Carol and Rebecca share student perceptions of how grading practices at Tech impact their learning and academic wellbeing and then delve into three different types of grading strategies - traditional, norm-based, and mastery-based. Dr. Al Ferri, Associate Chair of Undergraduate Education and Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, joins us to look at the research he's done on grading practices, his evolving perspective on his own grading, and the ways he works with faculty now to (re)consider their practices for better student learning and engagement.
Carol and Rebecca share student perceptions of how grading practices at Tech impact their learning and academic wellbeing and then delve into three different types of grading strategies - traditional, norm-based, and mastery-based. Dr. Al Ferri, Associate Chair of Undergraduate Education and Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, joins us to look at the research he's done on grading practices, his evolving perspective on his own grading, and the ways he works with faculty now to (re)consider their practices for better student learning and engagement.
Show Notes
Grading Practices
Traditional: A look at the typical letter/numerical grade.
Norm-Based: The standardized assessment of a student’s performance in comparison to their peers that can often promote competition and even cheating.
Mastery: Faculty set clear expectations for their students to meet and are told how to meet them with an all-or-nothing approach to grading.
Referenced Materials and Resource Links
Transcript
Carol Subiño Sullivan: Hello, listeners! Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Teaching and Learning Buzz, a podcast about all things teaching and learning at Georgia Tech. I'm your host, Dr. Carol Subiño Sullivan, Assistant Director of Faculty Teaching and Learning Initiatives at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Tech. I'm joined by my colleague Dr. Rebecca Pope Ruark.
Rebecca Pope Ruark: Thanks, Carol! My name is Dr. Rebecca Pope Ruark and I am a Faculty Teaching and Learning Specialist here at the center. The Teaching and Learning Buzz podcast is a new way for us to ask some questions, tackle literature, and hear from tech faculty and share ideas about teaching and learning at Georgia Tech.
Carol: That's right, Rebecca! Today we want to talk about grading practices and challenges. Not many people I know like to grade for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, because it just takes a long time to get through a pile of papers or problem sets. Other times because the expected grading practices may not align with our values as teachers.
Rebecca: There are so many reasons that grading is challenging for faculty. In this episode specifically, we want to look at what our students think about grades and then based on that we'll discuss a few of the major kind of groupings of grading types that we can potentially use but we'll also look at the benefits and the shortcomings of those practices.
Rebecca: In our second segment, will have an interview with Dr. Al-Fairy from mechanical engineering, a professor in campus leader who has taken an interest in grading practices here at Tech. So when you think about creating what comes to mind for you?
Carol : I think about fairness; so I think about how can I define the criteria so that they're truly measuring the learning goals that I've laid out for the course. I worry whether or not I’m making the criteria clear enough so students really understand how they're being evaluated and what they need to know to succeed.
Carol: Of course, for that I use rubrics, which can take a really long time to construct and sometimes I miss something that was really important to student learning and another thing I worry about with rubrics is am spelling out the criteria clearly but stifling creativity? So how can I make sure that I build those sorts of expectations and really hopes into the criteria that I set?
Rebecca: That's a great point! I have trouble with rubrics too. I come from a writing studies background so the majority of courses that I teach were in writing and professional writing and rhetoric and how do you kind of put numbers or a little check marks on someone's essay or their research paper?
Rebecca: Sure, there are conventions that we can say that they followed but a letter or a number just doesn't seem like a useful way to signal to a student, for example, how well they did and what they can do better in the future. I really like giving students feedback and I like talking to them about their papers but I just putting numbers on them it just seems wrong in so many ways but there's not a lot we can do to get around that based on a system that we currently have.
Carol: I feel you on that. I have sat there with some feedback written and then what's the number I put on it? We've actually also heard from some current Tech students about the concerns that they have about grading practices and how those practices affect their motivation.
Carol: For example, students told us that they want feedback earlier in the course so that they can gauge their progress earlier and actually make decisions about whether or not they want to stay in the course. We know that can be hard when you have large classes and a lot of stuff to get through in order to be look at the feedback and grades out so how we can get students feedback earlier is something we need to think about.
