What is Asset-Based Feedback? Feedback in the context of education is information provided following a learning activity that helps students and instructors: 1) identify current gaps in a student's journey from novice to expertise in a given domain and 2) clarify the steps toward filling ...

The importance of a community of support for alternative grading

Simply grading the final group output is insufficient, Lauren Vicker and Tim Franz write.

This morning, our six-year old first grader - a kid who has no experience with or conceptual understanding of school grades - showed us a "neat trick." On a piece of paper next to some of his writing (we'd been playing Boggle last night), he drew a lower case "f" next to a minus sign (-) and told us that "f minus is a bad grade." Oh, OK, we said. However, he slyly continued, "Look at this!" And then he drew a curved-ish line down, turning his lower case "f" into an upper case "A." With a finishing flourish, he also struck through the minus, turning that symbol into a plus (+). "It's an A plus," he exclaimed. "What does that mean?" we asked. He didn't know. And we have no idea where he picked up this knowledge of grading, perhaps from a chapter book because his first-grade teacher does not assign grades to the many projects he creates in class. He has never received a grade from an educator in his life, yet he's approximating the act of assigning a grade to himself and believes it's best to avoid an F- and aspire toward an A+. The logics of conventional schooling and success are so pervasive, are odd at face value, and are frankly incomprehensible to children unless they are first trained into a culture of what "counts" as rewarded achievement.

On alt grading research, justice and equity, and liking student writing

Please see below for the links to the slides and handout (with references and script) for my talk at The Grading Conference 2025 on June 11, 2025. Title: Tolerance for Error: A theory of how (some)…

The most common rookie (and not-so-rookie) mistakes with alternative grading

Are your students motivated by opportunity or fearful of scarcity?

What I learned by moving to a test-forward approach

One week of David's uncensored thoughts about grading

Curiosity, course design, and ungrading in the Middle East

A rant

I think author of this @insidehighered.com essay means to be helpful, and I like the shift from participation to engagement (plus he cites @cjdenial.bsky.social so that's always good!), but I think it still misses the mark significantly. 1/x https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/teaching/2025/01/22/making-class-participation-grades-meaningful-opinion

Insights from a survey at the University of Colorado Denver

Ungrading is an emancipatory pedagogy that focuses on evaluative assessment of learning. Self-regulated learning (SRL) has consistently been referred to as the learning theory that undergirds ungrading, but SRL—with its deficit frame in the literature and in practice—fails to uphold ungrading’s emancipatory aims. An asset-framed learning theory—one that combines the cultural orientation of funds of knowledge with the power dynamics of community cultural wealth—is proposed as an alternative to SRL. The proposed learning theory aligns ungrading to its emancipatory aims and may provide an opportunity to better understand the learning that occurs in ungraded classrooms. Scholarly and practical impacts for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and specifically biology, educational research and practice include investigating the plausibility of mixing learning theories, aligning learning theory to emancipatory aims and researching how faculty activate funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth, both individually and collectively, in ungraded STEM classrooms.

Or, how not to scare away new alternative graders

A number of responses focused on the idea of mastery.

Students with alphabetically lower-ranked names often receive lower grades than their peers, according to a recent study from the University of Michigan.

A piece co-authored by my students and me

We asked professors, students, and high-school counselors.

If ChatGPT can do it, and if the purpose is learning, it’s not worth doing.

What do students say about alternative grading?

Also, what are you reading this summer?

Robert Talbert is a math professor, so numbers are his thing. And the way the grading system in education works has long bothered him.That became clear ...