What happens when we give students meaningful choices in their learning? In this episode, Sharona and Boz dive deep into the role of student choice, autonomy, and agency in both K–12 and higher education classrooms.

They start with a simple question: if nearly every school and district mission statement includes “lifelong learners,” how do our grading practices actually support—or undermine—that goal? From there, they explore how alternative grading practices can not only give students more options but also build genuine agency that empowers learners to set goals, take action, and connect their education to their lives.

Key Topics Covered:

• The difference between choice, autonomy, and agency—and why it matters.
• Real classroom examples, from multiple-choice homework sets to open-ended calculus projects.
• Research highlights, including a Science Advances study on how giving students control over attendance and homework increased their engagement and persistence.
• Why students often choose harder work (and stick with it!) when the choice is theirs.
• How alternative grading systems like Triple P (Preparation, Participation, Practice), contract grading, and ungrading create space for authentic student agency.
• The role of AI and efficient tools in helping instructors offer tailored pathways without burning out.
• Practical strategies for weaving agency directly into learning outcomes.

Takeaway:

Student choice alone isn’t enough. To truly prepare learners for life beyond the classroom, we need to design systems that move from choice → autonomy → agency, and grading reform is a powerful way to get there.

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!

• Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education – Science Advances
• Measuring Student Success Skills: A Review of the Literature on Student Agency – Center for Assessment (see especially pp. 16–17)

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:

• The Grading for Growth Blog
• The Grading Conference
• The Intentional Academia Blog

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.

116 - Student Choice

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Boz: You even see this more in K 12. There is not a single school that I have ever seen that I've ever read a mission or vision statement that does not have the phrase lifelong learners, ev. Fair enough? Fair enough, fair enough. Pick a school at random, pick a district at random. Read their mission or the vision statement, and I will bet you donuts to dollars that you will find that phrase. So,

Sharona: Nope, you're correct. I, I, I stand corrected.

Boz: So if, if that is in our mission and vision statements as an institution, whether we're talking K 12 or higher ed, then we have to build students agency. We have to give them that goal setting and that student voice. 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 student 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 Grading 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 think I'm doing well. It's a little bit early in the morning for normally we don't record quite this early, although we're often working this early, but I'm a little bit like, Hmm, am I happy to be up and doing this this early in the morning or am I not? So I'm kind of a little wishy-washy.

Boz: How about you? You know, I'm doing, I'm doing all right. Like you said, we are recording this a little bit early for compared to when we usually do, but other than that, I'm doing pretty good.

Sharona: Well, and I'm also not sure about how my day is gonna go because it's the first rehearsal day. Our new show, and it's the first time that I have to face everybody after we put out casting decisions. And casting is really, really hard and unpleasant. So I'm kind of like, are people gonna be happy to see me? Are they not gonna be happy to see me? So I'm a little conflicted today. What does your day look like?

Boz: Sounds like you've had a few harder choices than I've had recently. 'cause you know, this is. We're recording this on a Saturday morning and my Oklahoma Sooners, have a bye week this week. So biggest choices I'm having to make right now is, you know, do I start with yard work? Do I start with cleaning the gutters? So my choices are easier than yours.

Sharona: Yeah. But neither of those choices are appealing to me. Oh, well, yeah. No, I don't do yard work. I remember

Boz: you don't have a yard

Sharona: being so happy when I hired someone. When I was in Ohio, I hired someone to mow the lawn and then trim the edges and I was super happy. So yeah, you enjoy those choices. That'll be, that'll be interesting.

Boz: Talking about choices have you had any other choices recently that have kind of come up?

Sharona: Funny you should ask that. No. I've been thinking about the question of choice a lot this week. We had something happen when I was doing grading calibration for one of the pre-calculus courses. And one of the things I try to do, even when I'm in a traditional class, is I try to sneak in alternative grading beliefs and ways of doing things. And one of the ways I do that is I try to give more problems on an exam than I really need to check for evidence of learning.

