92 - Researching Grading Reform: Building the Evidence to Change the System

In this episode, Sharona and Boz dive into what research around grading reform might look like. From the types of studies to the areas of interest and some options for focus. We look at what's been done, what's missing, and how the Center for Grading Reform is planning to launch a new initiative to build a national network of researchers focused on grading system.

Links

Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Clicking on them and purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!

Resources

The Center for Grading Reform - seeking to advance education in the United States by supporting effective grading reform at all levels through conferences, educational workshops, professional development, research and scholarship, influencing public policy, and community building.

The Grading Conference - an annual, online conference exploring Alternative Grading in Higher Education & K-12.

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Undoing the Grade, by Jesse Stommel

Follow us on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram - @thegradingpod. To leave us a comment, please go to our website: www.thegradingpod.com and leave a comment on this episode's page.

If you would like to be considered to be a guest on this show, please reach out using the Contact Us form on our website, www.thegradingpod.com.

All content of this podcast and website are solely the opinions of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily represent the views of California State University Los Angeles or the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

92 - The Need for Research: CfGR

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Sharona: Which, can I just make a quick side note? If any of you have heard me talk about the history of grading, it largely centers on Harvard University. I mean, Harvard has been driving this boat for a very, very long time.

Boz: And not, not just on grading. They've been driving the boat on a lot of things in American Education.

Sharona: I mean, yeah, it's the whole reason that we teach math in the sequence we do. They actually have a page, on their center for teaching and learning, saying it is time to switch to alternative grading practices. So we might be making progress. 'cause if Harvard's gonna do it, then everybody's gonna do it according to history.

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast, where we'll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students' learning from traditional grading to 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 you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I'm doing okay. As of recording this, today is the first day of Passover, so I have a Seder tonight that I'm kind of excited about. And then I go into two straight weeks of tech for the theater. And at the same time, I'm also traveling this week to go to Chicago to speak the Chicago Math Symposium. So I kind of have a couple of really crazy weeks coming up, but I'm pretty excited if anyone listening is in the Los Angeles area, I'm gonna put in a pitch. My son is starring in our production of Anastasia with Encore South Bay, and I want them to come see it, encore south bay.org. So that's my pitch. How about you? How's, how's your, weekend going. How's everything doing?

Boz: Well, actually at the time of we're doing this recording, my spring break, which you had a couple weeks ago, officially starts. Although, how am I spending my first day of spring break? I'm going up,

Sharona: I think you're going into work.

Boz: I'm going up and teaching a class. But yeah I'm doing well.

Sharona: Well, no wonder you're so relaxed. You're like, yeah, I didn't have to do much yesterday. I totally forgot you were on spring break this week. Oh my goodness. Well, it's also, for me, week 12, I think, of my semester. Yeah. So I'm a little bit down in the doldrums. It's a little bit gray outside, and when we got on this morning, you're like, are you sure we wanna do this? I'm like, yes, I want to do this because this is the highlight of my week. So I'm gonna ask you what we're talking about this week because I need distraction.

Boz: Over the last few weeks, you have actually been speaking at several different venues and places, but we've also been planning for one coming up and had an interesting experience doing that. That kind of got us talking and thinking about research. So what happened with that planning for the CBA conference that we're presenting that.

Sharona: Right, so Queens University in Canada has a competency-based assessment forum that they run every couple of years. And I was invited, we were invited, but I'm the one going 'cause your day job interferes, to help them plan it and speak at it. And one of the things that came up in our recent meetings is how hard of a time they were having, finding research about competency-based assessment, that it really seemed like it was either non-existent or very scattered. And the reality is before we were invited to do this, I had never heard of competency-based assessment as terminology. I've heard of competency based education, but not competency based assessment.

Boz: Yeah, same here. Same here.

