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 ...

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.

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)…

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

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

My dissertation on #ungrading as an example of teaching development in online, social spaces is web-ready. I will be working on smaller pieces in the coming months (especially for @dbuckedu's pressbook), but for now I wanted get this out into the world. https://t.co/EkvS63tI6a