Rethinking Grades: A Path to Active Learning with Josh Eyler

(upbeat music) Thank you for joining us today for this episode on Empowering Active Learning in the Social Learning Amplified Podcast series. I'm your host, Eric Mazor, and our guest on the episode today is Josh Eilert. Josh is the director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Director of the Think Forward Quality Enhancement Plan at the University of Mississippi, where he's also a clinical assistant professor of teacher education. He previously worked on teaching and learning initiatives at Columbus State University, George Mason University, and Rice University. A sought after speaker for his expertise about the signs of learning and about compassion in education, especially in connection with students, grades, and mental health. He has spoken at colleges and universities across the country, including Yale University, University of Texas, and Johns Hopkins University. Josh is the author of the new book, "Failing Our Future," "How Great, Harm Our Students," and what we can do about it. This came out this year from Johns Hopkins University, press, and it will be, I guess, the focus or discussion. And another book, "How Humans Learned the Signs and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching," which was named one of the 100 best education books of all time in 2019 by Book Authority, which is a leading site for book recommendations. Called a splendid repositories, ways to rethink how we teach college, but Los Angeles Review of Books, it was also named Book of the Year in the Chicago Tribune. Josh, thank you for being here today. Thank you so much for the invitation, Eric. Well, I'm really excited because the title of your most recent book on grades resonated so strongly with me. In my own trajectory as an educator, I moved from what to teach to how to teach it. And after I introduced the instruction as a way to help students learn in the classroom, I realized that it's actually the assessment that dictates everything. It's the tale that wags the dog. That's absolutely right. Students approach to learning and their study habits are completely dictated by the assessment not by what you would hope and intrinsic desire to learn. Now, I frequently speak on assessment and the title of one of my talks is assessment, the silent killer of learning. (laughing) Love it. But I really, it's really grades or high stakes exams that are, I think, the killer and that take the joy out of learning. What is it that motivated you to write your book? - Right. And in some cases, they're not the not-so-silent killers. (laughing) So there was a couple of things that converged at the same time that really led me to writing this particular book. One was that when I was writing the earlier book on the Science of Learning, I was working on the chapter on failure as a tool for enhancing learning. And I kept running into lots of research about grades and about how they set up obstacles to not just learning, but the natural process by which people learn, which is trying something out, making a mistake, getting feedback and trying again, that grades sort of arrest that process. And so as I finished that project, I kind of put a pin in the idea of returning to grades as the subject of a whole book. The second thing was that a lot of people in my kind of educator network were trying different experimentations with their grading practices. They were trying out alternative models, like contract grading and standards-based grading, and things like that. And I dove into those waters as well and tried some experiments in my class. And probably the, maybe the most important thing that was happening at the time is that my daughter was entering the school system and began to get grades for the first time. And I was witnessing her trying to navigate that world and her response to the grades that she was getting. It all came together and I thought that it might be beneficial if all of us who have a stake in education in this country were all in the same page and knew the contours of this conversation. So this is written for a broad audience of parents, educators, administrators, policymakers, even students. So we can all kind of move this conversation forward together. Now, as I was listening to you, I think it's great because I think it is really something that has many stakeholders, parents, future employers, educators, students. I was thinking at the same time as we're having this conversation, we have to realize that typically people like to use simple numerical metrics. I tried to see that in product reviews on sites like Amazon or consumer reports or the infamous H index in academic publishing, school rankings and so on. And also, I think deep down we know that they often drive a unethical behavior. People who sell products on Amazon come up with fake reviews to artificially raise their rankings. Authors in academia chase high impact journals because they know that that will affect their H index or even embellish articles and results in order to get published in high profile journal and increase their H index schools and universities do all kinds of things to manipulate their rankings rather than to really look good. - That is very true. - Their business and world reports, yes, definitely. - So I think that one reason we stick with these numerical rankings is that they're easy to obtain and they're easy to process. But I think everybody also