Posted 5:04 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022
"Grading Systems Affecting Students’ Learning"--Undergraduate Research Proposal
Introduction
College students work hard to achieve good grades. A good grade on a test or assignment makes you feel proud and accomplished, while proving you worked hard and are intelligent. Or does it? A good grade could also just mean you found answers to a question online somewhere and submitted it on time. According to a published article by Alfie Kohn, research currently being done on the effects of grading show that, “a grade-oriented environment is associated with increased levels of cheating, and grades promote a fear of failure even in high-level students.” Students are always working hard to get good grades, but what many don’t realize is this is completely different from working hard to learn and widen your education. For many students, passing the class is often put as a higher priority than understanding the material and gaining new knowledge to help them in their future. The grading system is set up in a way that it is of greater importance just to complete an assignment, and on time, than the quality of the work and whether there is learning involved that will better the student academically.
There has been substantial research done regarding the negative impacts that grades have on students mentally/emotionally, and how it impacts them throughout their lives in school and into their professional careers. For example, a research article on the perceived demands of schooling, stress, and mental health proves that low academic achievements show psychosomatic symptoms in students that lead to prolonged stress (Gustafsson et al., 2010). What seems to be missing from these conversations is what can be done to change this way of “grading.” My project will discuss a solution on changing the typical grading system to be more learning-based, focused on revision and learning from mistakes in order to pass a class. To answer this question, I will conduct research on the UWL campus to see if grades accurately reflect how much a student has learned/how smart they are. Using this information will help me form a solution for the better of students to solve this issue of defining someone by a letter grade that doesn’t truly represent their full knowledge.
Literature Review
Grades often have an impact on students’ interest in learning. In an article from Wrytin, the author states, “once they receive negative feedback, they will tend to think less.” A student will turn in an assignment, test, paper, or project, and receive a letter grade in return with maybe a comment or two explaining why. They then immediately move on and never think of that assignment again. It is also common, because I have done this too, that when a student does poorly on an exam, to first off instantly feel down and unmotivated/disappointed. You then decide to move on and pretend it didn’t happen, and without going back and figuring out what you did wrong and learn from mistakes, you throw away that test and say, “I’ll do better next time.” But how will you do better next time if you do not go back to see what you did wrong? This is not the student’s fault for thinking this way because these thoughts have been put into our heads by our grading system throughout our entire lives. With assignments piling up we don’t have the time to review mistakes and correct them. By simply missing a due date for a single assignment, you are often set up for failure.
Research done by Conni Campbell, a coordinator of teacher effectiveness and preparation, in Learning Centered Grading Practices, proves that “A student could be earning A’s on assignments, but have a few missing assignments, and their grade would not accurately reflect their current knowledge.” This is due to how grades are calculated and averaged in an unfair way to students. Surprisingly, we have this information and yet we are not doing anything to change grading systems. The reason we have grades is to be able to separate students at the academic level. While this is proven to be inaccurate, it continues still. In this same study, Campbell highlights a survey done in 2012 which found that on average, 93% of teachers include homework submission, not accuracy, in the final course grade. This is a cause of student stress and explains why the main focus of college students is turning things in on time, rather than the accuracy of the work itself.
A common theme throughout the research I have found tends to be conversations around the issue of our grading system, standardized testing, and the stress/mental health issues this is causing in students in college. Although these are serious issues that are not completely resolved, many colleges are no longer requiring standardized tests like ACTs, and there are more mental health support groups forming in schools. However, few mention what could be done to change these systems; rather, most describe how universities are supporting students to cope with the existing systems. One main systemic issue that is addressed in Cambell’s study is, “a grade of F with 0 points is six times worse than a grade of D and recovering one’s overall grade after a score of 0 is averaged into the total is nearly impossible.” The high school I attended attempted to resolve this problem by changing the grading scale so that an F is a 50%, in order to help students recover their grades after failing a test or not doing an assignment. This solution was discussed in multiple other sources I found; however, this along with other presented solutions just answers the question of how to make the grading system fairer, to cause less stress to students. The unanswered question that remains is what a real solution could be to change the grading system completely, to provide students with a way to actually learn. Changing how points are earned continues our same system of submission and completion. What I would like to find is how we can incorporate learning from mistakes and revision into a grade, so this “grade” is not defined by interval performance but by overall intelligence at the end of the course.
After diving in deeper through research, I found that there are some schools and programs that have been implementing some of these ideas into their curriculum. At an international school in Brooklyn, students master a set of skills and demonstrate their knowledge to their teacher who assesses them on a scale from not meeting standards to exceeding standards. Here there is no such thing as failing, and everyone learns and moves forward at an individual pace. Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and some schools in Illinois and New York are beginning to require school districts to phase in this system, and it is receiving lots of positive feedback from students, teachers, and parents. Joy Nolan, one of the directors of New York’s Mastery Collaborative, said the method allows students to gain traction no matter their level, and puts the focus on specifically you and your growth. One of the middle-schoolers, Moheeb, says “it encourages students to work on what they’re struggling with.” I am currently taking a college writing course at UWL in which our papers are pass/fail, where we work to answer questions and objectives and are able to revise and resubmit our work so there is no stress on receiving a bad grade. In my opinion, this system has been a lot less stressful than my past writing courses. It is a great deal different from writing a paper knowing that you will be receiving a final grade and percent on how well you did, knowing you won’t be able to make any changes if it wasn’t your best work. It is clear that there could be a possible way to make progress on the issues that our current grading system arises. It is strange that retakes or revisions like these examples are rarely offered because this would be how a student would learn the most, by learning how to be better and correcting their mistakes. This is how our education system has always been set up, so nobody ever wants to question or change it. But are grades really helping students learn at all, or just causing unnecessary stress and misleading evaluation?