And so what that looks like is we usually have, say, 70 points on an exam, but we're intending to count it out of 60. And I had a whole conversation with the instructors. About whether or not we should pick one problem to be considered the extra credit in quote unquote. And I don't like that because I don't wanna make the choice as the instructor, which one is the extra credit. I'd rather give that choice to the student or not have them have to choose at all, and they get credit for everything. So I was kind of thinking about this and I was honing in on this idea of the student making the choice. And I thought that felt pretty powerful to me.

Boz: Well, yeah, and giving student choice in certain aspects. I mean this is something, especially if you're a K 12 educator, we've done all kinds of training where on how to set up your classroom expectations and norms and things like this that if you involve the students and gets students voice and choice into it, it builds buy-in, it builds some agency to the students. But as we were thinking about this, where else do we see student being given choice and how does that actually work with and enhanced by alternative grading practices?

Sharona: I think that's a very interesting question. As I was talking to you about and coming up with the topics for this episode, I did some research and I also started to think about, well, where are we putting student choice and what does that mean? And I ran across something that I hadn't really separated in my mind was that there's a couple of words that go with student choice that I think are really important, but I had been mixing them up in my head. And those words are autonomy and agency. So I went digging and I learned something very interesting. What do you know about autonomy and agency?

Boz: You know, you're right. I have heard these two terms be used pretty much interchangeably. And I mean, I'll admit I've used them pretty much interchangeably, but you're right, there is some difference. So do you wanna kind of go into, for purposes of today when we're talking about choice leading to either autonomy or agency, what is the difference in those terms?

Sharona: Yes, I will absolutely do that. Now I want the listeners to know that these definitions are coming from a couple of different papers. We will post the sources in the show notes, but it boils down to one of the definitions that I really like is that student autonomy is the capacity for self-direction and the freedom to make meaningful choices in one's learning.

And I love that word meaningful because let me give you an example. We've talked about in this podcast, our Triple P, our preparation, participation and practice learning outcome. And we give students a ton of choice. In that learning outcome, we basically provide them with a menu of things to do with a whole boatload of points over a thousand points. And we say, you need to get to 700, and we don't really care how you get there.

Now we've put in a lot of structure that students may or may not be aware of to sort of help guide them, but ultimately they get to choose which activities to do in order to get this 700. We tell them at the beginning that they should do everything until they learn what works for them. So we're trying to get them to not just go, oh, well I like this part and I don't like that part, or whatever, but to give some intentionality and thought into the choices and what it will mean for their success.

Boz: Yeah, I do the exact same thing, usually not the first day, it's usually the second day. But when we're talking about the triple P, I encourage my students, for the first unit or two, do everything or as much as you can. And then once you find what is actually useful to you, continue doing that and stop doing the rest. Here's the interesting thing. The students don't stop. We've talked about this argument and people going, oh, well if they don't have grade incentive, if it's not gonna help or hurt their grade, the students aren't gonna do it. And that's not the case here. We have seen this over and over and over. Once the student hits the mark that they need to get the Triple P, they don't stop.

They don't stop because it is helping them. And they have found other reasons to be doing it. But it's interesting, they have the choice to stop and they don't. This is not the only time we'll see this, so, and we're not gonna jump right into it, but as we talk about some of these articles and some of the things you found and some of the research that's been done about giving students choice, there's some interesting things that come up.

Sharona: I agree, but before, like you said, before we go there, I did wanna add one thing about the autonomous, the definition of the autonomy nature, which is you have to have enough understanding and self-awareness to make those meaningful choices, and for those choices to align with your values and your interests in order for it to be truly autonomous. You know, choosing between chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream. Yes, it's a choice, but it's not autonomy, right? Autonomy's a little bit further because of that meaningful component. And sometimes if we give students choice, but they don't understand the impact of those choices, it's not really autonomous. So I want people to keep that in their minds as we move into. Where we see this playing out in alternative grading, that that meaningful component has to be there.

Boz: Okay. So what's the difference then between autonomy and agency?

Sharona: So agency starts with autonomy. Like you have to have autonomy to get to agency, but then it adds in the ability to actually influence your educational journey through meaningful action. It adds that ability to take an action that moves you in a direction that supports your autonomy.