Sharona: I brought that back to you. We were in that meeting and they couldn't find research about it. So as part of these meetings about the competency based assessment, one of the things that we were trying to do is come up with terminology because I had never heard of this language, that's what they're basing it around. So we were going back and forth a little bit and sharing the four pillars, and they were sharing their five principles and really they were almost identical. Yeah, almost identical. So finally at some point I said, wait a second. Could we, could you dig a little deeper? I'm not understanding the distinction between competency based assessment and say standards based grading.

And what we discovered is that really there is no distinction. They had come up with the terms competency-based assessment as a subset of this competency-based education that is being used in a lot of professional settings. The idea of competency-based education is that you're measuring whether or not graduates of these programs, say doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers are competent in the skills they have to have for their profession. So they had taken this into almost a program assessment level and then down into the classroom. And what we sort of discovered is they had not heard of the language standards-based grading. And so they were searching on competency-based assessment and not finding stuff.

Boz: Yeah, we've talked about this issue before. There's a lot of different language out there and there are some distinctions, but there's also a lot of things that are basically the same thing that we're calling different things. And my opinion, and again this is just my 2 cents, but this is because a lot of this is coming up in small pockets. We've got this grading and assessment reform going on in a lot of small pockets. And when you develop these in these small isolated pockets. You'll come up with a lot of similar ideas, but with different terminology.

And this lack of clarity of terminology is causing issues and it's really what was why they were having a harder time finding some of this. It's not because it's new, it's because of the terminology. And we've discussed this with everything from what we actually call these systems. That's part of the reason we started using alternative grading, just to mean anything that's not points percentages and averages. Also going down having conversations about assessments, and you bring up the fact that you say assessment to a K 12 educator, we automatically think about test, quizzes, things like that. Whereas you say that to a higher ed, and that's not always what they go to, is it?

Sharona: No. Oftentimes assessment in the higher ed realm, depending on who you're talking to, but especially talking to administrators, they're up at the program level at least, or possibly at the institution level. They're not down at an individual course level.

Boz: But even going as far down as the difference between what we mean when we're talking about grades on an assessment and the final grades on the end of the term. This came up in our interview with Jack Schneider when we were talking to him about his book Off the Mark. So just this issue with language.

Sharona: Well, and I think this issue with language goes even beyond what we call grades and what we call marks. And it goes as far into a lot of times people are asking, how do you know this stuff works? Where's your research? And that word research is carrying a lot of weight. You were saying it's all done in these little pockets, right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And there's like so many dimensions to research and some people want to use the fact that, oh, where's your research? Because that's their first way of pushing back. 'cause they think you're not gonna have any research. Or a lot of times they're like, where's the research? And when I give them six citations, they're like, oh, but that wasn't done in our situation.

Boz: And when we're talking about something as complex as grading reform, reforming something that has been around as long as it is and is as deep seated as it is. There's a lot of different parts to that. There's a lot of different areas that need to be looked at. It's not just as simple as oh, we change how we grade in one thing, and we measure students. There's a lot of parts, a lot of different types of research that can, should and has been going on. But again, I think it's in a lot of these different kind of pockets.

Sharona: Exactly. And the more that I see the impact that grades has in the classroom out of the classroom, our whole educational system, I realize how humongous trying to change this is. So we need this research though. We wanna build legitimacy. We wanna convince people that this is important, that it works and we also wanna avoid recreating some of the damage that we're currently.

Boz: Or new damage.

Sharona: Or new damage or, exactly. So I wanted to give some ideas of the types of research that can be done, and then maybe also we can talk about the sort of subject areas of the research. And I don't mean by subject areas, disciplines, not biology or math, but the components of grading that might need to be researched. So I'll give some types of research and then maybe you can give some of the components.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: That sound good? Okay.

So the types of research I've really seen or we've seen like five sort of major areas. Some of which we've had personal experience with doing, others of which I have not touched. So the first type would be classroom based. So this is some of the stuff that I personally have written is documenting my redesign process. So how you go about redesigning a course case studies on what happened in our courses. Some of the stuff we've done this is what the Grading for Growth book was largely was case studies. So anything that's in an individual or in a set of classrooms about the class itself outcomes, things like that.