Rebecca: We really do. Students also feel really strongly about curved grading. They know that sometimes they can benefit from that curve but, for the most part, they say it's really stressful. They don't know where they stand, often until the end of a course, and they say the grading on a curve doesn't motivate them at all. It really can be stressful for them it leads to competition with their peers in the class because they want to get ahead of that curve and get those few days that are up there and that can even encourage cheating sometimes.
Carol: Right and building on that, students shared with us that they don't feel that they have any safe space to fail so if they get a low grade on that first test, they assume they won't be able to recover and they won't be able to move up along the curve, especially if they know peers who scored higher than them. When this is the case students, might become de-motivated, they'll disengage from the class, or they might just drop out of the class altogether. Since we know how important failing is to the learning process is (and this is also what research on this topic has shown us), this one is really hard to hear.
Rebecca: It is! We have to try things out and test things in play before we can really learn or be able to use that knowledge so what opportunities are we giving our students to test those ideas and play with them without penalizing them in the end for that? The grading practice we have, they're really just integral to the kind of college experience we have right now, but that's for better or worse. We do really need to be talking about how those practices impact student learning and especially their academic wellbeing here on campus.
Rebecca: This topic is so important at Tech that the Faculty Senate just passed an addition to the student expectations of faculty list. It reads, “We hold that all students have the right to expect to have reasonable access to creative materials for individual assignments projects or exams to review graded material in a timely fashion and if you have a clear explanation of grading criteria and grading determination. Students can also expect to have their letter grade in a class based on their individual performance of course criteria, not solely based on their performance relative to their cost means.”
Carol: The new expectations a student says that students will not be solely judged on the norm-based greats. So what does that mean not solely based on norm-based grades? There are lots of grading types and we're going to highlight three that particularly relate to this statement today. First, we're going to talk about traditional grading; second, we’ll talk about norm-based grading; and third, we'll talk about standards based or mastery grading.
Carol: Let's start with traditional grading. In traditional grading, students must demonstrate what they know about a topic via a high-stakes, summit evaluation like a test or a paper or a project at the end of the unit. Typically, students earn a numerical or letter grade based on their individual performance and instructors grade students on an absolute scale typically A through F, or a percentage system in which A is 100-90, B is an 89-80 and so on.
Carol: In traditional grading, students may or may not be aware of the criteria for earning the different scores. For example, we talked about rubrics but what if you have a test question? There's not always a rubric available. Importantly, instruction is delivered to a cohort of students at the same time and individuals advance to the next level or not. If they fail the assessment, they take a major hit to their final grade and may ultimately have to take the class again.
Carol: So this is a system that most of us are familiar with and there are supporting critiques we need to consider. While letter grades based on a pre-set scale do seem to be the most common way grading across the spectrum, traditional grades can also be subjective. So for example, what is the difference between a low A and a high B? Numerical grades might actually be even more subjective. The most common way to do this would be to render grades on a 100 point scale but what is the difference between an 89 and a 90, for example? And something else to consider: if 50 is a failing grade doesn't that mean that half of the entire scale is failure? These types of grades don't often communicate what was learned but only what was evaluated against the specific assessment.
Rebecca: So the second type of grading we wanted to talk about is the norm based grading. This is a method that almost tries to circumvent that subjectivity and traditional grading by using bell curves and other ways of really thinking about equal distributions of students. In this kind of grading, norm base grading, students are compared against their peers rather than some absolute scale, A through F scale or 100 through 0 scale. The most common types of that are pretty common on campus. Norm- based grading can be done in terms of curving specifically and you can do that multiple ways. You can curve a test or a final grade on a true bell-curve so that 10 percent of the students get As, 10 percent get Fs, 20 percent C's and so on. Some faculty use a uniform distribution instead of a bell-curve so this would assign 20 percent of the students A’s, 20 percent B’s, etc. on that one.