Research Questions
- Do grades accurately reflect how smart a student is?
- Does the traditional grading system create well-rounded students?
- What could be a better alternative to the traditional A-F grading scale that can be implemented at our UWL campus?
Methodology
For my research I will be using a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative methods to best answer these questions. In my literature review above, my first research question was already addressed and answered. So to begin, I will conduct primary qualitative research to answer my second question by interviewing randomly selected UWL students around campus in each building who are waiting between classes, and ask them the following questions, encouraging as much elaboration and examples from their past courses. I will use a device such as my phone to record their spoken answers and later summarize them myself in writing. I am confident that these interviews will help me understand and come to a conclusion from my first two research questions regarding if grades show how smart a student is.
- Questions for UWL students
- Have you ever had a class in college or in high school where you were offered retakes on tests?
- If yes, did you take advantage of this?
- Do you feel like you learned more in this class as a result of retaking tests to correct mistakes you made?
- Did you notice a difference in your scores and in the way you learned? How so?
- If no, how likely would you be to retake a test if this was offered?
- Do you feel that your knowledge in this course (the one they are about to go to) is accurately represented by your current grade in said course?
- Do you feel it is more important to submit your assignments on time, or accurately?
Following this research, to gain knowledge to be able to answer my final research question, I will simply conduct my own secondary research to see if there are courses at UWL that use a pass/fail system. If there are, I will contact these teachers and ask them why they decided to set up their class in this way. Along with this, I plan to contact the Department of Education at UWL to ask how much freedom teachers have to change/alter their grading systems for each of their classes. Conducting this research will then lead into my following research methods.
The majority of my quantitative primary research will come from a survey sent to UWL teachers asking a few specific questions and a few questions that require elaboration for me to reach a better understanding of their answers. The questions are made to be very simple to answer so that I can get consistent feedback for stronger evaluation.
Survey given to UWL teachers
Part A
(Circle one option) (Question)
Yes / No Do you offer retakes on exams/quizzes?
*If no, skip to part B*
Increase / Stay the same / Decrease What is the difference in scores
after the retake?
(Report percentage)
__________ What percent of your students take advantage of
the retakes?
Part B
Why do you or why do you not choose to offer retakes for your students? (answer in detail)
______________________________________________________________________________
I plan to survey as many teachers at UWL as possible and from a variety of different leveled courses, subjects, majors, and minors. These results, along with my secondary research I will conduct to see if there are courses at UWL that are based off a pass/fail system, will be incorporated with results from my previous research in my literature review to answer my research question of what a better alternative could be to the traditional A-F grading scale.
Preparation
As a college student, diving into these unanswered questions has been eye-opening to me and makes me wonder why this is not talked about more often. I am able to easily contact teachers and students at UWL and have the necessary resources to complete this project. I have become passionate about this topic which is why I believe I could find the answers to my questions through my research ideas. Through my experience in my current college writing course which is set up so that assignments are pass/fail with revisions, I now understand that there is a better way to learn than the way we have been doing it most of our lives. From completing this project, I will learn to always question these simple things in life like grades, because asking deep questions like these can lead to answers you never would have expected. I have always had the mindset that getting an A is the most important thing to focus towards in every class, when really my mindset should instead be what am I gaining from this class and how can my mistakes help me continue to learn. Although the main goal of this project is to make a change to the grading system, I hope that through this project I can also convince others to implement this new way of thinking into their lives which will carry on throughout college, and into our future careers.
References
Campbell, Conni. “Learning-centered grading practices.” Institute of education sciences. June 2021, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ971421
Funky, Fundy. “Do We Still Need Grades in the Modern Educational System?” Wrytin, Wrytin, 31 July 2019, https://wrytin.com/fundyfunky/do-we-still-need-grades-in-the-modern-educational-syste m-jyrcbfey.
Giota, Joanna. “Consequences of differentiated policies and teaching practices in the Swedish school system.” Research Gate. January 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299470101_Consequences_of_differentiated_policies_and_teaching_practices_in_the_Swedish_school_system
Kohn, Alfie. “The case against grades.” Educational leadership. November 2011. http://www.montessoriprivateacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/alfie-kohn-article-from-educational-leadership.pdf
Spencer, Kyle. “A new kind of classroom: no grades, no failing, no hurry.” The New York Times. 11 August 2017.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/mastery-based-learning-no-grades.html