Something I haven't done at all is institutional research level. So this would be looking at, although we talk about it with people all the time, things like policies or equity audits. We keep coming across this thing that we had never experienced before, and now we've come across it twice in the last few weeks. We tend to assume, our personal experience, is that most high schools grade on either an A, B, C, D, F scale, maybe on a GPA scale for a course. We've run into two school districts, or schools at least, if not districts, that report final grades on a 50 to 100 scale. So looking at that and its impacts, that would be like an institutional level thing that I've never dealt with.

I've also been involved in student outcomes research. On their learning, their motivation. We've talked in this podcast about achievement goal theory, stuff like that. I have not been involved in longitudinal studies, although I've certainly read them, but that's another thing that can be done.

Boz: And I think that is one of the ones that, especially with some of the personal pushbacks that we've had, but more you have had, when we're talking about some of the courses that you've actually helped redesign or are coordinating. And looking at those student achievements from those classes. That we need to look beyond just that end grade and really look at the longitudinal outcomes of those students as they progress in their education. Like it's great to look at what happens to an algebra student in an algebra class, but is there any way that we can actually look at those students and see how they end up doing in calculus? See how they end up doing in college later on? See how many of them end up going into math or STEM related fields if we did the initial research in an algebra class.

Sharona: Well, and I just realized, I just lied. 'cause you and I were involved in a longitudinal study.

Boz: Yes. We were.

Sharona: The SLAM program.

Boz: Yes, we were. There were, because it was done with a nonprofit. We've talked about them before. College Bridge, a great organization. But they also had limited resource resources. So, trying to do some of the longitudinal studies that bridged from high school to college, which is where their whole name comes from, proved to be very difficult. But the research that we had had incredible results, but it was a smaller research. It definitely had issues trying to keep track of students. But yeah, that is kind of where we actually met and started this partnership journey with.

Sharona: The things you don't know you're sowing. The seeds you sow. Absolutely. And then the last one that again, I haven't personally been involved with per se, although I've been on the periphery of, is some mixed methods type studies. So these are the types of research we could be doing, but overlaid with that is what is the research about? So can you share some ideas of what are some of the key areas? That we could and should be researching

Boz: Well, and these are our opinions, but the impact of grading on student learning and motivation, which there is definitely research out there. But looking at not just the positives of alternative or negative of traditionals. But both. And some of the stuff like Feldman with with his Grading for Equity, getting into the equity part of student motivation. And then we've talked about there is a lot of different terms for alternative grading and there are differences in them. Actually maybe looking at really comparing some of these. And are there advantages to say standards based versus specs or versus ungrading. Like not just looking at those compared to traditional, but also looking at them compared to each other?

Sharona: There's a very interesting thing we read yesterday as we were doing this research. That there's an entire special issue out on alternative grading in the area of two year colleges. And there's some actual, in this special issue, it's from the National Council of Teachers of English. They actually talk about how there's a potential for some of these alternative grading methods to have their own problems. For example, for neurodivergent students, and we've talked about the need for structure, but there's a sense that the labor-based grading contracts may have a problem because maybe some students aren't capable of doing the labor piece. So I think there's research that needs to be looked at to say, instead of a blanket statement of this is better for all students, maybe we need to look at, okay, maybe there's situations in which this new stuff is also not good.

Boz: And that's interesting 'cause that kind of leads into one of the other kind of big buckets, which is factors influencing grading decisions, including, and very importantly, students' perception of these different grading systems. Like how their perceptions of these mold or affect their performance in them. But also kind of in that same group teachers biases. Are there other influencing factors that could affect what teachers perceive when it comes to these grading decisions and especially any kind of grading reform?

