In this episode we explore several questions sent in by listener's of the pod. From Interim Grades, creating learning objectives for high school science courses and how to track effort to why we even put this podcast and our work in alt grading out into the world, join us as we delve into the things that YOU are most interested in learning more about.

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!

• Next Generation Science Standards
• A Parent's Guide to Grading and Reporting: Being Clear About What Matters, Chad Lang and Matt Townsley
• Episode 32 - Interview with Dr. TJ Hitchman - Active Learning and Alt Grading (and the need for structure when the internal motivation is not there)
• Episode 31 - The Role of "Effort" or "Work" in an Alternatively Graded Course
• Specifications Grading, Linda Nilsen
• Episode 33 - An Interview with Dr. Thomas Guskey

Resources

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 (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

The Grading Podcast publishes every week on Tuesday at 4 AM Pacific time, so be sure to subscribe and get notified of each new episode. You can follow us on Twitter, 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

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

Sharona: I asked a faculty member who recently did a course redesign not related to grading and I said, why did you do what you did? And they looked at me blankly and kind of said, Oh, I suppose I should know the answer to that. And then they came up with, well, we want our students to be more successful. That's not the why that we're talking about.

I mean, yes, it's why you would do course redesign at all, but why this one?

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: Welcome back to the podcast, I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing quite well.

I am very excited that we finally get to sit down and record again. It was definitely a wild and interesting couple of weeks.

Boz: Let's briefly talk about that because last week, we ended up doing a replay of one of our older episodes, but that was not planned. So what happened last week? Why did we not record?

Sharona: So we sat down at the same time last week that we're sitting down this week and we're like, great, let's start recording. We had a plan. We were going to, talk about what we're going to talk about this week. And neither of us could get onto the system that we use for our podcast recording.

And we're sitting here going, what's happening, what's happening. And it turns out the entire recording system was down.

Boz: Yeah. So we had to kind of pivot pretty quickly. And we decided to do, you know, to do a replay of one of our older ones and we kind of went back and forth on which one, but man, it looks like we picked the right one to replay.

Sharona: So last week we were talking about interim grades, which actually we'll end up talking about a little bit again today, which is what inspired us to pick that one. Cause we have some great stuff to talk about today. And so we picked that one. And in one week, the episode has about, I want to say what 70, 80 percent of what the original episode has in 11 months.

Boz: Yeah, actually. It's less than a week. It's had more downloads than the original had in the first month. So I'm guessing LAUSD wasn't the only school district that had interim grades here recently.

Sharona: Well and I also want to shout out to the listeners because we've grown the podcast so much since that original episode aired. And I know I, as a podcast listener, I don't go back into the archives. I don't go back very much when I add a new podcast to my listening stream. I don't necessarily go backwards. So. It was really gratifying to see so many people engage with this topic.

Boz: And, you know, it was one of the episodes that Joe's on. So it's just, those are always fun ways, which we need to get him back on. He was asking me about that.

Sharona: I was going to say, did you tell him that we replayed his episode? Because you saw him this week, right?

Boz: Yeah. Him and I were both together at a full day long meeting actually about equitable grading and instruction. Cause we're both EGI champs at our schools. So we were at a full day meeting for all the EGI champs in the area, but yeah, I told him about that. He was mad that we haven't had him back on more recently.

Sharona: Well, we will certainly do that shortly. So let's jump in though. What are we going to talk about this week?

Boz: So we're we've been hoping to do this for a while, but yeah, we're going to take some of our emails and some of our questions that we've had from our listeners and discuss those on air.

Sharona: Exactly. So those of you that have sent in questions, thank you.

You're getting a little bit of a shout out, although we'll probably just use first names so that we don't out anyone who doesn't want to be outed. But we have some great questions. So I'm excited to get to these.

Boz: What is the first question or comment that we're going to look at?

Sharona: Okay, so the first question comes from Kevin. And Kevin asks, "I'm wondering your thoughts on learning objectives for a high school chemistry course. We have so many. I would say we cover about 20 chapters with anywhere from 10 to 20 learning outcomes in each chapter. It just seems too overwhelming."

Boz: And absolutely. Those 10 to 20 learning objectives in each chapter, those are not learning targets.

You can't make all of these learning targets. I mean, we're talking anywhere from two to four hundred. So those learning objectives are like objectives for daily or, you know, unit within that, that chapter. So yes, every one of those should not be turned into a learning target, but those learning targets should be actually made up of bigger ideas that could incorporate a lot of those lesson learning objectives. But yeah, you will drive yourself nuts if you try to make two to four hundred learning objectives.