Boz: So we had recently had a conversation about a way a a one of the New England independent schools do their honors, where the student actually has the choice of going okay, i'm doing these things to get my A, but there's some other things that I can choose to do if I want. It can't hurt my grade, but it could give me that honors designation, a choice like that. That would be not just autonomy but agency. Correct?

Sharona: Well, I would say it's helping them build agency. Yes. Yeah. By making that choice, they are not only getting an action, but that action includes. Goal setting. It includes the student feeling that they have their own self-efficacy. So yes, I would agree that it exhibits agency, but it also builds agency. And I think that's what's so powerful about that particular item of deciding to try to opt up into this honors designation is the student has so much power. To set their own goals, to build their self-efficacy and to make a meaningful choice that they then have to take action on. Like it's not just, oh, I'm gonna choose the honors designation and then I'm gonna behave the same in class. Like, they have to then take a whole bunch of actions to make it actually happen.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: So I think that's the key for me is thinking about, I think we have a lot of autonomy in the alt grading that I personally do. I don't know that I do as much building of student agency as I would like, except maybe in a couple things that I'll talk about later.

Boz: All right, so we've got, just to kind of define our, our terms as we're gonna be talking about 'em today, we've got choice, which is, you know, just giving students choices on certain things. And I'll give an example of a choice. That is just a choice that I don't know if it really builds towards autonomy and definitely not agency. This is a choice that I used to do a lot in my high school classes, especially my algebra ones, and that was when I had a homework assignment. I would give them choices like you can do set A, which will be these five problems. You could do set B, which are these five. You can do set C, which are these five. I never did ter even, 'cause of course my book had all the odd answers. But giving them that little bit of choice of, you know, a subset of homework instead of saying, you know, everyone's doing all 15. And there is a lot of research behind doing this, of just giving a, a student a choice. It does build buy-in and it, it is something that. Can help with motivating students, but that was just a simple choice. I don't know if that really gets into, you know, building student autonomy or agency. Definitely.

But things like this are one of a especially K 12 educators tools for classroom management and just kind of building the classroom culture. So we have these choices. And this is not unique to alternative grading by any means. And, and we're not gonna try to say that we are, I think, going to try to say how it can be improved and enhanced when done with alternative grading.

Sharona: And I think that leads us to why would we want to improve and enhance student autonomy and student agency?

Boz: Well, one, I mean we,

Sharona: what's the purpose of that?

Boz: Yeah. Well one is, you know, getting student buy-in. I mean, we've done whole episodes on student buy-in, and that's one of the things right there is, as you give, you know, students choice and start to build their autonomy. They do buy into the course and buy in helping build that internal motivation, that intrinsic motivation instead of always counting on external.

Sharona: Well, I agree with you, but I also think there's sort of a bigger picture here, which is overall student success. We're seeing is driven largely by the greater level of student agency. I mean, students right now are faced with a lot of choices about where to spend their dollars on education or their lives, and I do think that some of the disruptions happening are going to force us to make education more meaningful to students or they're gonna opt out of it.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: At least at the higher ed level.

Boz: Oh, yeah. And we, and we've talked, we've got a couple episodes about, right?

Sharona: So when we were preparing for this, one of the questions that came up is, I know that you and I clearly believe that more student autonomy, more student agency is good. I am now coming to believe, and everyone who's heard me say, I'm not part of the Burn It All Down camp is gonna find this hilariously funny, i'm like, dang. I think that my number one thing I have to start teaching is student agency. That needs to become a guiding principle of my design of my alt grading, which means I may have to go that ungrading route. I didn't really say that out loud, but, but in particular, because we came across a couple of articles and I do wanna get to these articles right now because. I don't like to do things just on my gut feel. I mean, I'll, I'll do them on my gut feel, but I'm not gonna actually promote them and say other people should do them unless I have some research to back it up.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So I wanna start with this article the title of which is Choosing to Learn the Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education. This journal was published in, I'm sorry, this article was published in the Journal Science Advances. I thought that they looked at two studies. That was fascinating. Do you wanna share the first of the studies in this paper about what they, what they looked at and what they saw this had to do with attendance?