Rebecca: Another way to curve is to look for those natural breaks in students' demonstration of learning on an assessment or course. There could be a cluster of students maybe who all demonstrated comprehensive knowledge on the test and they earn an A and then, there might be a little bit of a break and another group seems like they got most of it but not all of it and they may ultimately get a B. You kind of look for those divisions as you look at the total of grades. This kind of grading can be really appealing, especially in cultures and departments where faculty are expected to, for example, maintain a C average because we do, fighting against grade inflation.
Rebecca: Curving does have the benefit of meeting students where they are collectively, but it can also lead to competition in cheating like we talked about earlier. Students feel like they have to be better than their peers to earn those few A’s at the top of the curve, so they lose that benefit of learning together.
Rebecca: Curving on tests also doesn't necessarily take into consideration the assessment measure itself. If the highest score on a midterm is a 50 out of 100, a straight bell curve would give those students who got fifties an A, but that student still will only have earned 50 percent on a 100 percent scale. On a traditional grading scale, that would be an F. So in this case, really did none of the students pass the test because they didn't learn the material or do we really have to sit and think about if the assessment that was designed for that test actually tested students on what they learned during that segment?
Carol: Right, so then we move on to the third type of grading we wanted to mention which is standards based or mastery. In this style of grading, the instructor sets clear and unambiguous goals and paths for students to meet those goals. Content is usually given in short, discrete units, then the students work on problems or deliverables at their own pace with instructor support. So, for example, all students might start out working on a particular type of problem; those who are able to master it go ahead and move on to the next one while some students might take longer working with that same type of problem.
Carol: In this model, students have multiple ways and opportunities to show if they have mastered the material or not, allowing them to recover from failures. An important feature of this approach to grading is that it is all or nothing with no partial credit awarded. A student who is almost there will be asked to make another try at it in order to show that they have mastered that particular standard.
Carol: When students are graded according to a standard (or a set of standards), the performance is their only measure of success. In this sense, it's possible that everyone in the course meets the standards and earns a high grade because grades are not comparative to others in the course.
Carol: This sounds great, there's a lot of good features to this, but there are some important critiques. For example, it may feel harder and a lot more work up-front because as a faculty member, we have to prepare all the assessments at the very beginning so that students are able to work at their own pace and have the opportunity to demonstrate mastery when they're ready.
Carol: In some ways, standards or mastery-based grading is the opposite of norm-based grading and so some of those ideas about grade inflation we mentioned earlier come up again. if everyone can get an A in this approach to grading, will there be great inflation? What happens to those cultural expectations of a C standard if your stand your average is actually higher? And also, this is a really unfamiliar way of being assessed for many students, particularly around that idea of no partial credit and faculty may have to work with students who are resistant to this approach to grading.
Carol: We’re going to take a break now. When we come back, we'll talk to Dr Al Ferri about his work on grading practices at Georgia Tech.
Break
Rebecca: Welcome back listeners. We're here with Dr Al Ferri! Al, thank you for being here today.
Dr. Aldo Ferri: Well it's really a pleasure to be here. This is a topic that I have really become very interested in and have been working with for a while so I'm glad that you asked me to be here.
Rebecca: Great, thanks! Why don't we just start, and you tell us a little bit about yourself and some of the roles you have here at Georgia Tech?
Al: Well, I am currently the associate chair for undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering and that means, that in addition to teaching, I'm also looking at grading from the standpoint of an administrator and so I get to see it from different angles. I've been here for 34 years and over that time, I've seen a lot of things about grading and as an administrator, I've seen a lot of grievances about grading. It's really helped to shape the way I think about it.
Carol: Could you tell us a little bit about your own grading practices before you became interested in this work?
Al: That's a really good question! As I said, I've been teaching for 34 years and when you come to Georgia Tech and they put you from a classroom, they don't really tell you anything about teaching, believe it or not. So you tend to duplicate the things that you've seen as a student, things that work for you that you figure will work for everybody. I have evolved quite a bit over that time and I started out, as most engineering faculty, thinking that curves were just part of the lay of the land. You gave a test, their average on the test was low, “that's okay it worked for you when you were an undergraduate, the curve will take care of everything in the end”.