Sharona: Well, and I, I wish we had some other language that maybe we should think about coming up with ourselves. But basically what we're talking about is " assessible for the grade" learning outcomes or learning objectives. Like when we're talking about learning objectives, we specifically mean the constructs of how are we going to combine the material in such a way that when we assess it, it chunks itself into a grade. And we typically recommend no more than 30 for a semester term for a, so for a year long, you might have 60? But maybe not.

Boz: Yeah, even that's pushing it.

I mean, I, I've personally never had more than 16 in a, in a semester. And rarely do I even have that many for a year long course. Like the last year long course that I taught, I think had 17.

Sharona: So I was speaking recently and, I think science is definitely one of those that is prone to this. I definitely recommend if you haven't listened to Jeff Schinske's episode, where he talks about, I think, was it over a thousand learning outcomes? On the anatomy and physiology course.

You know, not everything needs to be assessed. Not everything that you teach in a course has to be assessed for the grade because the student doesn't have to walk out of a course with an A, literally knowing every single thing. I mean, how many times do we say, when do you really learn XYZ subject? And the answer is the first time you teach it.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Right? So I was thinking about this question in the context of someone we're working with on the science side, which is Annie Ransom, hoping to get her on the podcast here soon. But one of the things that has happened in the last few years is the adoption of the next generation science standards. Which I think has completely changed the focus, or is trying to change the focus, of what it is you expect students to come out of a middle school or high school class with. Can you maybe say a little bit more about what you know about NGSS? Cause I think, you know, a little bit more than I do.

Boz: So, yeah, so you know, back, oh God, almost a decade or more now when, when Common Core came out and most states adopted Common Core. They have in math and English, they have. Individual standards for different courses or different levels, but then they also have these overarching standards that spanned the entire K 12 experience. And, for math, we've talked about these. These are called the eight mathematical practice mathematical practices.

These are part of what we're supposed to be teaching, but it's bigger than just the individual concepts of sixth grade math or algebra two. It's something that expands the entire thing. And the next generation science standards are something that's similar to that. It's a overarching goals and standards for science.

So instead of all these little individual skills that you might see in sixth grade science or an eighth grade life science, it's what we want to see students leaving with from the K 12 experience.

Sharona: What I really like about what they did in science is they added sort of two buckets. In math, we have our content standards and we have our practice standards. In next generation science, they have disciplinary core ideas, they have practice standards now. So they have eight practice standards, which include asking questions and defining problems, developing and using models, things like that.

And then they have something called cross cutting concepts. So there are nine of these, I think? And they are things like patterns, cause and effect, scale, proportion, and quantity. So it seems to me that if you're a science teacher in K through 12, I personally would recommend starting with both the cross cutting concepts and the practice standards as the foundation of the learning objectives that you're going to be using.

Boz: Yeah. And in fact a couple of years ago I was working with one of the science teams at my school and in their grading architecture they did end up using what we refer to as the bucket method where they had these big buckets of standards and to get the, a grade that the student wanted, they had to have so many from each buckets, but yet the buckets themselves were, and I don't think they used all of them if I remember right, but the buckets themselves were the next gen standards that they were planning to address in that that course.

So they didn't quite use all of them. They didn't have nine buckets or whatever, but, and then they broke those, the individual skills into those buckets. And to get this bucket, you needed to show some level of proficiency on so many of these skills within that bucket.

Our science colleagues that we've worked with, a lot of them have kind of used this bucket method. I know our engineering teams that we've worked with has done a version of the bucket architecture method.

Sharona: And I think that that would let you utilize a lot of the content skills to actually assess both the cross cutting concepts and the practices. So you can make larger learning objectives in the content, like something that might be too large that you don't want a student to have to show all of it or, or maybe there's a lot of the different ones that you can be assessing, but they really align primarily to the practice standards and the cross cutting concepts to get your final grade wrap up.

So I definitely think that that's a place to start for a lot of our science teachers. And when we get Annie on the podcast, I know she'll talk about this a lot that the focus for those that I know doing Standards based grading or some sort of alt grading in the K through 12 world in science, they're letting go of a ton of the learning objectives on the content side as far as focusing assessment on that. They're utilizing those learning objectives on a day by day, unit by unit basis.

And that is the content of the assessment is written to align to those learning objectives. But the actual "can you ask questions and define problems?" That's what the grade is based on, as opposed to do you know this chemical thing or this life science thing or this individual earth science thing?

