Draft3_GradesArentReal_QEP_Grant

Anna Anderson, host of Deconstructing Assessment, questions why grades aren't real in Episode 1. She challenges the traditional A-F grading system's effectiveness and impact on students. Anderson advocates for feedback-driven assessment, highlighting how grades can induce fear, competition, and hinder learning. She suggests exploring alternative grading methods like contract grading to promote innovation, risk-taking, and student agency. The goal is to shift towards assessment practices that prioritize student growth and inclusivity. Anderson encourages educators to adapt these ideas to benefit their students and foster a supportive learning environment. Hello, hello, good afternoon, good evening, good morning, whatever time of day is most accurate to your current experience. My name is Anna Anderson, and I am your host here on Deconstructing Assessment. So today, Episode 1, Why Grades Aren't Real. Now I have a feeling that this opening statement, this title, has a bit of a visceral effect on some of y'all. I can feel the flinches, the immediate reactions of, of course, grades are real. How else are we supposed to evaluate our students? How is assessment even useful if grades aren't real? That's what our students are here for at the end of the day, isn't it? We all have been trained to feel like our students need a grade in order to move forward. So today's episode is going to be about why that might not necessarily always be the case, and how you as an educator or the caretaker of a student have the power to create and advocate for environments where students are relying on your feedback and encouragement rather than just the final letter grade at the end of the semester. So historically, the A through F grading system has not been the only evaluation method used in formal classroom environments. It became really popular in the 1890s after Harvard University started using this practice. But even then, a lot of faculty members, quote, expressed concerns regarding reliability, grading students on a 100-point scale, end quote. So basically what they're saying is that teachers were really concerned that one instructor assigning a grade wouldn't be the same grade assigned by another instructor. So you could have one artifact, and there was a possibility that two educators would look at the same artifact, and one would give it a 79, and the other would give it an 82. And so at that point, how reliable really is this grading system if two people come to a totally different conclusion? There was also concern that a student's ability to perform in the classroom isn't always the same as their ability to learn the actual material. Shinsky argues that grading, quote, does not appear to provide effective feedback that constructively informs students' future efforts, end quote. In other words, the grades we're giving our students don't really provide the kind of feedback they need, and they're not really preparing them for real-world activities or making sure they have the skills we hope they take away from our courses. Those things just aren't reflected in the grades. This is, in part, because, another quote, our current A-through-F grading system was not designed with the primary intent of motivating students. Rather, it stemmed from efforts to streamline communication between institutions and diminish the impacts of unreliable evaluations from students between teacher to teacher, end quote. Basically, this system was never designed to benefit our students or to motivate them to work harder, to enjoy themselves in the classroom. None of that was part of these decisions. Instead, the A-through-F grading system was designed to make it easier for institutions to communicate between each other. The grades are created for a system that considers the institution rather than the students. Shinsky also says, quote, grades appear to play on students' fears of punishment or shame, their desire to out-compete their peers, as opposed to stimulating interest and enjoyment in learning tasks, end quote. So this means that students are motivated not by an internal desire to do well, to learn because of their own genuine excitement for the subject matter, but from an external desire to do better than someone else, pitting students against each other in a way that doesn't really benefit anyone. It also, according to Shinsky, gives rise to fear of failure. It reduces student interest. Grades decrease enjoyment in classwork. They increase anxiety, hamper performance on follow-up tasks, stimulate avoidance of challenging tasks, and heighten competitiveness. So all these are ways that Jeffrey Shinsky and Kimberly Tanner outline as how grades can negatively impact students. So is this really the system we want to hold on to? Assessment has changed a lot over the years, and we'll discuss that more in future episodes. But we have an opportunity to create systems that will actually benefit our students rather than continuing down the same path we've been walking so far. Why should our assessment systems be efficiency-focused rather than feedback-focused? Instead, we could move towards a grading system that rewards students for innovation and taking risks rather than punishing them for stepping outside the mold. Jeffrey Shinsky says many colleges today have moved away from numerical and categorical grading to instead, quote, create contracts with students to define success or employ student self-reflection in combination with written evaluations by faculty, end quote. So students are given the power to decide if they have successfully met the qualifications outlined by the teacher in the beginning of the course. I personally experienced contract grading for the first time as an undergraduate student. Initially, it did kind of scare me because I wasn't sure how to get an A. I'd been trained in middle school, high school, since I was little, really, just to do the best work possible to get an A. But in a contract grading scenario, it was a little bit more focused on me experimenting and moving outside my comfort zone, thinking outside the box, tackling topics that I might have avoided in the past because I was worried I wouldn't be able to execute them well enough to get that A. And so this contract grading experience really allowed me to stretch my writing muscles and try new things in a way that I definitely would not have if I'd just been concerned with getting an A. So this grading structure that focused on labor and effort rather than the actual production at the end allowed me to try new things in my writing and develop new skills and actually become a better writer in the end. I took agency in my own education, and it really helped me develop my identity as a scholar and a writer. So I know what you're thinking. I said colleges, right? Many of you are probably K-12 educators. You're caretakers for K-12 students, and you're thinking, how can I possibly have this apply to the classroom that's most relevant to me? Well, the idea of all of these different suggestions is that maybe there's a way to adjust them in your classroom in a way that best suits your students. So just sharing these ideas in the hopes that maybe it triggers a thought for you. It triggers a new idea for how you can implement some of these ideas in your classroom. A lot of the research that I'm pulling from is based on college-level coursework, but that's not to say that these same strategies can't be adapted to best fit the classroom that you care about most. I really hope this discussion and the suggestions I've given are something you find helpful as an educator or a student caregiver. At the end of the day, all of our classroom practices should be focused on the students and their needs. At the end of the day, all of our classroom practices should be focused on what's best for our students. If adjusting the way we grade or moving away from grades altogether might be what's best for them, then I think it's worth discussing. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. I'm a graduate student at Texas Women's University. I'm pursuing a master's degree in literature, and one of my primary areas of study is assessment theory and methodology. So that basically means that I'm a big nerd about things like standardized testing, rubrics, and how we assign grades in the classroom. The purpose of this project is to empower you as an educator or a student caretaker to be an active participant in the assessment systems happening in our classrooms. So I want to be here as a resource for you, the educator or the student caretaker, so you can better understand the what, the how, and the why of assessment. My goal is not to do away with the existing systems, but rather to question if we're engaging in the best practices for our communities, and to provide some other options for you all to think about and discuss as ways of learning that are focused on growth and inclusivity. Throughout this episode, I'm going to be relying on an article by Jeffrey Shinsky and Kimberly Tanner called Teaching More by Grading Less or Differently. I found this article after reading an essay called How to Ungrade, written by Jesse Stommel, that I will be quoting from as well.