Al: I have slowly evolved and most recently. I've read a lot of the literature on the detrimental effects of this norm or normative grading practice and have realized that I think that I need to reform my own practices and I need to also have conversations with our faculty about why grading on a curve is sometimes very unmotivating for students. I've looked at a lot of the literature about the fact that the most egregious examples of grading on a curve and when I say the most egregious examples they are the examples worst where faculty, in order to be nice to students, will say things like “Don't worry the top 20 percent will get an A, the next 30 percent will get a B, the next whatever percent will get a C”.
Al: It comes from a good place in their heart, but it is very unmotivating and I think that it doesn't promote the kind of collaborative learning that we really want to foster here in Georgia Tech. We want students to help each other and for everybody to be in a community of learners. If the top 20 percent are going to get in A, then there is no incentive for you to help someone else and there's no incentive really to work any harder than you are because you're already at the top and if you're at the bottom, there's no reason to work harder because you're at the bottom.
Rebecca: So what was it that kind of flipped the switch for you and made you start thinking that maybe carving was not the best way to greater students or to assess their learning?
Al: There was an ongoing discussion on campus about the stress levels that students are experiencing and the fact that they are under a lot of stress. There's a lot of talk about how to make the environment much more welcoming, much more supportive and I started to look at it from the perspective of the anxiety that students feel about their grade. If there's a curve, what you're telling the student is “Trust me, it will all work out. Sixteen weeks from now, you’ll find out your grade and hopefully you'll be satisfied with that grade”. But students want to know, at different points of the semester, where they stand and so telling them “the average on a test was a 60, you had a 70, it should all work out” was causing a lot of stress.
Al: I gradually changed my grading practices so that the syllabus said a 90 to 100 is an A, 80 to 90 is a B, etc, and designing my tests with a lot more thought to making sure that they were doable, that they tested the right material, that I was getting a valid a valid indication of what the students know but also motivating them so that they were learning the right material and putting a lot more thought into tests so that the average grade comes out where you wanted to come out so that in the end of the semester the grade distribution is consistent with what the norms historically have been is something that I found really good success with.
Al: I do make sure that each test has a grade point average which is in some ballpark. And it could be a little higher a little bit lower, but I'd try to make sure that when a student calculates their grade cumulatively at any point in the semester that they have a pretty good feel of where they stand grade wise. And my colleagues say, “we shouldn’t all be about grades; it's not about the grades, it’s about the learning.” Yes, that's true but students are human; they have stress and they want to know it's not an unreasonable desire to know where they stand at different points of the semester. For example, near drop day, they would probably want to know where they stand grade-wise and this solves that.
Carol: Speaking of the campus-discussion about student stress, you recently chaired a committee that approved new expectations about grading practices, including the idea that students can expect to be graded not solely in relation to peers. Why is this expectation important and what does it say that the faculty senate passed the measure?
Al: I was the chair of the Student Rules and Regulations Committee for about 5 years and one of the topics that came up in the last year that I was chair was that a lot of things were having to do with the path forward, were about alleviating stress on students and we took up this question of curving, like could Georgia Tech make, you know, could we have a policy or a rule that said that we don't condone curving and through discussions with a lot of very engaged people on my committee, we realized that that really wasn't a workable plan. We could not just say you can't curve and that's why we thought a better place for it was in the expectations. We really thought very carefully about every word in that expectations.