Boz: But I do think that also brings up an interesting point. And I think you touched on it earlier about maybe needing a little bit more distinction in our language. Because I've done this with the history group also where they've got their textbook and they're looking at they've got a textbook that they like that kind of really lays out things for them and does lay out what they call Unit learning objectives.

And they were trying to do the same thing. They were thinking, Oh, we've got to make each one of these. Well, those unit learning objectives, just like in Kevin's example of a science, I think they had eight or nine chapters, so not quite as many, but yeah, they had 15 to 25 of these objectives inside each one of these chapters.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah. No, that's way, way too many.

Sharona: Well, then it becomes a laundry list of skills where you start to lose the forest for the trees again. Because if you're so focused on your 400 skills, where are the students getting the idea that it's the patterns that matter, it's the asking questions that matter, it's all of those things.

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: So that's what I would start with. If I were suddenly to be dumped into a high school chemistry course, I would start with saying, okay, if I really want to make sure that I assess all eight of the practices and all nine of the cross cutting concepts, that's 17 right there. How do I use those to build a grade using the content objectives as the foundation on which I'm teaching and learning. And one of the things I like about the Next Generation Science Standards website, which we will link in the show notes, is you can actually search. It's a very searchable tool where you can put in the grade level, either the practice you want, or the cross cutting concept. You can select the discipline and you can select the disciplinary core idea. And when you click submit, it pops the entire learning objective that meets all those things.

So if I select, I want to do something about patterns in high school using chemical reactions, and I hit submit, I get HSPS12- matter and its interactions. And it says construct and revise an explanation for the outcome of a simple chemical reaction based on blah, blah, blah, blah. So again, it's a starting point. Again, these might not be written the way we would for a gradable learning outcome, but it's a very good start.

Boz: Yeah. And going back talking about Joe again, on one of his episodes, when he was talking about how he developed his learning targets, like he said, the state standards is what he is teaching, it's not what he's assessing. He's using those things that are laid out in the standards to assess what he made as his learning targets. What he found is what is important in the class. So it's not like you're ignoring your state standards or you're ignoring these 10 to 20 learning objectives for each of the 20 chapters. But that becomes the vessel of how you assess your actual learning targets, not the learning targets that you need to assess themselves.

Sharona: Okay. So, that addresses Kevin's question. I think one of the other

Boz: Well it addresses one of them.

Sharona: But hold on, I'm not ready to address the other one yet. But I wanted to say something else, which is now that we're working specifically with the different disciplines in one of our projects that we're doing, it is very important that each discipline work to understand how this plays out in their discipline. Because I feel like our mathematical practice standards, in mathematics, they overlay on the content standards and we do use directly, at least I do, quite a few content learning objectives that I've rolled into sort of high enough levels that I'm not doing 70 million of them.

But I believe that Joe in English, they're even more focused on the cross cutting ideas of English as opposed to any specific individual skill. Like in mathematics, I have some things that I have to get across in algebra about using a variable or an equation versus a relation. There's certain things that I have to teach in high school, which I don't know, maybe they're just taught in a language based discipline earlier, maybe not.

But I feel like there's a disciplinary difference there that really you need to find your group of people that's working on this, that's in your general discipline. At least in science, if not necessarily in physical science or something like that.

Boz: Yeah. And I completely agree. And this is where we do start seeing some of the differences in the different content areas.

This is kind of why the grading conference got started because as a bunch of math teachers getting together saying, we're tired of having to do all these PDs that were made for other disciplines and we've wanted because it does really look different from discipline to discipline. So kind of going back to Joe's example, he has less learning targets for his year long course than you and I have in our in a semester long course.

And that is because his learning objectives are these much bigger, broader learning objectives that he assesses throughout the entire year, where some of ours are more skill based. So, yeah, we have more of them because they're more narrowly defined. Whereas Joe has some of these larger ones that he does continue to assess.

So. Our grading architecture is also very different between any of my classes and his classes. He uses the Guskey method for the wrap up. You and I use the N times. And again, it's because of the nature of the course and the learning objectives.

Sharona: Absolutely. So Kevin did ask another question. Are we, are we ready to move on to the second question that we got from Kevin?

Boz: Yeah, why don't you go ahead and read out that second one.

Sharona: Okay, so the second question starts with "me again", because it was sent separately. But the question is, "how would you handle having to give a letter grade on a report card three times throughout the term before the final grade? For example, if I say that students must score proficiency on 12 quizzes to get an A, but only four quizzes happened so far, how do students and parents know where they stand in terms of a letter?" And he follows that up with, "I know it shouldn't matter, but the reality is we have to do something." So I have a couple of thoughts, but do you want to start or?