Boz: Well, yeah, it, it really looked at attendance and homework.

Sharona: So they themselves did two. Studies, one on attendance, one on homework.

Boz: Yeah. So let's, let's look at the attendance first. 'cause that's another one that we, you know, especially when you're doing your coordination and trying to work with other professors and other educators, this idea of if we don't make attendance mandatory and if we don't tie it to the grade, you know, we've gotta give certain percentage of the grade to attendance, or they just won't come. So they, they did this the first part of this was on attendance. Now, the choice that they were given to the students wasn't should, should attendance, matter, should you come or not. It was, do you want to make attendance mandatory and part of the grade.

Sharona: For yourself?

Boz: For yourself. They looked at three different groups. One where the attendance was mandatory by design. Another one where they gave the choice to the students if they wanted the attendance to be mandatory and part of the grade and the students chose yes. So they opted into making attendance mandatory. And then the third group was also given that option, but opted to not make attendance mandatory.

Sharona: To make it clear the YES group and the no group did that on an individual basis within the same class. So those two groups, they either chose to make attendance part of their own individual grade or they chose not to, and they were tracked within the same class.

Boz: They found some really interesting things that those that opted into making attendance mandatory had higher attendance than the group that chose or that wasn't given the choice at all. So the results.

Sharona: Wait, you're saying that the people who chose to make it mandatory had higher attendance even though like it was optional for them to opt in, but they had higher than the people who the teacher did it?

Boz: Absolutely. And now in the data and they make this very clear that it did not quite reach what we call statistical significance, which is usually a p value of 0.05. This hit about 0.07, so it wasn't quite statistically significant. I do wanna make that clear, but in the aggregate, in the total, in all three of the breakdowns. It was higher in every single group one group, even more so than others. So can you call it statistically significant? No. But man, looking at this data and looking at the size of this. It definitely looks like it had a impact.

Sharona: Well, and for those of you who are not statisticians, there's actually a big argument about the cutoff for statistical significance. Even a 0.07 is still gonna mean it's highly likely that this data is reflective of reality and not just chance. What's interesting to me though, it's not just that the attendance was higher in what they call the optional mandatory group, it's actually the pattern over time that I thought was even more interesting.

The teacher mandated mandatory group saw attendance drop in all of the conditions that they analyzed over time. It started out about equal with the optional mandatory group. But then as we've all seen in our classes drops over time. It doesn't matter, they're just willing to take the grade penalty. But the optional mandatory, the people who said I'm in, I choose to make my attendance mandatory, their attendance stayed the same through the entire semester, the entire term. So I think that's really interesting. It's almost like, Hey, I chose to say that I'm gonna come. Dang it. My word is worth something. It's kind of an interpretation. Right?

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: Now, does attendance matter? Many of us think it does. Many of us think that students will do better if they're in class, which is why we have essentially, in a way, an optional mandatory attendance built into our statistics because they do get credit towards their Triple P for attending. By participating in our iClickers or other in-class activities, they could stop coming. 'cause there's other ways to get the Triple P. So we're not quite at the same thing, but we essentially have an optional mandatory.

Boz: Instead of our attendance having a penalty towards their grade, we've talked about this before, it has a natural consequence and the natural consequence is losing on some of those class discussions, on some of the other activities, which does have an effect on the triple Ps. And yes, even though a student can get the triple P without getting all attendance, it's pretty hard to do without getting most attendance, but that's a natural consequence. It's not a imposed force consequence of, oh, let me hold the grade over your head, because that's the only tool I have and I'm going to beat you with that every chance I get.