knows we should take them with a grain of salt. I like to say easy metric, useless metric. That's great, yes, I agree. But we also know that no one in society would hire people simply based on the grades they obtain in high school or in college. - Right. - So in education, I think grades are not just uninformatives because nobody would hire people based on these grades, but you have gone in your book as far as saying they can interfere with learning. - So in your opinion, what are some of the most significant ways in which grades are an impediment to learning? - Well, I think first and foremost, and probably the most studied aspect of the relationship between grades and learning is the role of motivation. And so grades are just quintessential, extrinsic motivators derived from behaviorism. And we know that extrinsic motivators work, but they really work to get people to comply and to do things that they would otherwise not do, right? So yes, a grade can get a student to attend class. It can get a student to turn things in on time and to even participate, but just being in a learning environment, complying with the learning environment in no way ever ensures that a student will learn simply because they're there. That takes intrinsic motivation. It takes pedagogical design. It takes relationships between a teacher and student. So extrinsic motivation of grades only goes so far. What we know is necessary for deep learning is really intrinsic motivation. And that is where grades set up the very first and probably the biggest obstacle that grades interfere with our ability to be intrinsically motivated for lots of reasons. One is, of course, that it's difficult to find your natural interest in something when you're always concerned with whether you're getting the right answer or whether there is going to affect your GPA or your employment prospects. It's also grades affect intrinsic motivation because they encourage a kind of strategic learning and a strategic course selection process. So I'm not really doing things because I love them. I'm doing them because they are a means to an end. And that is something that's set up by grades. They also cultivate an environment, not to say that all students will do this, but they cultivate an environment that incentivizes cheating. That if we are creating classrooms where all of the emphasis is on grades, the extrinsic motivator, you're also just psychologically creating an environment where people have incentive to do whatever they need to do to get that grade because we have told them. We have given them the message that that's what matters most. And so often, the environments where the most pressure on grades also see a rise in incidents of cheating in academic misconduct. The second thing that a lot of research is bearing out is that grades themselves, although we have been told that they are scientific or objective measurements of learning, what we actually know is that grades are really subjective and are disconnected from learning. And so some of this goes back to you. your work on peer instruction Eric and those original insights into how students were getting A's on tests, but weren't learning the concepts of physics very deeply. And so that mismatch is everywhere in education. And so what we can say for certain is that a grade shows us individual students progress on the goals learning goals set out by a particular instructor for one course at one time. It is not in any way a kind of youth universal stamp of knowledge acquisition in a particular field, but too often that is the message that gets sent about grades that they they provide some kind of veneer or mirage of rigor and standardization and therefore we must keep them at all costs, but what we're learning is that that is just not true. I love this discussion. There's so many things that are popping up in my mind as I'm listening to you. I can already see that we're going to run out of time today. So you mentioned one important word subjectivity and a flip side objectivity. So my question to you is, is there really an objective measure of learning? I don't think that there is a truly objective measure for learning because the measurements that we use are created by human beings with particular biases and angles and lenses that they're using to create them. So I don't I don't think that there are truly objective measurements. I think that there are particular insights that we can gain from student work. I think that there are tools out there that do allow us that do give us important information about learning. But I would not say that we have a truly objective measurements. I completely agree with that. I asked it was sort of a leading question in the sense, you know, in particular, let think about, let think about Bloob's taxonomy disputed as it may be, it's still a useful framework to think about from time to time with, you know, the lower order thinking skills like memorization and understanding at the bottom and then the highest order thinking skill evaluation and creativity or innovation at the top. And if you ask yourself, can I really, truly, objectively evaluate these six thinking skills I left out to two in the middle, I would say memorization, yeah, of course, I can test it. I can ask somebody to remember Swahili words and then, you know, after an hour or two hours or three hours or a day or two days or a month, I can ask, you know, the meaning of a set of Swahili words and sort of