Boz: Well, this is the question that prompted us to use the replay that we used last week. And I've, I've said it on that episode. I've said it other times these Midterm grades are the bane of my existence. I it's the one question that I get probably top three questions that I get when I'm doing trainings, and it's the one that I think I have the weakest answer for but yeah, it's, it really is for me just trying to scale down what the students have had an opportunity to show mastery on at this point and what they have. So I literally turned in my grades two weeks ago. We have to do grades every five weeks in a 20 week Semester.

So we're doing three interim grades before our final grade. And honestly, on my first one, because we have the option to do this at LAUSD, all of my students got an M. We have not had enough time to actually assess for mastery on any of my learning targets yet.

Does that mean I'm not doing work and my students haven't been working? Absolutely not. We have tons of assignments. We just have not had an opportunity to truly show mastery of any of my learning targets. So yeah, I'm glad LAUSD has that option. I don't know if Kevin, if your district has an option to kind of just do one of those almost pass, fail, or, you know, yes, the students on track, not worried about kind of grade like mine does, but.

Sharona: So I have a couple of thoughts, as a general principle, regardless of the technical tools available. And this is going back to what I was thinking about some of the conversations that we've had with Matt Townsley and also with Thomas Guskey about the importance of parent communication.

And I think the first thing that has to happen before you get to interim grades is a letter should go home to the parents, that maybe they have to sign they've read it and turn it back in for some like triple p points. But that basically says, we're on a journey to use whatever metaphor you want.

We're like, my favorite is climbing the hill. But I was just thinking of another metaphor, like, you know, in those long distance races, like the ones that at the Olympics that you have to go around the track 20 times, right? In the first two laps, everybody's clumped. And there's no separation and that's intentional because some of them could get out in front.

Right? But they're gonna, they're gonna fall apart. So in those first couple laps, all you know, is they started without falling down. Right? So I'm kind of like, if you have a metaphor that you like, you can send this letter home to parents and say, you're going to get interim grades and your student is going to have one of two. So let's say they don't have any weird options. They have to give ABCDF. I think you give one of two grades. C means you started properly, you haven't fallen down. F means you fell down. Like, like there's something serious that happened at the beginning. Like if your kid missed three and a half weeks of school out of a five week grading period, that's a more serious thing because it means that the parent needs to know there's an intervention that needs to happen.

So you send home this letter that explains what this is. And then you do a, basically a passing grade and a no passing grade and the no passing grade, the intention there is hey, intervention time.

And then you do something slightly different, maybe at the next grading period, because maybe you've started to see some separation, but a letter explaining should go home and you should go over it with the students.

Boz: Yeah, and you brought this up and I think this is a fantastic book and one of the few that I've really seen that addresses the parent communication side of K 12 education. But if you haven't already checked it out Matt Townsley's and Chad Lang's, A Parent's Guide to Grading and Reporting is an excellent resource.

Sharona: Absolutely. So, and this also occurred to me. Now, two other caveats. I am very much opposed to letter grades that go on permanent records that don't really show the student's achievement as of that time period.

And in particular, what bothered me about this is one of my sons had an AP English teacher who gave a C at the fall semester permanent grade mark moment when a student was only at a three level of performance on the AP. So this was an AP course and the teacher's goal was to get students all the way to fives, which she did with my son, but if the student is only at a three level at the, at the semester mark, then she would give a C, because that's a three.

And I oppose that because that's now on a permanent high school record. And the student might be the top student in the entire class, or maybe every single student is on track to get a five, but that C doesn't mean what she thinks it means to the rest of the world.

Boz: I mean, we are talking a huge difference between what you're talking about and what Kevin was asking about, but yeah, I would agree those, those final semester grades that do stay on a transcript for K 12 students. Those grades you have to be extremely intentional about and that kind of logic of it's a C because that's where they, if they finished my course and that's what they would, that's what they would have? Okay, but you're halfway through the semester, or halfway through the year, like that, that expectation.

Sharona: So I think that's a challenge that I think high school teachers have in general, is you have to almost double track your grades, because you are in a year long course.

And if students are not performing to a certain level in the first semester, they might struggle in the second. And that's okay to find a way to communicate that, but to put that on a permanent record and to affect a student's GPA, which I mean, definitely affects now, again, if people are taking it as a senior, it doesn't matter so much, but we know a lot of juniors who take these courses now, and that could affect their getting into college.

So I think we need to remember that in high school, I think a lot of high school teachers consider the semester grades still an interim in some ways, like in their heads, because they're like, well, I have a year long course. But no, you really have a two semester sequence. So that's my one caution about those grades is that if I, because if I were teaching high school, I would kind of do that.

