Conference Notes: Grading & Assessment Structures that Promote Learning

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

From March to June this year, I attended 4 teaching-related conferences*. I learned a lot and I took copious notes! Now that the meetings are over and I have a little time to breathe, I’m curating the ideas from my notebook into a list of actionable take-aways that I plan to implement in my own classroom. I’m writing them here as much to solidify the ideas as to share them with you.

*I attended these meetings from March to June this year: Pearson Biology Leadership Community Meeting; North Carolina Community College Association of Biology Instructors Annual Meeting; The Grading Conference; Gordon Research Conference on Undergraduate Biology Education Research

Promoting Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset is the belief that you can learn and get better at just about anything, as long as you apply relevant, feedback-informed practice. Growth Mindset is the opposite of Fixed Mindset, the belief that whether you are good or bad at something is an inherent trait that cannot be changed. I learned about Growth Mindset in a Faculty Mentoring Network in 2019, and it was a game changer, both in my personal life and as an educator.

In my courses, I explicitly teach about Growth Mindset and I use a series of interventions to promote Growth Mindset related to doing math in biology classes. However, at the Pearson Biology Leadership Community (BLC) meeting, I learned about 2 Growth-Mindset related tools that I want to implement:

Action Item 1 - What Learning Looks Like Video – During their talk about alternative grading at the BLC, Jenni Momsen, Anne Casper, Angela Hodgson, and Jennifer Doherty played this 2-minute clip. In the video, a skateboarder attempts a new trick, which he fails – repeatedly – until eventually, after several small progressions, he successful completes the trick. The video provides a striking, visceral example of the role of mistake-making and failure in learning. I plan to play this during the first week of class to reinforce that learning requires risk-taking, mistake-making, and often failure. Throughout the course, I will refer back to the video, especially after assessments, to reinforce that each student’s mistakes are learning opportunities, and I plan to be explicit about the ways my course structure provides room to demonstrate learning and growth even after making mistakes on assessments.

Action Item 2 – Wise Feedback. Also at the BLC, David Yeager talked about his research on trust-building with students. He described some of the research from this 2014 paper in which he and colleagues did the following experiment: middle school students wrote a draft essay for class; their teachers wrote personalized feedback about how to improve the essay; and the students had the chance to submit a revision. Some students were assigned to a “wise feedback” condition: each student received a hand-written note attached to their essay feedback that said “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” Students in the placebo condition received a hand-written note attached to their feedback that said, “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” Here’s what happened:

From Yeager et al. (2014) - (A) Percent of students who revised their essays, by race and randomly assigned feedback condition (Study 1). (B) Final score on revised essay as graded by teachers, by race and randomly assigned feedback condition (Study 2). Values are covariate-adjusted means controlling for gender, teacher, and first draft scores (means estimated in separate regression models for African American and White students). Error bars: 1 standard error.

 As you can see, students in the Criticism + High Standards + Assurance (“wise feedback”) group were more likely to submit essay revisions (holy cow, look at that impact on African American students!), and their revised essays scored higher as well.

In my courses, one of the types of assessment I use is written exams. I provide personalized feedback on student responses and students have the option to submit revisions based on the feedback. Fewer than half of my students submit revisions. While I thought it was obvious that I spend all that time writing feedback because I care about my students and I want them to be successful, I didn’t realize that my feedback might be viewed as personalized criticism rather than supportive feedback. So the idea of wise feedback really resonates – it makes my care for them, and my belief in their ability to grow and succeed, explicit. So, at the beginning of my written exam feedback to each student I plan to include a short “wise feedback” note that reinforces my high standards and my belief that the student can reach them.

How to promote learning from mistakes

Promoting growth mindset is important for creating an environment that values mistake-making, rather than penalizing it – but mistakes are only valuable as learning opportunities if students use feedback about their mistakes to change their thinking. I think these two action items will directly support students doing just that.

Action Item 3. Exam wrappers. In my Introductory Biology I course, I use two types of assessment. In one type of assessment, students take an online quiz every 2 weeks that consists of automatically-graded, lower Bloom’s-level questions that address discrete concepts. At the end of the semester, the students take an in-person cumulative Final Exam that covers the same content. In this way, the quizzes are essentially practice for the Final Exam – they provide an opportunity for students to try, make mistakes, and learn from their mistakes in preparation for the Final Exam. (Because I use Multiple Grading Schemes, two grading schemes don’t count the quiz scores at all, so the quizzes really are just practice!) After each quiz, I spend 15 minutes of class time where student teams answer the 5 most commonly missed questions on the quiz. This is one way I incorporate review of the quiz content into the course curriculum.

However, while my students have access to their quiz scores on the Learning Management System – including which questions they got right or wrong – most students don’t review that material. That’s where the exam wrapper comes in. I was reminded of this approach by Sandhya Krishnan’s poster at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC). The idea of an exam wrapper is to follow an assessment with a separate metacognitive assignment that prompts students to reflect on how they prepared for the assessment, what went well and what didn’t, and what they plan to do differently next time. In my case, I already assign daily pre-class homework; I plan to designate part of the one homework assignment immediately after a quiz for students to review what they got right and wrong on the quiz, reflect on their study and quiz-taking process, and make recommendations to themselves for the next quiz. This way, I hope to “force” the students to do more than just look at their quiz score – hopefully, with the structure of the exam wrapper assignment, they will go over the quiz questions that they got wrong and reflect on why the correct answer is correct and what they can do differently before and during their next quiz. Some students will already do this – these students have significant academic capital already. By making this process a required part of the course, I hope to improve equity by, as Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy argue in their book Inclusive Teaching, creating structure that benefits all students.