measured the amount of memorization that this particular individual has mastered. Sure. And then it becomes more fuzzier as you go to understanding. And by the time you get to innovation or creativity, I think there's no relationship at all anymore between evaluation and the person's actual contribution. Think about so many artists that died before they were recognized as being, you know, creative innovators or even innovators in society who were not valued for the innovations they they brought about. So I think that that is a clear indication that we can't really objectively evaluate human human abilities. I agree. Absolutely. Now, in history, grades are relatively recent, they're called a quote invention, right? I mean, I, yes, I've read in some place that it started with the mass tripos and Oxford in the late 19th century, which was not an academic enterprise. It was sort of a competition, an extracurricular mass competition, which was more or less like a sports ladder where people got eliminated. It's a successive round of solving harder and harder problems. Right. And then, you know, you end up with a numerical ranking of people and you think, oh, that's great. I know who's the best students and who are the poorest students. Well, why do you think we adopted the system? And why are we clinging to it even though deep down in our hearts, we all know that grades don't tell you the story and that maybe even their social injustice. Yes. Well, certainly they are, but why do, why do we have them? Why do we adopt them, you know, and you're absolutely right. These are very recent. In fact, the A through F letters system that is so common now, it wasn't standardized until the 1940s. So you're talking about less than a century of use, but they were adopted and their good records on this largely for an ease of communication with parents and across institutions. So if all schools are giving A through Fs, that's easy to communicate with each other and with colleges and with employers. So it was largely about that kind of shorthand for supposed learning and how they could communicate with each other. But what is also clear is that it was not because they felt it was the best way to measure learning. That had no part whatsoever in it. It was a system that was really set out to make communication as quick and as transmissible as possible. Why do we cling to it? I think like we cling to a lot of things that are rooted in tradition and baked into the foundation of our systems because it's always been done that way. And the messages that have always been sent about them are that these are pure reflections of your work as students when we're learning, of course, that is not true. And also people who are charged with leading and working in educational institutions often got good grades and believe that grades are rigorous and reflections of student learning. And so it's kind of a self-replicating system at the same time. It's also a system that has evolved. You mentioned A through F at my institution right now. It's A through A minus roughly. Right with students becoming almost suicidal when they get an A minus rather than an A. So grade translation has been so severe that I think grades are becoming meaningless, not because they're intrinsically meaningless. They're becoming meaningless because, you know, it's almost like a pass fail system. How, what's your view of that and do you see some of the same problems at your institution? Oh, sure. Okay. Well, actually the first thing that you were talking about there with mental health is actually true and real and institutions are starting to learn more about how grades are affecting students mental health. The grade translation conversation is an interesting one because this is often a proxy and this conversation accepted but it's often a proxy by those who feel really passionately about it for a different conversation about a supposed loss of rigor over the course of many years. And so sometimes when people are talking about grade inflation what they're really kind of arguing about is have standards decreased over time and our course is less rigorous now than they used to be. I also find that sometimes when people are talking about grade inflation what they're really talking about is grade compression. So a smaller range of grades over time has been given when I think in order to say that grades are truly inflated, we would have to know a lot about how the grades had been given in the past, what criteria people had used and how the assessments were designed. So I think ultimately is grade compression happening especially at top universities yes, we are seeing a smaller range of grades but there was a paper by researchers at Cornell about 10 years ago who were trying to get to the bottom of what is why are there so few grades beyond this scope being given and they really couldn't come up with they could not find a single cause of course they found they found better teaching was happening they found that they were admitting better students or more prepared students and ultimately they saw that it was probably the preparedness of the students themselves that could account for some of the grading compression but it couldn't really pin anything on it. So I do think nationally we're seeing a shift in the type of grades that are given does that indicate though that the courses themselves are less challenging. I don't necessarily think that it does and I don't think