I would make my climb of the mountain be the whole year, but I'd probably have a relatively broad range for what the first semester marks are. Because they could still continue to improve in the second semester. So that's just one caveat I wanted to bring up.

Boz: What's interesting is also about this question is I thought this was purely a k 12 issue. It wasn't until recently that I found out that there are actual colleges that require their instructors to do some of these interim grades. Which came to a complete shock to me because as a student, I'd never experienced that.

I had never experienced that as an educator, but is there any difference in those colleges that do have to give these interim grades, the purpose of those grades and the purpose of K 12 interim grades.

Sharona: I have no idea. I've been in academia over 35 years and I had never heard of this until some of our colleagues were telling us this.

So if you are someone who works at a college or university or community college who has to have interim grades, would love for you to write in and explain what the purpose of your interim grades is. Now, that being said, we don't have interim grades at Cal State LA, but we do have some reporting we have to do to the university for students that we think are falling behind.

But that is not anything that gets recorded in some sort of a letter grade or anything like that. We're just sort of alerting some support structures in the institution, Hey, these are the students that we think could use some additional support. So if that's how they're used in colleges with interim grades? I would encourage faculty to encourage those schools to get away from the letter grade and just go to needs support.

Boz: Yeah, because I do know one of the purposes of interim grades at the K 12 level is that parent communication. But I, that's not, I think, I mean, that is absolutely not a goal at the higher ed. In fact, FERPA things kind of prevent us from doing too much communication with the parents.

Sharona: Yeah, we can't. I mean, the two or three things that come to mind for what it could be is it could be number one, alerting support structures to students in danger. It could be a matter of accountability on the part of faculty. Like requiring faculty to have done some graded work. Because I know in the past that can be an issue. Like if you only grade two midterms in a final and the first midterm is in week eight, then the students have no knowledge of how they're doing until they're over halfway through the semester. So that's another possibility.

Boz: And I had a course, a couple of courses, that were even less than that. It was a midterm and a final and that was it.

Sharona: And the midterms like in week 10 or something, week nine, it's not even early. So yeah. So I think that may be why, but I'd love to get some people to write in and tell us about your experiences with interim grades at a, at a higher ed level. Are we ready to go on to the third question here?

Boz: Alright.

Sharona: So this is from Aly, and Aly has been diving into alt grading for her entire career. She's looks like an early career faculty member. And she was listening to episode 31 regarding effort. And that's when we were talking a lot about the gamification of tracking of effort.

One of the things I think we've said a lot is there needs to be a safe space for students to show that they're doing work, but I think you need to teach them. So what she says is, she's wondering if we had any visuals or materials to offer in reference to our triple P learning outcome or proficiency scale.

She teaches secondary social studies so actually I guess she's in high school. I thought she was more in, in higher ed, but she's in high school, so she teaches government psychology and sociology. And she's making a lot of connections to my math history course.

Boz: Which is cool.

Sharona: It is cool.

So let's talk about, let's go revisit a little bit, this idea of effort and why we might want to track it.

Boz: So, yeah, so one of the things that is kind of a Cornerstone of any kind of alt grading is the fact that we understand, and we truly believe, that learning comes from making mistakes and trying to correct those and learn from those mistakes.

That's how human nature is. It's how we learn. And we don't want to punish students from doing just that. So we do want to make a, like you said, a safe space for students to practice and to make those kind of mistakes. But at the same time, especially I think with younger students and students that might not be as as motivated for whatever subject that they're that you're teaching, you do still have to give some sort of motivation for the students to do this. So what you and I have come up with with our classes is this kind of halfway point where we're doing assignments and things that we don't care if they get them right or wrong. So we're not punishing them for, for getting things wrong, but at the same time, we're, we're wanting to try to give them a reason for doing them because that motivation, that intrinsic motivation just isn't there yet.

Oh, and you're going to have to remind me. I can't believe I can't remember who said this, but the more motivated the students are, the less structure that you need in your course.

Sharona: So that was Theron Hitchman, TJ. Okay,

Boz: I was wanting to say Schinske, and I knew that was wrong. But yeah, this idea of this inverse relationship between structure in the class and intrinsic motivation of the students.

I teach mostly at high school and even my course at the college level that I teach is mainly for non STEM majors, or at least non math majors, not always their favorite subject. So, yeah, we do this, what we call the triple P as a way to not punish our students for doing the practice that we know they need to do.

And at the same time, still giving them some external motivations to do the work.