Al: We wanted students to have a place to go where they could get some, I guess, some support against the most egregious grading curving practices and by those, I’ve referred to them before, when a faculty member says the top 20 percent will get an A the next 30 percent will get a B. And I actually have had grievances where students have contacted me as associate chair in mechanical engineering. They've contacted me and said things like “I had a 94 percent cumulative average and I got a B” and when I go to talk to the instructor, the instructor says, “Well, I had to do that because I was giving too many A's and my grade point average for the class was going to be too high.” And I have to talk them out of that and say, “Wait a second, 94 percent sounds like the student achieved the comprehension that you wanted when you designed your test and when you designed your learning environment, they met the bar,” and so I wanted students, through these expectations, to have some place they can go to point to and say the Institute does not condone that kind of totally normative based or norm-based grading.
Al: That being said, we do have to be a little cognizant of the fact that as instructors and as teachers, we do get things wrong occasionally and sometimes our tests are harder than we thought or problems are confusing that we didn’t think would be confusing and there have to be adjustments. We can't just say nobody in this class is going to get an A because I designed some test at problems so there has to be some room for adjustments. Those adjustments could come about because of historical averages, they can come about because of the fact that we have multi-section classes and we can't have the grade point average in one section 37 and the other section have a 22. That is really unfair to students, so we wrote this expectation. It was passed by the Senate. I can't say that that it was widely publicized but it is now one of the twelve expectations there on the students’ side, that a student can go to and get some support for a grading practice that they think doesn't promote learning and it doesn't really hold water when it comes to determining what that student knows.
Carol: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you hope that this change in the expectations will open up conversations about teaching among faculty and administrators in schools? What do you hope the impact will be?
Al: Whenever I've had conversations with faculty about curving, it's usually a very lively discussion. People have very strong feelings about it and this expectation which was written into the rules and regs to catalogue has really been, I think, helpful for faculty to kind of reflect on what they are doing and “why do I give these tests and why do I feel so strongly about, you know, a grade point average of a class?” As an administrator, a lot of my conversations lately have been ones that I don't really want to have because they are conversations about the fact that there's a disparity between the grade point average in one section of a course versus another section and students are fairly sensitive to this kind of unfairness, that had they only taken the class with somebody else, they would have gotten one letter grade higher. They don't complain about the fact they could've gotten one letter grade lower but that kind of unfairness from sections is one that I now have to deal with.
Al: We're having a lot of meetings with faculty to talk about, historically, what has the grade point average been in this class? There has to be room for variation; some classes are, just from the random selection of students, some of them are not going to perform as well and some of them are going to perform extremely well. There has to be room to accommodate that but a lot of those discussions about great point average in sections has led to more of this you know the broader issues of why do we grade? What's the purpose of grading? If the students don't do well on a test, why don't they do well on the test? Was there something about the test? And it's something that the faculty really, you know, this is Georgia Tech and faculty are very busy, they have a lot of other demands on their time. And a lot of times, they don't really have an opportunity to talk about things like that, to reflect on teaching and when you engage them in that conversation, sometimes it's the first time that they've had that conversation in a while about “wait a second, maybe my grading practice can be improved and maybe I should try something different.” Those conversations have been great, and we do have a lot more room to improve and I think that in some of the conversations we’re having now, if there is a historical grade point average for a particular class, does that make sense?
Al: You know if I have a group of students that we recruited from high school and their the lowest grade point average you know is an A, they’re straight A students, some of them have never received a B in their life, does it really makes sense for us to have courses where we say that our goal is to have a grade point average of a 2.7? Does that really make sense? And that's where we are right now. The conversation is about we need to all agree on standards from section to section. We have to agree on the learning objectives, we have to agree on the difficulty level, we have to agree on the coverage, and we have to agree on the assessment that is part of it. And that's more on the fairness side than it is on the learning side but I think that when students perceive that there is unfairness or that the system is stacked against them, they are not motivated and they will not show you their best work and so I think we have to be aware of the fact that these things are all kind of tied together. We want students to learn, that's really why we're here and we want to make sure that our system, whatever possible, encourages them to do their best and that's the sort of conversations that have come about because of these new initiatives on campus.
Rebecca: How do you think that we work with faculty to help change the mindset or introduce even what you would call baby steps toward changing it without feeling like they need to dump their entire system at once? What are some, maybe, strategies that they can use to kind of tiptoe into it or how can we help support faculty to change that mindset away from just curving?
