Progressive, holistic education is more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. Unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes well-being. The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with racial injustice, disrupted students’ educational experiences. McKinney de Royston and Vossoughi (2021) suggest that as society is eager to return to normal, we must not seek to reestablish what was ‘normal’
‘Normal’ education ignored the deep disconnects between academic learning, well-being and the realities of social and political life. In many instances, traditional grading practices “treat students like a product, a vessel to be filled with knowledge as opposed to a person who is central to the learning process” (Ferns et al., 2021, 4502).
An ungrading approach to assessment is one that prioritizes narrative feedback. With ungrading, students receive narrative feedback aimed at fostering reflection and a purposeful connection to their learning. The goal is to deemphasize the talk of grades in exchange for dialogic engagement with students’ learning and personal and professional needs.
As alternative forms of assessment grow in popularity, researchers have begun to examine students’ perceptions of ungrading. In this article, we examine graduate students' perceptions of being in an ungraded course, paying particular attention to how they articulate their ungraded experience. We leverage this special issue as an opportunity to draw connections between ungrading and a trauma-informed approach.
In a recent study, Gorichanaz (2022) interviewed students that had experienced multiple courses with him, experiencing both ungrading and more traditional grading systems. Students felt that ungrading “de-gamified” their learning experiences, where their learning was less about making a specific grade in exchange for a better understanding of the material. Students perceived ungrading to encourage a view of learning as a collective endeavor instead of an isolated and comparative event.
Students associated ungrading with a positive course experience and an increase in intrinsic motivation. Guberman (2021) notes that deeper qualitative analysis is needed to understand how students’ experiences of ungrading can demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. We discuss how the Covid-19 pandemic brought scenes of student trauma to the forefront and initiated discussions of how our educational systems need to change to better suit learners.
We frame the “pandemic pause” as an opportunity to address many of the challenges students face. We theorize how treating assessment as part of a system of care can better support students learning in times of trauma. Trauma-informed instructional practices are a growing interest among educators and educational researchers.
We view trauma as the fixed-term or “ongoing physical, social, and/ or psychological strain’ One pedagogical strategy central to dealing with trauma is to refocus pedagogy practices on students’ well-being. We briefly discuss how “normal’ assessment–assessment that prioritizes numerical ranking and quantification–furthers mental health and academic concerns.
Even before the pandemic, grading practices and the effects of grades were a concern for educators and educational researchers. Two of the primary concerns have revolved around how grades affect students’ academic motivation and mental health. As such, we use this space to explore how ungrading fosters both a trauma-informed approach and one that centers on students' needs and lived experiences. Then, we examine literature that explores the negative effects ofgrades and discuss how assessment, as part of a system of care, is critical.
Chamberlin and colleagues’ (2020) research continues to support the notion that feedback is more effective for intrinsic motivation than grades by themselves. Seligman et al. (2021) found that medical students perceived the shift to a pass/fail system coupled with formative feedback from numerical-based assessment positively, especially in terms of student well-being.
Formative feedback is a well-known strategy for supporting students learning. Butler’s ( 1988) research that indicates that when formative feedback. is accompanied by the presence of a grade, the feedback is often disregarded. While research continues to point to the mental health concerns associated with grades, medical programs and schools are increasingly shifting to qualitative-based assessment.
According to a recent questionnaire, the grading systems used in medical school have transitioned overwhelmingly to narrative-based assessments. Rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicidal ideation have spiked dramatically in recent years, and academic stress tied to grades is the leading cause of this escalation. The effects of grades continue to wreak havoc on students no matter their academic interests or programs, and should be of serious concern (Burke, 2020; Eyler, 2022).
The pandemic has only exacerbated this problem, and as a result, students across the U.S. are advocating for a change in grading structures. As educators aware of these findings, we present ungrading as a possible solution. The last two years have brought about increased interest and discussion of alternative and more holistic forms of teaching and learning practices, including assessment methods.
Considering the effects the pandemic has burdened students with, Veletsianos and Houlden (2020) call for “radical flexibility” and an “educational environment in which the people participating and supporting education are understood to be and thus treated as holistic beings” (p. 857) We sketch out a possible future, one where assessment prioritizes care and well-being–assessment as a system of care. Framing ungrading as trauma-informed practice, we are reminded of the literature that has explored teaching and learning practices, and education more generally. Nel Noddings ( 1988), for instance, inspires thoughtful dialogue around the role of care in education.