Sharona: And like we said in the episode that we talked about this, there's a little bit of gamification, so there's a couple ways that we do this and I think that Ali's question is something that I've been trying to tackle and I don't have it, which is I do want one of those gamified icons like a pot of gold or one of those things that where it fills up partially like it starts to color in the building as you get more points or coins or whatever and then as you continue to play levels on the game you get more coins and you get more points.

So I view the way we do our triple P as a points accumulation game. And you get to pick the activities that get you the points that get you the coins. And I would love like an animated GIF or animated tool that Like if a student wants to check how they're doing, they can just go look at it and it like pops up.

So if anyone is a game app developer, wants to develop me a, a triple P tracking app, put that out in the world. We're gonna manifest that. But the idea being that we know there's a bunch of activities that could help the students succeed. We see a very strong correlation between the ones that achieve that particular learning outcome by getting enough points and those who pass the class.

It's not completely predictive and so it may just be correlation, not causation, but we see the correlations. And so I like having the ability to, for a student to say, how far along am I? And I don't think we do as good a job with that as I would like. Now with our stats class, we're doing it. with points, and we are making different things worth different amounts of points, because we think that some things are more valuable, at least in our estimation, some things are less valuable. In my history math class, I wasn't as sure what was more valuable and what was less. So there were just a whole bunch of activities that you could get a check on and you needed to get a certain number of checks completed to get that learning outcome.

And what it did is, I mean one of those checks was showing up in class and participating in the discussion. I have to say, I had pretty much perfect attendance through most of the semester. I think that's also because they were enjoying the class, because there was no stress in that particular class.

There was not a single thing to memorize. No exams. It was all projects. So but, but one of the things they had to do, and because I had so few learning outcomes, I mean, there were only 10 and they needed nine to get an A, and one of those was showing up in class and participating basically. They kind of, it was a little bit of a club, but that one was easier for them to track. But I, I definitely think that making a visual like a thermometer or a pot of gold or a building or some sort of diagram related to your to your subject matter and filling it in would be an amazing thing to do.

Boz: Yeah, but there is something that I wanted to talk about with these triple P points because I am seeing it come up a lot with some of the courses that I've been working with. So there's really two, two points I want to make. First, as teachers, a lot of us are like, yeah, the students need to do this work so they understand the material. Which yes, there is a correlation between the two, but the idea of there's no way for a student to be able to get mastery on everything else without doing all of this work, I think is, it's really not true.

So we do two things with our triple piece that I really encourage anyone that is wanting to use a learning target like this should do. First, we have an excessive amount of triple P points and the students only need to get a little over half. Like, they really don't need to do all of our stuff.

And part of that Is because this is a scaffold. And any K-12er that's heard you need to provide scaffolds and differentiation, what's the one thing you're supposed to do with the scaffold eventually?

Sharona: Take it down.

Boz: Let's take it away. So, and you and I have seen this for years with, with our students, with these triple P's. Once our students get it, they don't stop.

Like, it's not like they hit the minimum and they stop doing the work. Most of our students, I mean, I've had students almost get 200 percent of what they need. Like they double what they need and it's because they're finding these actually useful. So they continue to do them so they no longer need that external motivation of, Oh, I need to do this for the triple P points. They've realized it's what's helping them.

So that's the first, cause that's the last couple of groups that I've worked with have wanted to do something like this triple P. Well, they're wanting their students to have like 90 percent of it to get it.

I'm like, no, no, no And yeah.

Sharona: Just before you go on to that, though, the downside of requiring something so high is that the stakes become too high on something that is supposed to be the relaxed, safe space. You're supposed to be able to miss something and not worry about it or go back and do it late, but maybe it's not for points and you're just doing it because it's useful.

You're supposed to have a lot of space and room to wiggle. And when you require 90 percent on homework and you're actually grading it for accuracy or you require 90 percent completion. Well, then you can't do 1,400, 1,500, 1,600 points. It overwhelms the rest of your grading system. So I definitely want to reiterate that, that we need to get away from this concept, well, 50 percent is failing.

No, if you take 100 percent of what you think a student should do, and you double it, and you let them only get 50%, then, it's the same thing. So I just want to kind of strike that a little harder, that it's not the percentage of completion that counts. It's just the total amount of activity.

Boz: And that's the other thing that we do, why having so many more points than what we were asking for allows us to do, is we break this stuff up into different categories. That's why it's called the triple P, preparation practice and participation. And we break, you know, the different activities into those different ones. And like I tell my students, we all learn differently. Like we were sure that this is how you can practice to get to mastery, but how much prep you need and how much practice you need and how much participation you need is going to be different for me than it is for you. I might need more practice where you might benefit from more of the prep.