that we have at least that we don't have data to make that claim necessarily but I do think that thinking about the types of grades that are being given in the range really does reveal some of these larger issues and nuances of the grade and conversation. I'll tell you what's happened in my class 10 years ago I decided to completely change what I was doing rethink my class or rethink my learning goals. So that was actually the first thing I did. And I decided to settle on four main learning goals. One self-directed learning, two content mastery, three team work, effective teamwork, or engaging in effective teamwork. And four was professionalism. Each of those subcategories, for example, professionalism is punctuality, engagement, ethical decision-taking, and so on. And so all my assessments, which are continuous, there are close to a hundred of them, there are many assessments, sort of map on to these four learning goals. So at the end of the semester, I end up with something on self-directed learning, on content mastery, on teamwork, and on professionalism. So it's like a vector if you want to describe the students with different metrics in each dimension. Unfortunately, at the end of the semester, the registrar knocks on my door and says, Eric, what is the grade for this student? And I have to sort of collapse those four grades into one. And I've struggled with how to handle that. Do you just average them? But if you average them, what happens is you squash the distribution. But it's highly unlikely that once students does very poorly or very well in all of those categories. So you end up narrowing the distribution tremendously if you just average them. They take the lowest one to prevent students from being strategic. That's kind of harsh and will create a lot of resistance. So I found that as I try to come up with a metric that gives more information by, for example, measuring people's abilities in more than just one dimension, which is what we typically do, content mastery. By being forced to squash that into a single dimension at the end of the semester, we lose all interesting information. So how do we fix these issues? Well, unfortunately, I don't think that there is one kind of one solution to rule them all. But what I am encouraged by is that, kind of nationally, both K12 and higher ed, lots of people are trying out different models just as you are to make steps towards solving some of the biggest problems with grades. So you have folks trying out things like contract grading, standards-based grading, which allows STEM faculty that I know who want to experiment have moved more toward collaborative grading, things like this. And a couple of things that they all share, they share a desire to release some of the pressure on students that students are feeling because of traditional grades. Another thing that they share is that they try, or they seek, to honor the fact that learning is a deeply complex process that occurs at different rates for different students. So that one student may easily grasp the concept of photosynthesis by the exam on week three. But another student, it may take to week seven to master the concept of photosynthesis, and that neither student should be penalized for the rate of learning that occurs. So all of them, kind of, try to account for that in different ways. And some of the experiments, like you're describing, shift, or add dimensions to the grading so that-- and that, to me, is a signal of wanting to honor the complexity of learning and also the weighting of those different levels of grading as well. So lots of people trying lots of different things. We're not going to solve the ultimate problem yet that you're describing, which is that we have to put a grade in the grade book, or registrars get mad at us. But all of them, all these different models, are really trying to figure out, how do we help students reorient their experience with grades and put the focus back onto learning rather than the evaluation? Yeah. What I would really, very much like to see, is sort of a transverse grading, where we sort of as a university or a school or a major or whatever decide on, he are the important skills that these college graduates or school graduates, or perhaps majors need to have mastered and make sure that each course sort of has activities to measure students' performance. And at the end, a picture emerges not from a single instructor and a single course, but across the entire two, four, six-year, whatever curriculum. I think we end up with a much better picture. But here's perhaps one point we didn't talk about. Sure. Most evaluations that take place in society, it's not the person doing the selling or the action or the manufacturing or whatever doing the evaluation. You have other people doing the evaluation. In education, we're in the weird situation that we're not only teaching our students, we're evaluating them, too. Yes. There's sort of what I like to call this Jacqueline height transition that we make from, the coach as an educator, as a teacher, to the bad guy who was doing the evaluation. We've sort of this internal conflict that on the one hand, we want to make sure our students come out of the course, scoring as high as possible. In order, of course, we want to be coming up with a distribution that differentiates the students, one from the ordinary. Isn't that perhaps, you know, maybe the root of the problem that in education, it's the person