Alternative Currencies Besides Grades 

Action Item 4. Use alternative currencies for external motivation. One of the conversations I’ve been a part of in the Alternative Grading community (on Twitter, and at The Grading Conference) is about creating artificial currencies in the classroom besides grades. Grades represent how much a student learned (assessment performance), but often grades also represent student compliance (jumping through hoops). Many instructors – myself included! – worry that students won’t do the work if it is not included in the grade. (Caveat – I teach introductory biology students, many of whom are enrolled in my classes to fulfill a general education requirement; in each course, the need for external motivation will depend on who the students are, and the way the course meets their needs.) So, how do we incentivize behavior without including it in the grade?

Multiple Grading Schemes is one solution: it provides one path that rewards students who do the hoop-jumping, while providing other paths for students who don’t (need to) do it. But this system still involves grades. Are there other incentive structures that we can leverage to reward students for doing the things that (we think) will benefit their learning? I can think of two: Late Work Tokens and stickers.

I’ve used Late Work Tokens before, and I love them. I started using Late Work Tokens as a way to strike the balance between providing necessary, structured deadlines and providing flexibility for students who need it. But, last semester I was recruited to participate in a biology education research study that required my students to complete a survey. I wanted my students to participate because I believe in the value of biology education research, but since I don’t give extra credit (for equity-related reasons), I didn’t know how to incentivize participation in the study. To my delight, my students were happy to accept one free Late Work Token as “extra credit” for participating in the study. So, in addition to providing structured flexibility, I found that Late Work Tokens can work as a sort of outside-the-grade currency to promote certain behaviors. While I stumbled upon offering extra Late Work Tokens as “extra credit,” this year I plan to explicitly offer them in limited situations as extra credit.

One alternative currency for extrinsic motivation is stickers. I’ve never used stickers in the classroom; on the one hand, it seems too childish for community college students. On the other hand, I am a grown woman who delights in getting a sticker after voting, and others vouch for how much their students love stickers as external motivators, so I want to try it! I’m thinking I may give stickers for things like: completing a homework streak (doing all the homework assignments in one month); attending a science seminar; sharing what they’ve learned in our class with someone outside the class; making a piece of art inspired by what we’ve learned in the class; etc. But oh! As I write this list, it’s obvious – I need to ask the students what I should give stickers for!

Sticker-rewarded behaviors fall into the category of “things I think will help student learning, but which are not essential for demonstrating understanding.” I’m also thinking I can create a system where students who get stickers in a certain number of different categories can win a bigger prize, like a widget spinner, slinky, bubbles, etc. I’m curious to see how this sticker-based currency will work in my classes! Stay tuned.

How to design exam questions to promote more scientific thinking

Action Item 5. Incorporate more scientific practice into my assessment questions. While I was at the GRC, I learned from Crystal Uminski about her work on “3D Assessment Questions.” The idea is to encourage science instructors to write exam questions that assess core ideas AND crosscutting concepts AND scientific practices. The key, for most instructors, is incorporating more scientific practice into exam questions – things like designing experiments, making and analyzing graphs, creating models, etc. I’m still mulling this over and how to incorporate more scientific practices into my assessments, but she gave me some excellent resources, including the original 3D assessment paper (check out this doc from the supplement, which includes some excellent examples of 3D assessment questions) and her presentation slides – which she said I can share! – that go into depth on how to write those types of questions.  

Of course, designing questions like this only helps students if you also teach them how to do the scientific skills included in the assessment questions!

Maybe how to make ungrading less inequitable?

One last thing related to grading. Many people are experimenting with ungrading – specifically, a form of ungrading that we’re calling “collaborative grading,” in which students receive written feedback on their progress, but no points or grades throughout the semester. To determine their final grade, the students complete an end-of-semester reflection in which they gather evidence of their learning from throughout the semester and they propose a final course grade for themselves, to be potentially adjusted in conversation with the instructor during a one-on-one conference. I’ve used this form of collaborative grading multiple times, but the more I’ve used it, the more uneasy I’ve become with the way that assignment of the final grade is liable to both the student’s and the instructor’s implicit bias.

However, at the GRC, I discovered a small addition to the typical collaborative grading end-of-semester reflection that might reduce the student’s implicit bias affecting their final grade. In her poster at the GRC, Susan Walsh explained that in her ungraded classes before her students assign themselves a grade, she has them assign a grade to an imaginary student. She provides the imaginary student’s end-of-semester reflection, and students assign a grade to both the imaginary student and, based on their own reflection, to themselves. I thought this was a brilliant addition to the collaborative grading model, as it provides a sort of “standard” against which the instructor can measure each student’s grading bias. If a student grades the imaginary student very harshly and the instructor feels like they graded themselves harshly too, then it seems more justified for the instructor to disagree with the student’s assigned self-grade and suggest that they earned a higher grade.

To be clear, this little hack doesn’t address the instructor’s implicit bias, which still leaves me feeling uneasy about ungrading entirely. I know that some instructors swear by how transformative the learning experience is when grades are removed from the class. But I think there is no way to equitably assign grades using an ungrading model. Perhaps the gains in learning outweigh the costs from an inequitable assignment of grades. But I’m not convinced yet.

Personally, I won’t be using collaborative grading again - here’s why.

I am currently of the mindset that: 1) grades are arbitrary markers that sometimes indicate learning/progress (but don’t always), 2) grades matter for students’ self-identity and their access to myriad academic and career privileges, and 3) assignment of grades is a game, and the game should be explicit, accessible, flexible, and applied equally to all students. Because of student and instructor implicit bias, I don’t think ungrading checks the box of “applied equally to all students.” That’s why I won’t be using it again.