It's just the difference in the learners and having a large amount of points that are way over what we're expecting allows the students to find, oh yeah, the prep stuff is what's helping me the most. Or the practice is what's helping me the most. So that's what I'm going to spend my time on rather than just doing stuff to do it because it's part of the triple P.

Sharona: And we're having an interesting experience, this is a small aside, I think we've mentioned that we were required to do some of our courses in a traditional grading and in order for this test or pilot of traditional grading to have integrity, we're trying to keep the courses as close together.

So the people in traditional grading, in order to maintain their grade, which now the triple P is something like 35 percent of the grade, they're going to have to do all of it. And we can't cut it down, because then it becomes a difference between the two courses. So.

Boz: And becomes an excuse.

Sharona: Right. So, so unfortunately, what, I think what I would say about this from what we're learning is you really, really, really have to rethink the role of these things if you switch to a mastery graded course. These two things do not behave the same in a traditional course and a mastery course. In a traditional course where 10 percent or 20 percent or 30 percent of your stuff is done on accuracy graded homework, you have to decrease the stress pressure on that, or you're going to kill a student's grade, no matter how well they do on exams. So whereas in our course we get to, I guess I would call it plenty of opportunity. We provide more, more support, more structure, more opportunity at a safer place with lower anxiety. So you have to rethink the role here.

Boz: Exactly. We had a whole episode on that on, you know, thinking about work and effort and the role of like homework on our another episode when we were talking about deadlines.

Sharona: And that's the same thing. We're also seeing that between these 2 courses is, in our mastery graded course, if you miss your prep work, we say, no, you can't do your prep work late. You need to do more practice instead. That's sort of the natural consequence. And that matches the real world. If you come to a job, to an activity unprepared, you may have to do more work on the backend to catch up. So it's got some authenticity to it.

Whereas in this traditionally graded world. If they miss this because they added the course two weeks late or four weeks late, in the case of some of our students, we're having weird stuff happen this semester.

Boz: Or they're having issues with their financial aid because that was an issue completely outside of the student's control, that has been a national wide issue this year because of some of the things that right. Issues that FAFSA.

Sharona: So our publisher is being amazing and extending trials for students who ask, but now we've got inequity creeping in because some students ask and some students don't. And so now we're having to chase students to purchase the materials.

And so there's just so many inequities built in and in that traditional grading system that could cost them two, three, four or 5 percent of their grade, if they miss a third of the preparation work.

Boz: Which doesn't sound like that much until you realize that's half a letter grade.

Sharona: So not loving this whole thing, but anyway. So thank you, Aly, for some great questions. We have one more that came in from Laura. Do you want to read some of this? Do you want me to read it?

Boz: Ah, you go ahead and read it.

Sharona: Okay, so Laura is responding to our offer on episode 58 to share our intro slides, specifically our presentation about grading as a misuse of mathematics.

And I do want to reiterate, we actually have our entire 30 hour training program now available, the materials for it, so if you're interested in getting that, reach out to us. But she says, "I am a part of an NSF grant to overhaul teaching and assessment in our department, and there's a lot of interest in the how of alternative grading, but we were just discussing that we as a group had not spent enough time on the why. So these slides would be very helpful. Our grant team all uses alternative grading in our community college science courses with a mix of competency, standards, specs, and ungrading depending on the course. And some of us have been attending the grading conference." So she goes on a little bit and says, closes out with, "we need to work on getting people to think about Why to do it this way and how that can help them choose a useful assessment structure."

So thank you, Laura.

Boz: We've made this same mistake early on in one of our trainings that we did. Even if people are motivated to want to change their grading system, the how is important, the why is equally if not more so important. I know that was probably one of the biggest mistakes you and I have done with developing some of our early PD is thinking, Oh, these people that are coming to this are motivated to do this. We don't need to talk that much about the why we did that once.

Sharona: Well, and I would actually take it back further. A lot of this why has been developed since we started doing alt grading. The feelings were there. This idea, like from, even from the moment that we read Linda Nielsen's book on specifications grading, like there was some there, but not really having dived super specifically into the specific things wrong with traditional grading.

So it's not just, why would we want to do it? But what is the problem? Like, what's the actual problem, with the mathematics of it?

Boz: Problems. Problems.

Sharona: So, I think that even now, we just recently did a PD on authentic assessment, and although we didn't have to start with the why of not using traditional grading, we actually started with the why of why do we grade.

