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Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer

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Peter Elbow at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Peter Elbow
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Abstract

Minimal grading and giving grades more meaning by defining our criteria are two methods of simplifying grading while giving students more substantive feedback about their writing.
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May 14, 2021 Page 1
March 2,
2020
Coronavirus / COVID-19
Communication
WEEKLY CORONAVIRUS COMMUNICATION
May 10 - 14, 2021
Horizon House Residents,
Community guidelines that were in place before this week’s announcement by the Centers for
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Weekly Coronavirus Communication
May 14, 2021
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... Students become motivated by grades, claims Elbow, rather than by gaining knowledge, and "grading tends to undermine the climate for teaching and learning." [5] SBG and ABG offer advantages over regular marking, as they divide the feedback to students into separate categories. The aim is to divide for the student and the instructor each element of the course so the student can better understand their strengths and weaknesses, while the instructor can see how the class is faring on each element. ...
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... This paper is predicated on our experience that many undergraduate engineering students are at least in part motivated extrinsically through summative evaluation, AKA grades. Elbow claims that "once we start grading their work, students are tempted to study or work for the grade rather than for learning," [2] while Savage, et al. find that every last student in their study is dominantly motivated by grades [5]. In pursuit of these grades, many students will approach their instructors post-evaluation and request "some more." ...
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... At times, practices that I have intended to be caring have not always been received as caring by my students. I implemented labor-based grading in my mathematics methods course in an effort to humanize my assessment practices, focus my grading on engagement in behaviors for learning [14], give students autonomy over their grade, and reduce students' mathematics anxiety. Although the labor-based grading system has seemed to be effective in accomplishing these goals for many students, some students have expressed that the system has increased rather than reduced their anxiety. ...
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  • Aug 2024
Teaching is widely considered one of the “caring professions,” but conceptualizations of care and how care is put into practice in education are not universal. In this article, we draw from a range of perspectives on care that integrate supportive interpersonal relationships, high expectations, and culturally relevant theories of critical care, as well as Queer Theory and Disability Justice, to explore the application of these ideas in mathematics education. We identify key elements for building communities of care in mathematics education contexts: co-constructing community agreements, redefining participation, shifting traditional power structures, collaborative problem solving, and building networks of care beyond the classroom. We share our experiences implementing these elements of communities of care and propose that the integration of these elements can serve as the starting point for a framework for building communities of care for equity, justice, and culturally responsive practice in mathematics education. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol14/iss2/12/
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... Such support may come in the forms of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain (BC) (Mozumder et al., 2023). Evidence shows that data on the psychological and learning situations of learners have not been deeply explored nor accurately obtained to enable teachers to make flexible adjustments during the teaching and learning process, and a heavy daily teaching load have made teachers untrustworthy graders (Elbow, 1997). Learners with a poor command of English (Liu, 2020) often lack motivation in language learning; consequently, their level of knowledge hardly improves over time (Yuan, 2007). ...
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The fairness of vocational contest scoring is key to generating reliable competency assessments. This study examined the performance impact of the motivation of English-as-a-foreign-language learners in contests with vocabulary knowledge antecedents in the contexts of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain (BC). The sample comprised 185 participants of an oral English contest at higher vocational institution in China. AI-powered scoring of learners' contest performance and a survey were used to collect data. The findings revealed that learners’ intrinsic drive was the main positive factor, outweighing their extrinsic motivation, and that AI and BC increased the trustworthiness and integrity of contest records, thus providing new opportunities to build learner trust and form psychological incentives. This study enriches foreign language motivation theory in the context of contest research and highlights the importance of using AI and BC to enhance the scoring accuracy and credibility of contests as authoritative evaluation instruments in vocational education.
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... ' The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices" (Stommel, 2020). In place of traditional grading, ungrading can include de-emphasizing or eliminating grades in all or part of a course through minimal grading (Elbow, 1997), as well as arriving at final course grades through alternative means such as mastery grading (Bloom, 1968;Campbell et al., 2020), specifications grading (Nilson, 2015), contract grading (Danielewicz, 2009), labor-based grading (Inoue, 2022), reflective self-assessment or collaborative grading (Masland, 2023), and more (Table 1). The movement is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather encourages exploring a variety of pedagogies that center student learning and growth. ...
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Rehearsal of Ideas: Low-Stakes Writing
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In this chapter, we examine the practice of low-stakes writing for our courses. We first provide findings about low-stakes writing in current scholarship, connecting this with relevant scholarship on theatrical rehearsal practices. Next, we explain the ways in which we implement the activity in our classrooms and share some of our discoveries and observations. We finish by reflecting on challenges associated with integrating low-stakes writing into our courses, and conclude by establishing best practices.
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