Al: I think that there are opportunities, especially when onboarding new faculty for having a conversation with them about more than just how to assign grades, how to enter grades. But more about “should you have this policy or this policy?” and I have lots of conversations with faculty, especially younger faculty. I've asked now to see their syllabus and I look at it and if I see something in there that strikes me as sending the wrong message to students or a grading policy that seems like it's going to be, you know, certainly more norm-based or something like that, then I will head that off before It happens. With younger faculty, I think, we have this perception that its somehow, I don’t want to say offensive, but it sort of assumes that they’re not going to be good teachers and we don’t really want to offend them. But really when faculty (especially new faculty) start out, they basically just try to duplicate what worked for them. You can't become a faculty member at Tech without being outstanding, like just one of the most outstanding people in every class, so what worked for you may not be the right thing.
Al: We have a lot of faculty that after a few years, they open up about the fact that “well you know my tests are very hard, I'm known as a hard grader.” Ok, why do you want to be proud of that? It's like you're putting emphasis on the wrong thing. It's really about student learning, who's getting the most from the students. From the group the students that you're given on day one, who is taking them the furthest in terms of advancing their knowledge? Being stern and being strict and having standards is, I think it comes from a good place, but I think that the literature shows that there are other ways of doing this that work better, that motivate more students, that encourage the good students to continue doing well and can encourage is the students who are struggling that they still can succeed, that they can change the way they're studying, that they can they can improve their grade from that starting point.
Al: And as I said, I think that we have an opportunity with young faculty because I don't think we really have training on teaching. We don't really have week-long workshops where they learn about assessment strategies. But sometimes that's sort of what it takes is to just realize that there is a lot written about, this people have thought very deeply about this and you might want to adopt some of those practices. So I did tell them that when you make a test, make sure you do the test for yourself. It's one of those really puzzling things that the rule of thumb is that if you can complete a test in about a third of the time being given to students, it's about right in length. It's really hard for younger faculty or you know even some of the veteran teachers to understand that the expert blind spot that you have when you're making up that test really is about the right ratio.
Al: You should make your test so that you can do it in about a third of the time. Now if a faculty member never heard that, how would they figure it out? Maybe after 10 years, they might they would just kind of stumble upon it but why not go ahead and tell them that early on? Do your tasks, write out everything completely and if you can do it in a third of the time, then not only will it be doable for students but you will have a more valid indication of what the students know because a lot of times what you're testing is how quickly they can do a problem and not can they do the problem (which of course is tied together). But when you design a test that puts students under so much stress because they're fighting to meet the time requirement, you're not really seeing what's in the student's head and you have to give them some time to think and to put things together. Hopefully your test is a doable test, but has some things in it that are a little bit challenging or you know have aspects of the test that are learning experiences, but you have to give them some time to figure that out.
Al: I think that it’s just that we all sort of believe that everybody can be a good student and everybody can be a good teacher and you know, I think that's true but why not help the process along by conveying the wisdom of what other people in the field have figured out a long time ago?
Rebecca: One of the tensions I think you're getting to there is the difference between being hard and being rigorous. You can still be rigorous and provide students challenges without getting that mentality of “I must be the hardest grader and that's reputation I need” because that's a misconception of rigor. When you give students the opportunity to take a test like you're designing for them to really show what they've learned, that requires patience reading, giving them some time to play with that, and seeing where they can go in the amount of time that they have.
Al: I think that's true and it is something that you know I'm still a work in progress on. I gave a final yesterday, I went through the tests and I made sure that I can do it very quickly and I'm glad I did it but I think that the students might have a different opinion about how long the exam was. But when trying to go through the test, one of things I did was I looked at whether I was giving them busy work or whether I was really testing their knowledge. And too often I will say I want to test this idea so I'm going to embed it in a problem that requires all this extra work. My attitude now is if you really want to test that particular concept, think of a way of doing it where you don't have all this other collateral time. Essentially, you're asking students to spend a lot of time to get to the point you want to test them on. And if you're really clever, you can figure out a way to test that concept even in the middle of a very elaborate or complex problem; you can structure it in such a way that they don't have to spend a lot of time on the extraneous information and they can focus in on those concepts.