Because that's the other piece of it as we talked about in the episode, episode with Thomas Guskey, what's the purpose of grades? So I think that there's multiple why's that we need to be thinking about when we're working with people newer to this. I asked a faculty member who recently did a course redesign, not related to grading, and I said, why did you do what you did?

And they looked at me blankly and kind of said, Oh, I suppose I should know the answer to that. And then they came up with, well, we want our students to be more successful. That's not the why that we're talking about. I mean, yes, it's why you would do course redesign at all. But why this one? Why alternative grading?

Why redesign the course the way you're doing? Why are you making the decisions you're making? Why are you choosing these learning objectives? What is it driving this? And I think we need to ask why more through the entire process.

Boz: Yeah. And this is something, and I know I've brought this up before, but this is something that I've seen more with the K 12 than the higher ed, but it seems like any kind of change that we want to do in the K 12 world has to be done so quickly that people are like, okay, you want me to do this? Fine. Tell me how to do it.

No, you need to slow down and go back to the why and stop jumping straight to the how for several reasons. First, we have an episode on buy in and getting our students to understand and to buy into this grading system and to believe us when we say, yes, we cherish mistakes. It's okay to make mistakes. You're not going to get punished for them, is to understand the why, the why that you've done this. To get a grading architecture that really fits you and your course and your students' needs, you need to understand the why of what you're doing.

To be able to really design this and not overwhelm yourself and understand what your learning targets should be, you need to understand the why. So it all comes back to this. And there's so many things that can go wrong when you don't. Like I've had a really good friend that adopted someone's complete grading structure. And it was, hell it's Joe's, adopted their grading structure completely. It was a disaster for them because they didn't really understand the why. And the differences between that person and Joe, as an educator, and what they put the most value on. So it became a huge disaster, even though it was completely picked up and adopted from someone who had been doing it successfully for years.

Sharona: And I think that's one of the reasons that I'm having some of the issues I'm having right now at my institution is, I had a couple people adopt one of my courses because it was done and ready to go. And, apparently, one of them didn't have that great of an experience, and now I've got some opposition that I'm dealing with in my department.

So that makes me sad, because I thought I had handed someone who had a very similar philosophy to me, a, a beautifully designed course that would work really well, and I thought they had a great experience, and now they're in opposition. So, not really sure what's going on there, but it makes me sad.

So I definitely think taking the time to really think about why each and every decision, why are you doing this at all? But then each decision you make, why are you making that decision? And we say this a million times and it's still sometimes falls on deaf ears. There's no one right way to do alternative grading.

Boz: Yeah. And the reason that there isn't is because of a lot of the why behind it. The difference in the courses, the difference in the the values of the teacher and what the teacher wants the students to come out of. All of these other things that we do need to examine before you just jump straight into the how.

Sharona: So I want to thank the people who wrote in, because I think that this gave us a chance to really explore things that are sort of connected. I can see asking why about the learning outcomes from Kevin's question. I can see asking why about how to handle interim grades. And I can see why about how you track triple P.

So even though these were three different people with four different questions from many different institutions and contexts, it all just kind of tied together and I would love to see us do more of these, but we've got to get your questions in order to be able to do that, right? Is there anything else you want to say about any of these questions?

Boz: I just want to thank them for writing in, for others that have written in you know, one of our first times that we addressed a listener writing was still one of my favorites.

Sharona: When you got called out?

Boz: We got called out a little bit. I still love that. I love some of the, the metaphors that he used, but we want to hear from you guys. And again, we did, we'd love to talk to you guys as well. So, Sharona, how can someone, get in contact with us or give us questions or comments?

Sharona: Right. So the easiest way to get ahold of us is go to our website, the grading pod. com and use the contact us form. You can either write your question or you can actually attach a voice memo so you can record your question on your phone or your device and send us a vocal one. And if you send us that, we might actually play it on the air. And if for some reason you want to be anonymous, let us know that in your message. We're assuming if you're writing in and willing to use your name, that you're willing to let us read your first name on the podcast, but if you don't want it, just let us know.

But I thought this was a lot of fun and I would definitely like to do more of these. And I agree, we've had a couple of listeners write in and say, Hey, I have this thought. We're like, Hey, do you want to come on? And we have a couple of those that we're trying to get scheduled now. So we have some exciting interviews coming up, but

Boz: We, we really do. We, we've got some, some interesting ones come up. Unfortunately, beginning of the semester schedules are always hectic for everyone. So it's been hard to get schedules to line up, but we've got some really interesting ones coming up. So we hope that you guys continue to come back 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.