Sharona: I wanted to share. I completely agree with you. That's what happens with our Triple P? I also wanted to share an example of something I do actually in my calculus classes, because this is something that I think is really fascinating when you give students an autonomous choice and they take it and they run with it. So it's one thing to be like, oh, I'm gonna show up to class. Like either you show up and maybe you participate or you don't. But I do a project that is in each of the calculus classes as I get to the end. So Calc one, calc two, calc three, as I get to the end of the semester, there's a couple of topics that are very, very hard to learn fast enough to exhibit what I would call true evidence of learning, so I don't wanna stick it on an exam. Also, there are topics that are very hard to do in a finite amount of time, like an exam.

So instead, I have a project, and the project is based on a very simple starting point. Where I tell them to create a simple closed curve, and I'm not gonna go into the mathematics of that, but there are some very, very, very easy ones. So if they just wanted to kind of phone it in on this project, they could basically make like a crescent moon and that would be good enough and they could do the project.

My students don't do that. They intentionally come up with these crazy designs that make their project so much harder and they are so proud of these designs. They do flowers, they'll do things that like, sometimes they have to spin it into three dimensions and they'll come up with things that look like turbines and like, it's insane. And I'm like, this is amazing because all you needed to do the project was a simple closed curve. It could be any simple closed curve that's not like a circle or ellipse. And they do it. And it's just, I love the fact that they take it so much further than they have to. And it's not about the grade.

Boz: No. And yeah, we've talked more about this project in some of our past episodes, but yeah, it's really interesting to see what students will do when given the choice.

Sharona: Well, and I feel like that project was probably my one project in calculus that went a little bit more towards agency because it was reflecting things that they were interested in. They made these designs because of the things that they were interested in and tied it back to things in their life. That was pretty cool.

Boz: Kind speaking about that assignment and related to that, was the other part of the study that you were talking about and that was on assignments. On giving some choice to how students do different homework assignments. And again, it had some interesting findings with students that were given options to switch to a less demanding assessment option at some point. So did you wanna talk about that one.

Sharona: Sure, I can do that. So the options, one of the things I liked about this particular article, even though it's not specifically focused on alternative grading, is a lot of the principles are there. So they say, for example, regular assessment followed by timely feedback is a crucial in ingredient of effective teaching. However, students often seek to minimize the effort required to complete assignments. So again, this is who's pushing the effort? Is the teacher trying to push the effort or is the student trying to push the effort? And so they looked at the opportunity to give students the greater control over these assessments. In the first cohort, all students had to complete a series of 20 challenging problem sets. And in the second cohort, students chose. Between problem set based assessments or essay based assessments, and the essay based assessments required relatively little work and unfortunately, or okay, not unfortunately. So they randomly assigned students to either the mandatory or the choice cohorts. 90% of the ones in the choice cohorts decided. To start with the harder assessment, the problem-based one, and only 5% of those later switched into the easy one.

Boz: So when given the choice we're talking, only 5% actually chose to go the other, the other route.

Sharona: And they switched eventually. Yeah. They didn't switch like right away. They also measured. How long students set spent on the problem sets across the board. Because remember, everyone sort of started in the problem set. It's just one group had the opportunity to opt out. Yeah.

Boz: So that was the part that I found the most interesting. It's not how many did or did not choose to opt out, but the amount of reported hours spent practicing on, you know, homework or, or whatever the practice was for the students that were in the free to switch. They ended up spending more time with the practice, with the preparation, with the homework than the students that weren't given that choice to opt out. So not only did the students that were given the choice not end up opting out, but they ended up spending more time in, you know, doing the homework. Yes, the homework time went down throughout the semester, but that group that had the option to change. Ended up spending, they were a lot more likely to spend two to three hours per week than the group that was not given the choice.

Sharona: I think that's really interesting because just because they were given the choice, like why would that mean that they'd spend more time on it? Again, these, these groups are randomly assigned, so it's not like certain people chose to be in the free to switch group. Right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I thought that was very interesting. And then if you look at their results, they illustrated student adoption again. And this was across multiple cohorts now, student adoption of the high effort assessment led to higher effort

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: Beyond the other group.