Noddings ( 1988) reminds us that relationships are fundamental to an ethic of care. Ungrading espouses personal relationships with students and a commitment to recognizing their interests, histories, and experiences. This commitment is one that trauma-informed approaches are built on. As students’ trauma continues to impact their learning, educators must be prepared to deal with these challenges and recognize their responsibility in mitigating the effects of trauma (Crosby et al., 2018). These traumas cannot be ignored either, as they are central to teaching.
Alvarez (2017), for instance, documented the practices of an educator who responded to their students’ needs after a recent shooting in their community. Imad (2021) argues that educational practices must center on care and well-being as part of a framework for trauma-informed practices. Ingrained in these principles is a recognition that learning is a relational endeavor and process that requires educators to be empathic of students' social realities. To develop these relationships, Ferns and colleagues suggest a care-focused approach requires personal knowledge along with sharing and empathizing with students.
A pedagogical approach that centers on care and well-being must include a willingness to embrace students’ needs and lived experiences. Meyers and colleagues (2019) argue cultivating empathetic relationships with students is critical for developing high-quality student-teacher relationships and learning. Douglas (2020) advocates “we teach, assess, and refine so that ultimately, we have lesson plans that anyone can teach that will cover exactly the outcomes we want to address and yield uniform results in learning. But learning is never uniform”
In that spirit, we present ungrading as an alternative to the ‘norm’ and ‘uniform’ that is positioned within a system of care by accounting for students’ needs, histories, and realities. This research took place at a large university in the southeastern United States. Graduate student participants included in this research were students in a graduate-level online Introduction to Educational Technology course taught by the first author in the fall of 2021. In total, 13 students were enrolled in the course, with eight willing to participate in interviews about their experience. Of the eight students, each of these individuals came with a range of educational experiences. For instance, some students had recently completed their undergraduate degrees and had moved directly into a
Students came into the course with a range of educational experiences and beliefs about the function and purpose of grading practices. Six of the eight students interviewed had careers in PK-12 educational settings as classroom teachers or teacher assistants. One student was a graphic designer, and one student worked as a designer and trainer in IT cybersecurity. To prepare students for the ungrading process, they were introduced to Stommel’s (2018) ungrading guide and Kohn's (1999) review of grading Practices.
Before this course, not a single student had experienced a grade-free course or had heard of ungrading. As expected, students were initially uneasy about the approach as it conflicted with their past educational experiences. Some students were worried about receiving credit from the university and their workplace for taking the course. So, it was explained to students that similar to any other college course, they would receive a grade at the end of the semester, however, how that grade was determined would be a bit different.
Leveraging Canvas for the course made this design feature easy to organize and maintain for both the students and the instructor. A core feature of the ungrading approach is the “process letters” that students write periodically throughout the semester. These letters serve as opportunities for students to engage in self-reflection and are designed to have students engage and discuss their learning in-depth.
At the end of each process letter, students are asked to provide themselves with a grade (0-100) that serves as a conversation starter between them and the instructor. The research followed a qualitative case study approach (Yin, 2014) bound by graduate students enrolled in the ungraded and online Introduction to Educational Technology course. This study was approved by the University’s Institutional Review Board of Research in the fall of 2021. Upon approval, the instructor informed the students that he would be conducting interviews after the semester to not interfere with their course experience or influence their perception and participation in the course in any way.
All 13 students enrolled in the course consented to have their course artifacts (e.g., process letters) included in the study. The interviews focused on their perceptions of being ungraded, including how they perceived ungrading to affect their learning. In many cases, students used their previous experiences with grades to contextualize how they felt about being in a grade-free course. The recorded interviews took place on Zoom and ranged from 20 to 50 minutes. During the interviews, the research team took fieldnotes that were referred back to when analyzing the transcripts. Each interview was transcribed using an automation transcription service and then manually corrected by members of theResearch team.
Students perceived ungrading as a break from the stressful and often anxiety-causing environment created by grades. Ungrading was perceived to foster and encourage deep collective reflection and feedback. Students also perceived it to promote the pursuit of personal and professional interests related to course material. The team analyzed the interviews, which included multiple rounds of iterative open coding, where interviews were first individually analyzed and then reviewed and discussed as a group (Braun & Clarke, 2006). After generating initial codes, the team met and discussed their codes, leading to a consensus on codes. We used the artifacts students created for the class, including students’ process letters to support our interpretation of their perceptions.