who's doing the teaching, who's doing the evaluation? Yes. I do think that that is a major part of this issue. And it affects the classroom environment, it affects the learning that can happen as a result of that. And it's certainly not why I wanted to be an educator, right? I wanted to be more of the coach, less of the judge. And I do think that the mudding of the waters makes the classroom a really fraught place for learning to happen because of that. I will say that one of the benefits of some of these alternative grading models that people are trying are the shifts our role more toward the coach model, rather than the judge or the evaluator. I myself, some of the ones that I've tried, it has just kind of rejuvenated my approach to teaching because it has allowed me to really focus more on them as learners and to allow the comments and the feedback and the evaluation part of it to really be in service of those efforts rather than kind of undermining them. Which approach is that? Can you give us more detail? Sure, I've tried a lot. I've tried portfolio grading in my writing courses. I've used contract grading for the graduate courses I teach and I've experimented a little bit with collaborative grading, ungrading some of those models as well that really put the emphasis on student self-assessment. So I've done a lot of different things like many. I tried to match the model to the context and to the level of the students, right? What might be best for them depending on what level they're at, but lots of different approaches. I see, so you've used the word grading a lot and when I started thinking about grading, I used the word assessment where I really, in the back of my mind, were thinking more about high-stakes assessment and grading. Did they? And you just mentioned the word ungrading. Do you think a future without grades is possible? Or maybe let me rephrase my question here a little bit before you address that future. If you take away the grades, is it still possible to motivate the students sufficiently to learn? Because I can already hear my colleague saying that. Yes, I like you. I think I know the answer to that question, but I'd love to hear your view. Sure. The answer is yes, but it's also not an easy thing to do, right? So when you take away the grades, you have to pay much closer attention to the course design, the assignment design, all of the learning activities to make sure that they will connect to a student's intrinsic motivation, really drive the learning forward. But also, there's more emphasis necessary on building trust and relationships in the classroom. And also to take time throughout the semester, to keep coming back to the model you're using and explaining it to students as to why you're doing it. But the benefits of this, students discover their autonomy as learners. They develop agency for the purpose of their own education. They find elements of the course that they're genuinely interested in and want to explore [BLANK_AUDIO] And they ask better, more meaningful questions because their curiosity is allowed to run free in ways that it simply can't if you are worried about taking intellectual risk because it may affect your grade. So maybe I can rephrase my first question though because like you just described sounds like a lot of work. And I know that most of my colleagues, even though I think they do take teaching seriously, you know, see this as probably too much work to invest. So do you think we're headed perhaps to a great less future or is that out of reach? You know, I think like a lot of questions like that ultimately the answer is unknowable, but here are a few reasons why I'm optimistic. I think like a lot of major change that has happened in education and society writ large, big questions like this need to be asked and the answer seems unknowable until small groups of change happen over and over again over time. And eventually that creates momentum toward this bigger change that we're talking about. What I think is perhaps more achievable in the short term is institutions not only embracing but incentivizing faculty to explore other approaches to grading and to reward them for trying these things out. And so the workload isn't issue. I found it not more work but redistributed work. So a lot at the beginning and a lot at the end, but the middle has changed for me. So I think it's redistributed work. I think we a lot more openness and incentivizing of experimentation is possible before we before we get to a great less future. But I am optimistic. There's a lot of people doing a lot of amazing work in this area. And I think it's it's all to the good for our students. Well, on that optimistic note, Josh, thank you so much for a thought-provoking discussion. I would like to conclude by thanking our audience for listening and inviting everyone to return for our next episode. On behalf of all of our listeners, Josh, thank you again for joining us today. Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate it. You can find our social learning amplified podcast and more on perusal.com/sociallearningamplified. I hope you will also join our perusal engage event with Josh Eilers, starting on January the 13th. And if you don't know what a perusal engage event is, it's an opportunity for you to engage with Josh's new book and Josh on the perusal platform. Subscribe to find out about other episodes of our podcast. And I hope to welcome you back on a future episode.