Gradeless Assessment – Deep Dive Community
Spring 2022
Applications are open now for the Gradeless Assessment Deep Dive Community!
Click here to apply by March 28, 2022
In conjunction with the CTL, full-time Foundation faculty Deborah Johnson, James Lipovac, and Gloria Fan Duan, have organized a late spring Gradeless Assessment Deep Dive Community. Professors and are invited to come together and explore tactical ways to implement gradeless assessments (or “ungrading practices”) in their classes. This 3 part series takes aim at the following:
- Assessing equity gaps in our classrooms and discussing how we develop culturally inclusive and responsive practices
- Examining existing scholarship on gradeless assessment
- Sharing prior classroom experiences or pitfalls with both grading and ungrading
- Walking away with new assessment approaches to incorporate in our classrooms, and the possibility to opt in to a Fall Gradeless Pilot.
Dates and Times:
Sessions will run from 12:30 – 2:30 PM with the following ‘themes’:
- Session 1) April 4 – Reflection: Examining Key Questions
- Session 2) April 11 – Research and Development: Game-Based Breakout Rooms (in conversation with Bethany Ides ‘Writing the Possible’) with faculty from different departments
- Session 3) April 25 – Action Plan: Form Interdepartmental Committees to implement Fall Action Plans
Key questions, expectations or themes that the Deep Dive will explore:
Restructuring Assessment:
- Gamesmanship-Grades are a set of rules we are establishing. Points are distilled information that are easy to interpret but hard to understand. Points play into a confirmation bias- if you are already doing well in a system you keep playing the same way, but you never reach the potential that exists outside of this system, nor do you commune with people who are thinking and learning from divergent perspectives.
- How can we foster a culture of assessment to help define student success, collect evidence and approach continuous improvement?
- How do we acknowledge the full scope of what they are learning throughout their educational arc? How do you define student success?
- What learning opportunities does your program provide for students to achieve both PLOs and CLOs?
- How are you using assessment to better enable student achievement your PLOs and CLOs?
Building Equity:
- How do you address equity gaps in the classroom?
- How do we think about culturally inclusive curricula?
- How do we acknowledge our bias in grading?
- How are we looking at equity gaps in the assessment system as a whole? What are we looking at and is the evidence we are looking at going to allow us to assess equitably?
- How is our definition of student success equitable?
- At the program level, how do we assess student work more holistically– not just the work itself but students’ learning process?
- How do we avoid subjective measures based on inequitable income levels and access to technology?
- How do we assess the equity of the assessment process?
Stipend:
$250 to part-time faculty who attend 2 out of 3 sessions and complete all asynchronous activities.