Findings In the following, we report on the themes that emerged from our interviews with students. Students spoke at great length about the concerning effects grades have had on their mental health and well-being. Students perceived ungrading to be an approach that shifted learning and assessment from an isolated effort to a collective and reflective endeavor, more concerned about the process of what and how students learned than getting a specific grade. We examine how ungrading encouraged deep student reflection, positioned learning as a collective endeavor, and resulted in students who are practicing teachers reflecting on their assessment practices.
Students’ concerns about grades were often exchanged for excitement about reflection in our interviews. Given the importance of narrative feedback to the ungrading approach, the instructor’s feedback, in many cases, drove reflection. Lois noted being in a gradeless class shifted her mindset from focusing on what she got as a grade on every assignment to what the feedback is.
The students’ interest in reflection was not just felt by the current educators in the course though. Denise, a designer and trainer, suggested the lack of grades paired with increased feedback allowed her to “just really focus more on reflecting on what I had learned during the course.” Nadia, a middle school teacher, suggested being ungraded lent itself to reflection opportunities, unlike previous experiences in graded courses.
Students' reflective processes included ensuring they were meeting their own learning needs. This endeavor, helped students recognize shifts in their learning, and placed students in a position to be responsive to their learning needs, the authors say. Kris, a current high school teacher, suggested the reflection and feedback cycles that accompanied each assessment positioned his learning as a collective endeavor with the teacher. ‘Hey, you can step it up here. Or ‘hey, you Can improve here.’ Or, ‘ hey you need to read more or you needto study,’ one student said.
In comparison to getting comments on previous work where the emphasis was on what they had done wrong, Kris framed the feedback he received as “not telling us what to do.” Lois, for example, suggests the emphasis on feedback encouraged her to provide feedback to her classmates in a way that would spark reflection. Kris positions this process as a collective endeavor that has cascading effects on students’ learning practices.
For Lois, the emphasis on feedback promoted reflective processes she wanted to engage in with her fellow students. Barrett questioned the role of grades, asking “who’s benefiting from assessment?!” suggesting it is not the learners. For the current and pre-service educators in the course, being ungraded led students to reflect on their assessment practices.
Students perceived ungrading as providing them with more opportunities to make connections to their personal and professional interests. Not having to deal with the pressure associated with grades, reduced their anxiety related to participating in class activities. As a result, in some cases, students felt this lack of stress encouraged them to engage further with course topics.
Olivia, a pre-service educator, felt that being in a grade-free course encouraged her to participate and learn in ways that were much different from her previous class experiences. "I definitely noticed myself doing my assignments slightly differently... But, overall, I think it changed for me because I did a lot more research," she said.
I definitely did my assignments a bit differently, and I involved myself more in the content that was provided versus just doing the assignment and calling it a day. For Olivia, removing grades provided her with the space to pursue course topics in greater detail and at her own pace. Denise perceived not being graded as an opportunity “to be more focused on the task at hand and do some deeper exploration into other topics that were closely aligned, but we’re more suited for what I do professionally.” For other students, the removal of grades allowed them to feel like they could put their personal touch on the course.
Ester, an elementary teacher, perceived her experience as an opportunity to be more engaged in the course, especially during asynchronous class discussions. Lois found discussions without grades allowed her to add her personality to the class activity. Ester suggested how students interacted in this course conflicted with her previous experiences, recalling that “nobody's thinking about ‘Oh if I have to do something, it’s because I must answer two peers’”
Students perceived ungrading to be an opportunity for growth. As students who had never experienced being in a gradeless course, they had been conditioned to think about grades and grading practices in a specific way. As revealed throughout our findings, grades, for many, were the source of various traumas related to stress, pressure, and anxiety that inhibited their learning.
In addition to these perceived ill effects, several students mentioned ungrading seemed to overcome bias in grading practices. Kris, a non-native English speaker, shared that he felt graded assessments were often biased against him and his knowledge. Similarly, Ester, another non- native English speakers, spoke at great length about how she had often been marked lower compared to her English-speaking peers on writing assessments. She believed this to be the case not because she did not understand or demonstrate her knowledge of the content, but because she had trouble demonstrating the nuances of the English language. Ester expressed excitement for ungrading and Kris positioned it as creating a more “inclusive environment,” where their experience was “much more honest�
In addition to being more transparent for students, the release of pressure associated with getting a grade resulted in an opportunity for students to focus on their learning. Denise, spoke directly to this point in her interview, sharing: It was a lot easier to just focus on the assignment and not be so tied up with what grade am I actually going to get, which alleviated a lot of anxiety.