Boz: Yep. All right. And so we'll link this article and a couple others in the show notes. But I do wanna go past the point of just talking about the power of choice and what it can do with students. Two, where and how do we see it in alternative grading and. How is it enhanced by, by alternative grading practices? So we've already seen one example of this choice being enhanced by alternative grading practices. A couple episodes ago when we talked to Mark about the way the school does that honors designation, what are some other places that we've seen? Choice being enhanced with alternative grading practices.

Sharona: So the big one that comes to mind is the entire way I graded my history of math class.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: Because as people have heard me talk here before, it's such a gargantuan undertaking, you know, all of human history around the entire world in a 15 week semester, making that meaningful to students. And so. The way I did my projects where not only did they choose which standard to try to incorporate, but they had massive freedom about what the assessment, like what was their evidence gonna look like and what actual topic was. I mean, it was almost too much, and I got just unbelievably meaningful submissions.

Boz: And some really cool ones. I mean.

Sharona: Yeah, well the guy, like the guy who took the Egyptian fractions and composed a piece of jazz music.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: I mean, yeah, it was mathematics. It demonstrated their understanding of Egyptian fractions, but they got to make music or another student who explored the patterns on Islamic mosques. Or another student, two students who brought in the Incan Yupanas, bringing their own cultural historical background in. And I was not super critical on these projects. They had to meet the criteria. The math had to be clear. The writing had to be clear. But I'm sitting here saying, I just want them to love and explore and understand something about the history of math. Yeah. Like I didn't have a lot. And the level of effort that these students went to was mind boggling.

Boz: All right, so some other places that, and again, I'm, I'm gonna give one that some might argue you could do with traditional, and, and I'm not saying you can't, I just think it's much easier with alternative grading practices. And I, and I'll explain why, but giving students choice on the type of assessment that they're taking. So one of the things that I used to do when I was still teaching algebra one, was giving a alternative assessment, giving students choice to do this project. To make up some of their test scores for a particular unit. So each of my units had this different project that was meant to really highlight, the outcomes of that unit.

So yes, I did it when I was still doing traditional grading. And I would use that as, you know, you can make up so many points on your, so it worked, but it wasn't as effective as compared to looking at and saying, okay, students, you have to show me two different you know, pieces of evidence that you have gotten proficient on this. Learning target. It can be a quiz, it can, it can be, you know, a homework set. It can be this project and letting the students actually choose. And we used, we did something like that called Tams before in our statistics class. But yeah, letting students actually play to their strength. Letting students do like a presentation or giving students more choice on how they're going to be assessed. And again, with traditional grading, you gotta do a lot of funny things with the numbers. With alternative grading, depending on how you have your grading architecture set up, it might not take any kind of effort whatsoever to adjust for a student doing a different type of project.

Sharona: Well, and as I was preparing for this episode, I actually did think of the episode title, which says something and it might change, but it's basically how do you do this without driving yourself nuts as an instructor? And so I think what you just said is critical if we're just looking to give, you know, you showed me enough evidence twice of something. It's a lot easier to let students have those choices because you don't have to necessarily do an entire holistic grading. Like if you wanna let them write an essay and you're a math teacher, you don't have to grade all the writing and is it an okay essay if you're just looking to see, can they explain a mathematical concept? You're just looking for that evidence so you can actually do a bigger project or a bigger thing and just look for the evidence that you need, which I feel like the teacher that we spoke to a couple of weeks ago from Avondale School. And Jen, Jen was explaining how she does these verbal assessments like every day with her students because she doesn't have to do the whole thing. She just needs the one piece that she's looking for in that moment.

Boz: We can even take it a step further than that. We had one of our favorite guests on not too long ago, Jeff Anderson, and he made a really interesting point. When you guys were having a little bit of back and forth about, let's look at a math class where there are certain skills that a student, you know, is expected to have, and he made the point about why are we the ones that are choosing that, you know, that he, especially in a freshman level, you know, gen ed course, where students in that course. Might have four or five, six different majors throughout the whole course. So me as a engineering major might want different things and need different things out of your linear algebra class than me as a mathematician, you know, going in as a math major or different than me, you know, me as a student, as a business major. So could we give those students that, that kind of choice. And that's where we really get into un grading or contract grading.

