Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) - Softcover

Kohn, Alfie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1949199827 ISBN 13: 9781949199826

Publisher: West Virginia University Press, 2020

Synopsis

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Aaron Blackwelder
Susan D. Blum
Arthur Chiaravalli
Gary Chu
Cathy N. Davidson
Laura Gibbs
Christina Katopodis
Joy Kirr
Alfie Kohn
Christopher Riesbeck
Starr Sackstein
Marcus Schultz-Bergin
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh
Jesse Stommel
John Warner

About this title

About the Author

Susan D. Blum is professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on education builds on her academic specialties of linguistic, psychological, cultural, and educational anthropology. She is the author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture and “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, among other works.

From the Back Cover

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Aaron Blackwelder
Susan D. Blum
Arthur Chiaravalli
Gary Chu
Cathy N. Davidson
Laura Gibbs
Christina Katopodis
Joy Kirr
Alfie Kohn
Christopher Riesbeck
Starr Sackstein
Marcus Schultz-Bergin
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh
Jesse Stommel
John Warner

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction [excerpted]
Why Ungrade? Why Grade?
Susan D. Blum

From birth onward, humans, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful creatures, displaying a ubiquitous readiness to learn and explore, and they do not require extraneous incentives to do so. This natural motivational tendency is a critical element in cognitive, social, and physical development because it is through acting on one’s inherent interests that one grows in knowledge and skills.
—Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions”

Instead of focusing on getting a good grade, I focused on actually learning the material. I was less stressed out, and more interested in the actual class content.
—Undergraduate in my grade-free (until the end) class, Fall 2018

Humans, in recent memory, invented a way of looking at students’ learning. We in the United States call it grading; in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, they distinguish between marking on particular assignments and final grading. Though grading seems natural, inevitable, a part of the very fabric of school, it isn’t. It was created at a certain moment, for certain reasons not entirely well thought out, and then became embedded in the structures of schools for most students.

But because we invented it, we can uninvent it. We can remove it.

And many of us believe we should.

There’s a growing movement at this end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I call it ungrading. Others call it de-grading or going gradeless. Though the destination tends to be generally the same, there is variation in the routes, the reasons, the contexts, and the specific ways various individuals at different levels of education enact our changes. This book is an effort to assemble some of the practices faculty have devised to question the apparent centrality of grades as an unchanging, unyielding fact of schooling (according to both teachers and students).

After I published a short article online in 2017 called “Ungrading: The Significant Learning Benefits of Getting Rid of Grades,”  I was invited to a secret Facebook group called Teachers Going Gradeless, TG2. There was already a group that Starr Sackstein had been part of called Teachers Throwing Out Grades. Since then I’ve discovered more and more evidence of faculty going gradeless—most at the secondary (middle and high school) level, but increasingly in higher education. Much of the material in this book is available as blog posts, podcasts, Twitter threads, and interviews. Little has been published in print or peer-reviewed formats. We’ve retained some of the flavor of those posts, to keep the sense of energy and conversation of each author.

Almost everyone I approached was delighted to contribute to this book (those who declined had other commitments) and excited to push the conversation into a broader public realm. We believe that putting these pieces together produces a picture of what is possible—a picture greater than any individual alone can produce.

All the authors included in this book are troubled by some of the consequences of and reasons for grades. It could be because grading dehumanizes and flattens nuances in students’ practices and understanding. It could be the mechanistic approach, derived from the factory model of education, that we wish to challenge. It could be that we are concerned about the fixation on grades, which leads to cheating, corner cutting, gaming the system, and a misplaced focus on accumulating points rather than on learning. It could be that people wish to be more responsive to individuals in the classroom, to be more informative about feedback, to join students in a collective effort that isn’t primarily focused on assessment, evaluation, sorting, ranking. It could be that people are rebelling against audit culture, or what Jerry Z. Muller in his book The Tyranny of Metrics calls “metric fixation.”

[. . . ]

Edition details

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1949199827
• ISBN 13: 9781949199826
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269
• Editor: Blum Susan D.