where that’s a disconnect? And it’s been very powerful for these graduate students. I like to think that I’m creating the next crop of alt graders, but who knows.

Boz: That’s the big piece that I don’t think many educators have done and why sometimes grading reform can be so difficult to talk about because it really does get at the oftentimes those unexamined subconscious beliefs. And it really is. It’s something that every educator should really look at. And so few of us do, and it can be really uncomfortable when you do.

Jenni Momsen: Yes, yes, as as my student pointed out to me. Why do you grade everything and don’t give us space to learn?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And it even goes even deeper. It’s what do we believe success means and what do we believe? Do we, you know, we talk a lot about equity, but if you actually examine, do you really believe that every student can and should be able to succeed?

Jenni Momsen: But adding on to that, Sharona, it’s not just that every student can and should be able to succeed, it’s that every student has the decision to decide for themselves what success looks like. I have students who are like, I want a C in your class, and I’m like, great, that’s fine, that’s the pathway you’re taking, and being okay with that.

I think that’s the hardest part for a lot of my colleagues, is being okay when a student says, I’m not trying to earn an A. Because all these other things.

Sharona: Oh my gosh, I get that so much. But it would be better for them if dot dot dot. I mean, Jeff Shinske actually has had conversations with some of his students. He has a tremendous amount of people who want to be nurses, and they would prefer to fail his class than get a C. And like people are like, but it would be better for them to. No! It’s better for them to fail and be able to retake and get that A or a B. And that caused him to think, Oh, crud, we think a C is good enough, but it actually locks them out of their future program that they want to go to.

Jenni Momsen: Yep. Yeah, exactly. And so giving that autonomy to the student. It is their choice and how they want to engage and how they’re defining success for themselves. And that’s been one of my hardest is, because I was always the A student, like A in everything. And that was a hard realization for me to be like, it’s okay. A’s don’t mean anything anymore. Not anymore. But like, A does not mean what I thought it meant, right? Sort of a thing. And for students, who have different career aspirations, you know, success is what they define it as.

Boz: Well, not, not just different career aspirations, but different current environments and demands and limitations and everything else.

Jenni Momsen: Yeah, absolutely. Recognizing those constraints and being okay with it. Yeah.

Boz: Well, Jenny, we are coming up on our hour. So I wanted to first, Sharona, do you have any last minute questions or comments for Jenny?

Sharona: I just want to compliment you. It’s been such a joy to work with you on the organizing committee for the last several years.

And so thank you for everything that you’ve done for this community, because people may not know how critical you are and the whole organizing committee is, but you are. So thank you for that.

Jenni Momsen: Oh, I’m so just chuffed to be able to be a part of that. So I’m every day, I’m like, I can’t believe I get to be part of this group. It’s great.

Boz: All right. Well, with that said, I want to thank you also, Jenny, for coming on and to our audience. Thank you 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. 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.