Sharona: And that's where I've really been thinking about it a lot. 'cause I suspect I'm going back in the classroom in the spring and I suspect I'm not necessarily going back in classes that I have taught in a while. Yeah, I don't know that yet, but it would not surprise me if I end up in a, say a pre-calculus class. And the challenge that I'm grappling with is I would like the students to be able to chart a path through a pre-calculus class that's more in line with their personal goals, their major, the things they need out of it, and they don't know enough to know what that looks like. So somehow I have to provide enough guidance that they can make an informed, a meaningful choice without putting the entire burden on them to say, Hey, you don't know any pre-calculus, but you should figure out which precalculus you're gonna need as an engineer. Yeah. Like, that's not gonna work.

So this for me is where my skills and the addition of artificial intelligence comes in, because I have been using AI to generate mathematical objects, whether they're exams or quizzes or or application problems, where I tell the ai, put this in an engineering context. Put this in a pre-med context. Put this in a biology context, and it's doing actually a really good job because it's a closed end prompt where I can evaluate the mathematics of it.

Once it gives it to me, I can check it, I can edit it. I know what I'm doing. But to me that would be a place where I don't have to go crazy. I can cut down my development time. By interacting with the AI to generate these materials.

Boz: Yeah. And, and I'm glad you brought that up. 'cause I, I can hear people in my head right now just going, yeah, this is great to give all these, you know, great pathway choices to students, but how am I going to write 15 different types of assessment questions and yeah. I may be a math expert, but maybe I don't have the construction or the architectural background to really understand how this math might work for someone that's going into architecture or someone that's an art major. So how do I do that? And you're right, we've talked a lot about the importance of using tools. Especially when we're doing alternative grading. But really anytime as an educator, our time is way, way too thin. We have to be efficient and being efficient with this is being skilled with AI and really using ai. But doing that does, you don't have to have the expertise on the outside subjects. If you can set up the math, AI can really help you out and you've experienced that, like you said.

Sharona: I definitely have, but I also wanna direct people to some resources, not just ai that I really, that I found as I was looking through this. So there's an article, or it's not even an article, it's a report by the Center for Assessment called Measuring Student Success Skills, a Review of the Literature on Student Agency. And on page 16 of this particular 44 page document, there's a table called practices used to support student agency. And when I read through this, I kind of am reading and going, oh gee, like alternative grading is exactly what's in this table. So I just wanted to read some of the, it's in three categories, student opportunities for agency, student teacher collaboration, and then teacher led approaches. So student opportunities include choice, harnessing outside act, opportunities, revision. Revision. Yeah. Can I say that again? That's not one head stop revision.

Boz: That's not one of our cornerstones of alternative grading.

Sharona: Oh. And look, self-reflection and student led instruction. And then for student teacher collaboration, it's feedback.

Boz: Again, that has nothing to do with any of our founding pillars of alternative grading,

Sharona: Goal setting. Individual conferences and student voice and then teacher led approaches. Assessment, designing and supporting summative formative incentive summative assessments to support and evaluate agency modeling positive reinforcement. So like literally. We should just rename alternative grading as to be student agency grading.

Boz: Okay. We're not gonna get in another name change.

Sharona: No, but then on page 17, they give specific interventions, and one of them is problem and project-based learning, which is another one of those high efficiency, highly effective practices. So I do recommend that people go and read this. If you're interested in student agency, this might be the thing that trips me over at least into contract grading, if not actually full un grading. I mean, if you define un grading as just taking marks off, like that part's not hard, but I'm still wedded a little bit to some of the fundamental skills that I think the, the actual mathematical skills that students need, the sort of what I would call the advanced algebra manipulation skills. That they're gonna need when they get to calculus. So I haven't quite balanced those things yet in my brain.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But I, I think I have, I think I have a way, so, I'm excited and even if I get to teach linear algebra again, I think I can take it further because I do have the AI tools, which can take my learning outcomes and I can make a mathematics major version. Which is very sort of pure math, abstract, really going towards the proof side of things. And I can make an engineer's version of the same exact topic.