Students saw ungraded assessments as an opportunity to grow their understanding. Lois, for instance, perceived the ungrading process to “feel like there was less pressure involved and it was more about what I needed.” Instead, as was exemplified by Denise’s work, it led to greater effort on assignments and trying to deeply understand the material.
It was more about my own journey, instead of my own destination. Olivia, both simply and eloquently, articulates her greatest perceived benefit of ungrading. It encouraged her to approach her learning and assessment with a growth mindset. More specifically, Olivia saw ungrading as an opportunity to further develop her learning, not just to cover it once and move on to the next topic.
Olivia viewed her learning as cyclical and as a process that could vary in depth depending on her interest. Students were focused more on the process of learning, often associated with a growth mindset (Dweck, 2015), than fixating on an end result. Similar to Gorichanaz (2022) and Guberman (2021), our students’ previous experiences with ungrading and grades encouraged reflection of past trauma. However, as shown in our findings, students perceived ungrading to be a positive shift away from “normal” assessment and a more appropriate means for supporting their learning.
In many ways, grades created very traumatic experiences for a couple of students included in this research. One deeply troubling experience was shared by Ester while discussing how she felt some grading practices were biased against non-native English speakers. Ester shared that in her previous online courses, she would go back through the discussions and compare what she had written to what her peers had written. Frequently, she found that the theme of her posts were similar to her peers, and were often completed in greater detail.
The nature of traditional assessment completely ignores what ungrading champions. As interest in trauma-informed instructional approaches in educational settings garner more interest, ungrading is just one approach that prioritizes student well-being. We do not intend to position ungrading as the only approach to assessment that priorizes student learning, but we do leverage our understanding of the ungrading practice to question how other forms of assessment can prioritize student learning.
We suggest that ungrading prompts an audit of educators’ and designers’ assumptions about assessment and assessment practices to uncover the implicit biases they might promote. We suggest given the impact grades have on students’ mental health and well-being, and educational experiences in general, encouraging approaches that deemphasize the presence of grades are needed.
Based on students’ perceptions of ungrading in this article, we have positioned the ungrading method as one that leverages care for students and their learning. Ungrading can promote trauma-informed teaching practices by minimizing the stressful and anxiety-inducing effect grades manifest. We find it most interesting given the context in which students were enrolled in this course and this study–amid a global pandemic–not a single interview participant discussed the hardships they were facing. Instead, their perceptions focused on how ungrading made them feel free, excited, and engaged in theirlearning. Furthermore, ungrading is just one element in a system of care. It is unrealistic, at this moment in time, to expect grades to disappear in education entirely.
This article and research encourages thoughtful discourse of where and when grades are necessary or even not needed. We hope that this article will encourage thoughtful discourse about grades and the role of grades in students’ lives. We also hope that it will encourage a discussion of the role that grades play in students' lives and their experiences.
Ungrading: why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press. Brännlund, A., Strandh, M., & Nilsson, K. (2017). Mental-health and educational achievement: The link between poor mental-health. and upper secondary school completion and grades.
Potentially perilous pedagogies: Teaching trauma is not the same as trauma-informed teaching. Carol Dweck revisits the ‘growth mindset’ in Education Week, September 22, 2015. The impact of grades on student motivation in higher education, Active Learning in Higher Education, 2018, 49(4), 15–23.
Grades are at the center of the student mental health crisis. Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms. Best Practices for Trauma-Informed Instruction: Best practices for trauma-informed instruction. For more information, visit Inside Higher Ed's Grading For Equity page.
https://www.hanoverresearch.com/insights-blog/k-12-trauma-informed-resources-for-coping-with-tragedy-loss. Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. Imad, M. (2021). Transcending adversity: Trauma- informed educational development. To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, 39(3).
Fixating on pandemic ‘learning loss’ undermines the need to transform education, says Truthout.com. The author of this article is a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of the book “Teacher Empathy: A Model of Empathy for Teaching for Student Success”
From grading to assessment for learning: A qualitative study of student perceptions surrounding elimination of core clerkship grades and enhanced formative feedback. Jesse Stommel, J. (2018, March 11). How to ungrade . Stommel. https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/