Sharona: Well, and before you go on with that we were talking recently and at the moment, I'm blanking on which episode, but if traditional grades are subjective, which is the argument we make. That they're subjectivity masquerading as objectivity. Mm-hmm. And we're just saying, say in the guskey method that we talk about that it is the teacher's perception, or maybe this was on the episode with Joe we just did, if it's the teacher's perception that is ultimately giving the grade, maybe in combination with the student, you're gonna need to be even more aware, as an instructor, of your own implicit biases. Because they're not being masked, but doesn't mean they're going away. Yeah. So we're unmasking the subjectivity of grades, but they are still subjective in this situation.

Boz: Yeah, there's always going to be a level, but that's also one of the messages that I always love reiterating that comes from Guskey is about teachers not giving up their professional expertise to a computer algorithm. So yeah, there's going to be some subjectivity, but it's also coming from trained professionals. So as long as we're aware of that and like you said, are unmasking that and not hiding behind this supposedly objective way of doing it, even though it's actually much more subjective. And then another area that I think there's more, there has been more out there and it does look different, but how these grading systems are affected in higher ed versus K 12. What do the impacts of these grading systems if a student experiences them in K 12 and then transitions into college? What happens when students see this at the college level?

So there's a couple of different areas there. And then really looking at the role of feedback in grading, 'cause it's a cornerstone in alternative grading, is we want these feedback loops. But the role of that feedback in it grading the method of doing that feedback, how that feedback might look different in one alternative grading system compared to another. And what roles those feedback has on student performance. On student motivation, all those things. So there's lots of areas, and that's what we were talking about earlier about this being a really large topic. This is not a simple thing that you can just research, and it's part of the reason why we started having research a hundred years ago, actually more than a hundred years ago at this point, saying traditional had issues, but yet we still do it. This is a complex issue. This is a complex topic. This is a complex mechanism that is embedded into our school system here and has been for a very long time. So this is not a simple, we research right here and we're done. This is a very complex, multi webbed, it's complex, it's difficult to deal with.

Sharona: Well, and that's the thing because not only are there different areas of grades to research, not only is there different types of research, but in any given area, you can dive down to these micro levels, right? Because student stress becomes a factor when you look at grades. Quality of feedback becomes a factor. So it's not just research on grading and feedback and the role of feedback, but what makes good feedback. And then once we know some of this stuff, how do we train, especially for me, college instructors, because in K 12, you guys have a ton of professional development. A lot of it's bad, a lot of it's good, but at least there's a mechanism.

Right now there's very little mechanism to train faculty in higher ed. There's more and more centers for teaching excellence, but they're so underfunded.

Boz: Yeah, and just, I mean, looking at what you have to do to become a college professor versus what you have to do to become a K 12 educator. I mean, my degree, my bachelor's degree is in a Bachelor's of Science in Math Education. I have almost as many pedagogical theory-based classes on my transcript as I do math. Before you started as a adjunct at Cal State LA, how many pedagogical classes did you have to have?

Sharona: Oh, have to have? None.

Boz: Exactly. So even the way that we're prepared is different.

Sharona: Well, and it's kind of funny 'cause almost all of my training prior to starting to attend some of the Center for Effective Teaching stuff at Cal State LA was about, I'd call it about as southern as possible, even though I'm not Southern, which is, I learned it my mama's knee. You know? Because that's where I got all my early training, was at the dinner table when my mom who's professor emeritus at Cal State Dominguez Hills and ran the California Math project at Dominguez Hills for a couple of decades. I got to listen to her talking about the professional development she was doing with K through eight pre-service and in-service teachers. So that's where most of my training came from, was my mama's knee.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: A little shout out to my okie friend there. Right? Okay, so we've talked about the different types. What do we already have?

Boz: Well, I mean, there is, there is tons of research out there. You know, and we've talked and we've, we've interviewed several people about many the research books coming out. There are research papers. I mean, there really is, there's a lot out there. I. That looks at certain aspects or another. And I mean, if you look at research, I mean about grading. Yeah. You're gonna have some of the names that we talk about all the time. The Dr. Thomas Guskey's, the Feldman's but you know, the Linda Nilson's.

