Research Spotlight: Ungrading at POD

A study on the experiences of first-generation students

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

This week’s post will be short, since I’ve been away at the 49th annual POD Network conference for educational developers in Chicago. It was great to connect with colleagues from across the country and think through ways to better support teaching and learning at our own institutions. 

I was a little surprised not to see more sessions about grading, or alternative grading, on the program. I suspect it’s because “ungrading” has been around for a while now, and other topics—like working with AI or supporting neurodivergent students—were of greater interest to educational developers at the moment. Still, I’d like to see continued conversations about grading at POD and may propose my own session on that topic next year. 

In any case, there were two alternative grading offerings at this year’s conference. One was a poster on “Growth-Oriented Grading to Support Learning in STEM Education.” It shared research by Megan Linos from UC Irvine and Victoria Bhavsar from California State Polytechnic University. They found that courses taught with specifications grading “helped students understand and learn the course content, encouraged student engagement, and increased self-efficacy beliefs, especially for first-generation, underrepresented minority, and economically disadvantaged students.” Good news!

The work that most interested me, however, was a study by Sam Mitchell, a PhD candidate in the Sociology department and Graduate Consultant in the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. Sam studies inequity in higher education, with a special interest in first-generation college students, among other things.

In this study, Sam and two of her colleagues (also graduate student instructors) each taught one sociology course using a method I would call collaborative grading: students received feedback, but no letter or number grades, on the work they submitted for the course and determined final grades in consultation with the instructor, using an extensive end-of-semester self-assessment. The courses were moderate in size: if I’m remembering correctly, they ranged from about 35-60 students. Two were taught in person and one was an asynchronous online course.

At the end of the semester, the instructors surveyed almost 100 students to collect information about their demographics and perspectives on ungrading. They also gathered qualitative data from students’ end-of-semester self-assessments. In this presentation, Sam focused on students’ perceptions of stress, creativity/risk-taking, and learning in their ungraded class compared to other classes, as well as some key differences between first- and continuing-generation students.

The researchers found that ungrading reduced stress, encouraged risk-taking and creativity, and helped students move from a grading to a learning orientation. I was struck by how often the word “breathe” showed up in the student comments Sam shared—as in, “I felt like I could breathe in this course.” This seems revealing. And there was little difference between first- and continuing-generation students on these points: across the board, most students noted they were less stressed and learned just as well, or better, in an ungraded environment.

Qualitative comments, however, revealed some key themes in the experiences of first-generation students specifically (about one third of the sample). First-generation students noted that ungrading helped increase their self-confidence as compared to their peers. They also commented particularly on how ungrading leveled the power dynamic between students and instructors in the course, reducing the distance they sometimes felt between themselves and their professors. These seem like significant findings, especially since first-generation students face more barriers to developing academic confidence and to formal help-seeking than their peers. 

One interesting sidebar from the presentation: Sam noted that the volume of feedback this grading method required made teaching classes of 60 students (like hers) pretty difficult. For this reason, among others, she has since moved to specifications grading. I’m interested in thinking through possible strategies for making collaborative grading manageable in larger classes. But I’m even more interested in persuading our institutions to do what it takes to reduce class sizes so we can make the learning experience more meaningful for both students and instructors.

Thanks to Sam for allowing me to share some insights from her research in today’s post. These are the kinds of studies we need, and I’m looking forward to reading more of them in the future!