Boz: And then, but as we also look at, you know, just some of the alternative grading practices and some of the kind of different flavors of alternative grading. It allows for so much more choice from both the teacher and the student that I don't know how you can build the same level of student autonomy and agency a traditional class. And, and I, I am speaking specifically about. Contract grading. You know, some of the things that we've talked about with Dr. Ashley Fox or you know, Dr. Jeff Anderson said who are, who are some of the other ones that.

Sharona: Asao Inoue does contract.

Boz: Oh my God, Asao Inoue. Man was his keynote not great this last year. But yeah, the freedom that these different models give the students. And now a lot of this research, you know, this research that we've been talking about, points. And shows why the students are being so successful with in classes like this.

Sharona: There's one other area though that I di that we haven't mentioned yet that I really wanna bring up as a, a place to put this stuff.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: And it goes back to grading what matters, which is what camp was talking about.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: If the goal, of higher education especially, but of all education is to turn students into effective learners. What we really wanna grow is their self-efficacy and grow their agency. I mean, that is what we're trying to teach them is how to have agency Right. In their lives. Yeah. And in their educational journey. So you can put it directly in your learning outcomes?

Boz: Well, you just said, especially higher ed, all education, but especially I would argue, no, you even see this more in K 12. There is not a single school that I have ever seen, that I've ever read a mission or vision statement that does not have the phrase lifelong learners.

Sharona: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

Boz: Pick a school at random, pick a district at random, read their mission or the vision statement, and I will bet you donuts to dollars that you will find that phrase. So

Sharona: no, you're correct. I stand corrected.

Boz: So if, that is in our mission and vision statements as an institution. Whether we're talking K 12 or higher ed, that we have to build students' agency, we have to give them that goal setting and that student voice. And again, yes, you can do this in traditional grading practices. I'm not saying you can't. I'm just saying there is so much easier and so much more options with alternative grading. So, alternative grading, if you are looking at. Trying to convince or trying to make arguments for it at, at a school site. Tie it directly into your mission and vision center 'cause it supports that with the, the student's agency building towards lifelong learners.

Sharona: I completely agree. I would say that if you're still stuck in a traditional grading model for whatever reason, this is something you can do. You can build this in. But I would like to challenge our most advanced alternative graders, including myself. I'm putting myself out there to take this next step to really center student agency, which is not something that I've done as well as I would like. I definitely did it in my history math class, but student agency is not centered in my linear algebra. It's not. Yeah. I still think it's a very good class, especially compared to its peers. It's team-based inquiry learning. But I think I could go further and if I get the opportunity to teach that class again, I'm gonna try. I'm gonna try at least to get to the level of tailoring as much as I can to the student's individual goals, which may mean their majors, it may mean what they wanna get outta the class.

But having those individual conferences sitting down with students in the first couple of weeks, I have decent class sizes. 30 students is not unreasonable for me to sit down with and have a conversation in the first two to three weeks of the term. It'll take some time.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But I can be, I can do it. So I'm, I'm gonna throw down the gauntlet to all of our most advanced alt graders. And if some of you're already doing this, which I know some of you are, I know you are, we'd love to hear how you do it in your class. We'd love to bring you on the pod. So I'd like to get more people who are really focused on student autonomy and student agency on and talking about what they see happening in their classes.

Boz: Yeah. Absolutely. So if you are, if you are, or if you're at a setting or just in your classroom that you have some other interesting ways that you bring in student choice and, and autonomy and, and agency, we'd love to hear about it, and especially how your grading practices allow or enhance. Those, so we are coming up on time. Any other last parting words?

Sharona: Just again, thank you to our listeners getting to record this each week. It's seriously one of the biggest highlights and it lifts me up for the rest of the week. We couldn't do it without people actually listening to us. 'cause if there were five of you listening to us each week, I think we would've given up a long time ago. I know I would've. I've been like, what is this for? But this is just such an incredible journey. So thank you to everyone.

Boz: All right. Well, you have been listening to the Grading podcast with Sharona and Baz, and 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 future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.