Sharona: Susan Blums.

Boz: Susan Blums,

Sharona: Jesse Stommel,

Boz: Jesse Stommel, which was a blast to have him on.

Sharona: Josh Eyler we had on.

Boz: Yeah. You know, we should try to get Ken O'Connor. He's one of the big k-12ers that we've not had on yet.

Sharona: We should talk to Ken O'Connor. We should see if we can get Alfie Kohn. And of course, one of the keynotes this summer is Asao Inoue we should probably have him on.

Boz: Yes. Yeah, we definitely need to have him on. I am very, very excited about his keynote. Just because out of the keynotes that we're having, he's the one that I know very little about. I know from listening to you and listening to a lot of the other people on the organizing committee of the conference, how highly regarded he is and his work is. But yeah, I'm really excited about that one and I'd love to get him on and learn more.

Sharona: I agree. I agree. So we have all these things, and one of the things that you and I were talking about is books versus say journal publications. Right? Because I. Alfie Cohen, Susan Blum, Jesse Stommel, Ken O'Connor, Tom Guskey, Linda Nielsen, Robert Talbert, Joe Feldman. They all have books out. Yes. Like entire books. Jack Schneider Josh Eiler, they all have books out and in higher ed, when I go looking for research, I don't go to books. I go to journals. So when I was doing a sort of a roundup on some of the most recent research I'm seeing that's more higher ed focused, we found new stuff in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology education in the assessment and evaluation in Higher Education Journal. Even though NCTE is more K 12 focused, they have an entire special issue out in one of their journals. Particularly, actually, I guess they cross over because they have a special issue out about recognizing the contributions of two year college instructors, and there was some interesting pushback, even though it's a pro alternative grading special issue, they have some concerns about the dominant narratives about alternative grading right now. So that was really interesting.

Boz: Oh, that's an interesting point.

Sharona: Yeah, there's also, and we'll link all these in the show notes. There's an article in the Advances in Physiology Education Journal. There's another one in the Biology, biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education Journal. And then a lot of the talks that I'm doing, like I'm gonna be talking at the Transforming Undergraduate Education in the Molecular Life Sciences Conference this summer. So there's a lot of discipline based. Research coming out in higher ed, and that's where we tend to look as opposed to entire books.

Boz: So, there's a lot out there. I still think that a lot of it is done in smaller pockets. And I think this is especially true in the higher ed, and it might be because of the way the research is done, like you said, mostly in journals and opposed to books. We'll get these pockets where we're doing one thing, let's say in a biology research we're doing, and then somewhere else over in a different part of the country, they're doing similar things, let's say in an English department. Well, they're coming up with very different languages, very different terminologies, even though the actual thing that they're studying might be very similar. And that's where a lot of this language issue is coming up.

Sharona: Exactly, and even in the work that we've done ourselves, there definitely feels like there's some significant gaps. So I had a conversation this week where we've been measuring equity gaps and fail rates in the classes that I coordinate, but I'm having real trouble getting that data about how do they do in subsequent courses? How do they do in their retention? So I think we have some critical gaps in the research. I mean, for example, we're seeing in our class that we've closed our equity gaps.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: However, we don't have research at any kind of a scale about the impact of these systems on marginalized students. And the marginalization might be different than the typical equity gaps that we're currently measuring. So that's a concern. The impacts on retention and graduation rates. I don't think we have.

Boz: Yeah, that, that many studies on that one. That's that longitudal studies that we were talking about earlier.