Carol: Well this has been really interesting. Thank you so much for sharing what you’ve learned about grading, the way that you have integrated that into your own practice, and suggestions for other faculty who are considering making similar changes.
Al: It's been great to be here.
Rebecca: Thank you, Al!
Carol: Well, that was a really great conversation with Al. He raised so many interesting points! One of the things that really stood out to me was the connection that he was highlighting between creating and designing your assessments. So on the one hand, we've really been focused on grading and, you know, the different systems of grading but at the end of the day it's really about how we assess our students learning and creating assessments that really gives students the opportunity to demonstrate that learning rather than thinking about creating an assessment that is so hard and is going to maybe create a certain grade profile in the course, right? So less about being hard and more about what have students learned and is this a genuine demonstration of learning?
Rebecca: Those are great points Carol and I do want to point our listeners to the bonus episode for a little bit more from Al on that particular topic. One of the things that grading versus assessment, 0or that tension in his conversation, I found really interesting was of this idea of traditional grading where you might curve very specifically, kind of that old school. He was saying that's kind of the way that most faculty in his particular area, for example, kind of learn to grade, that's how they were graded as students, and it took him a while to really kind of stop and think about “is this the best thing for my students? Are they learning?”
Rebecca: It's very easy to say, “Well when I went through college, this particular kind of grading worked for me therefore it must work for everyone,” but if that's all you've ever seen, you might not know what else to do or how else to support student learning in ways that aren't those traditional kind of hard lines between specific grades. There are other ways to approach it and to realize that some of those practices might actually be damaging for students. They might be demotivating, they definitely don't foster collaboration (which we want our students to be able to do successfully in their future careers) so we do really need to stop and think about tradition versus, as you said, assessments that are going to really get out what students have learned.
Carol: Yeah, that was really interesting to me as well. I was really struck by his thought that really the most important thing for other faculty who are wrestling with approaches to grading is to create an opportunity for reflection and it can be difficult to carve out that time, you know, classes come every semester and the deadlines are relentless on top of everything else on faculty members plates but having that chance to reflect about what really is important and what is the purpose of grading? That was really powerful to me.
Rebecca: Right, totally agree. I think too he was really talking about giving faculty, new faculty especially but also faculty who have been here a while, the opportunity to talk to each other about their grading styles because we don't often have that opportunity to just sit and talk about our grading style so we might not think about what we're doing and how might how we might do it differently. Being able to kind of sit and pause and talk to some other people about what they do and how they think about learning and how they assess their students can help us really figure out what are some practices that I could try that might help my students learn better.
Rebecca: We want to make sure that we're designing assessments, even small ones at first before you go really big into the entire class, we want to make sure that we're working on assessments that really show us if the students are learning the material or the skills that we want them to. A grading system, whatever that is, should motivate learning. It should reinforce learning, it should incentivize learning, not punish students for not necessarily knowing something or getting it on the first try, which is really the point of education and learning--to give them the chance to try and play with things and to mess it up so that they can then continue to learn as they go.
Carol: I agree! That’s been really important to me as well as a teacher, finding opportunities for giving students second chances and opportunities to improve. So there's a lots to think about here, way more than what we've said so far, to discuss. We're looking forward to continuing this conversation through the programs and resources that the Center for Teaching and Learning has got on deck for the coming semester so we look forward to engaging further with you guys!
Carol: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Teaching and Learning Buzz podcast of The Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia Tech. Show notes and a transcript are available at ctl.gatech.edu/tlbuzz.
Rebecca: Check back regularly for new episodes, bonus clips, and more resources. If you have a topic or question that you would like us to explore, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach us at ctlhelp@gatech.edu.