Sharona: Exactly. There's definitely some projects that I know of that are talking about. This next one we're looking at departmental or institutional level changes. So case studies. One of the organizations that I'm loosely affiliated with is a project called Project Ember. Which is eliminating mathematics barriers through evidence-based reforms. This is an organization that has come together to try to specifically target the 50 to a hundred institutions that are the R1, the research institutions in this country. Mm-hmm. Because they turn out something like 90 plus percent of our college level math instructors. At least at any sort of like a tenured type thing. They turn out all the PhDs. So getting them to be educated, focusing on the teaching focused faculty at those institutions, and they have, as one of their. Pillars of their project, alternative grading practices. But again, do we have the research to support that kind of change effort and whether or not it will be successful? There's a few others. A big one, and this also came up this week, my dean asked an excellent question, the role of AI in assessment and grading. So, so many places where AI is playing in now.

Boz: Yeah, I like, we've, and we've said this several times, that AI has gotten to the point to where we really do, we think this is going to be the biggest educational change agent since, you know, really widespread spread use of the internet. I mean, it, it, it really is well, and not

Sharona: just in the students using it. But also the instructor's using it.

Boz: Yeah, the, the instructor's using it. The impact that it has on student motivation, the how, that might be different combined with the different grading systems. So there's a whole other world of research that can go into. How AI plays into this,

Sharona: and the one that most worries me actually about AI is how quickly some of the big publishers are rolling out AI feedback tools.

Boz: Hey, I, I just took a survey I don't know if you've seen it in your Cal State email, but I just took a survey from Macmillan, which is the publisher from the book that we use in our statistics class, about their new AI tool in Achieve, which is their homework platform that we, that we do use. I think it's, it's got a specific name and I don't wanna say it wrong, so I, I'm not gonna say it, but yeah, they've got a new embedded ai homework tutor. So I, like I said, I don't know if you've looked at it, but yeah, you're right. The, they are adopting things very quickly.

Sharona: So I don't mind that stuff as much, depending on how it rolls out. I'm really worried about the farming out of the feedback loop on actual assessments that students are trying to show evidence of learning, like homework, help, tutoring when you're in the process of learning is one piece of it, but at some point if a student is trying to say, Hey, I've got this, to me it feels like that requires, that's that human relationship you're building between an instructor and a student. Now I'm a huge reader of science fiction, huge. I've been for decades and a lot of the science fiction that's set out a couple hundred years or whatever they, the students actually develop relationships with their AI tutors, with their AI teachers. And that is the way that students learn in the future. And I'm like, whoa, I'm so scared. Alright, so we've talked a lot about what could be done, what should be done. What are we doing?

Boz: So we are actually at, at the Center of Grading Reform and we wanted to bring this up on the podcast 'cause we also want to hear back from people, but we are looking at expanding the, the current you know, big project that the center does is the, the grading conference every summer. But we're expanding that. We're looking at doing a new conference. I, I don't know if you'd call it a conference necessarily, but looking.

Sharona: It's definitely gonna be distinct from the existing conference.

Boz: Yes, it's going to be completely distinct, completely different. But looking at. Bringing these research agencies together and bringing these research groups together and connecting these researchers and practitioners to start to build, you know, an area of, of centralized research.

Sharona: Exactly. I mean, there's a need to connect people. So connect researchers and practitioners. 'cause some of us are doing this in our classrooms and some others are like education researchers that their area of specialty is developing this research. We wanna be building research agendas together and getting ideas. And we also want to provide support because a lot of institutions, especially given the current climate for funding are struggling to allocate between different disciplines and a lot of them are not in the business of doing education research. Yes. I mean, especially in an area that so dramatically challenges existing power structures.

Boz: Yeah. And again, we have so many different areas to look at this, but also bringing in some of those kind of shared instruments and shared tools. So we can also start, you know, bringing these, these small snowballs together to make a large, large snowball, you know, getting these, this momentum.

Sharona: We wanna avalanche. Yes. We want an avalanche of grading research and we wanna connect people, 'cause one of the challenges that we have faced is students are not very responsive anymore. If they ever were to surveys and questionnaires and participating in research. So it's really hard to get a critical mass of participants in a single institution. So being able to work across multiple institutions in a much more flexible way, I think is gonna be incredible. So, yeah, so one of the goals of the center is to be supporting this kind of research. 'cause again, the Center's purpose to some degree, is to do institutional level change or really do massive change on the grading system in the United States, in all of North America and any other country that has adopted our crazy grading system. Which can I just make a quick side note, if any of you have heard me talk about the history of grading? It largely centers on Harvard University. I mean, Harvard has been driving this boat for a very, very long time.

Boz: And not, not just on grading. They've been driving the boat on a lot of things in American Education.

Sharona: I mean, yeah, it's the whole reason that we teach math in the sequence we do. They actually have a page on their center for teaching and learning saying it is time to switch to alternative grading practices. So we might be making progress. Because if Harvard's gonna do it, then everybody's gonna do it. Well, according to history.

Boz: Yeah. I would say that's where we copied a lot of it to begin with. So maybe, maybe we could use that same mechanism to copy.

aybe we can find some time in: 2026

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I have some questions for the people listening. Do you wanna be a part of this? What kinds of research would you wanna do?

Boz: Yeah, were were there any research topics that we, when we were talking earlier that we missed? Is there something that either you have already started or that. You know, these big areas that you think need to be done that we, we did not mention earlier in the show?

Sharona: Well, I actually have a few that I wanted to bring up that we have not yet talked about.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So when we talk about like those different micro levels, one big one and that we talk about a lot, but there's not a lot of research on is the purpose of grades. We need to build, I think, a national consensus as best we can on what is the purpose of grades, because almost every one will tell us that the purpose of grades is to communicate to people what the students have learned. But we're finding that in reality, that's not what it was designed to do. And it's not what it's actually used for.

Boz: Not, not always. You're right.

Sharona: And then another area of research is addressing grading inconsistencies because across different instructors, but even across different schools, different classrooms, people have defined their grades in different ways, and there's no common meaning to them.

Boz: Looking at how little education there is on the art of grading, like we've talked about this a lot, about as big of aspect as it is, especially in K 12 education where we do get some, some pedagogy training in our, you know, in our education, we still, there don't have hardly any, if any, courses on, you know, like I said, that that art of grading, that grading 1 0 1 course.

Sharona: So I brought that up to you this week. I think you and I should create a grading 1 0 1 course for an institutional context. And then if we have any people in College of Education that wanna hire us to teach this course as an actual course, we are available, we'd love to do it. If you're not within driving distance of Cal State LA, it might have to be an online course, but hey, we know people who do those very well. We can make it good. So I'm just gonna put that out. I'm gonna manifest that. Into the universe. We would love to teach this course somewhere, sometime, someday.

Boz: Yeah. But going back to our questions for our listeners, like I. Are any of you out there that are into this side of it or that you are into research? And what would you like, like to see at a conference like this? And, and again, I, I don't know if conference is the right word, but what would you like to see? What would benefit you and your ability to research the topics that you're researching?

Sharona: Yeah, I guess I would probably start calling it a meeting to start with. 'cause it's a meeting we wanna bring together people to have these discussions. It's not a place where we present our research. It's not a place where we go to sessions about existing stuff. It's really about creating something new. So I think the first one's gonna be a meeting. I just don't know what title's gonna be. Yeah. So we've talked about a lot of these things. A lot of these holes. I just wanna invite everybody, if you're interested in this topic, you know, send us an, an email to, you know, use our contact us form on our website, thegradingpod.com. Let us know that you wanna be part of the stuff. You can also email the grading conference for now info@thegradingconference.com. Or you can email me at the center, let us know you wanna get involved. And then of course, the big thing coming up very soon is the grading conference itself. So.

Boz: Yeah, if you, if you've not already go get registered come join us at the conference and if you do, hey drop us a message in some of the sessions about this idea of this research. So we hope to see you there, and until then, we'll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode's page on our website. www.thegradingpod.com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a featured 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.

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