 essential role of OER in implementing alternative assessment. This presentation is by Amanda Tainter, Faculty Coordinator of Instructional Design and Outcomes, Julie Kehoe, Mathematics Instructor, and Jennifer Parris, Department Chair and Associate Professor of ECE at College of Cannons. So we're going to talk to you a little bit about our journey and so Julie and I are going to share what our issues were for traditional grading and assessment and what brought us to decide that we really wanted to change what we were doing and so our presentation we're going to be going back and forth a little bit about what we changed. Our big one for both of us was a focus on point earning. We had students that all they were concerned about was the importance of getting how many points to pass the class instead of what they were going to learn in that class. Some students would give up throughout the course because they fail a test, they fail a homework assignment, they fail a presentation early on and that's destined them to not be able to pass the class and they're digging themselves a hole that they can't get out of and we're going to take a look at how the grading skill was set up in a second that really helped to promote that. And just like on the first one, the focus on the points earning, the grades didn't reflect what students were learning because in a lot of cases the students were able to get enough points to pass the class. It wasn't really in a lot of instances showing us that students actually had learned especially when we were looking at what the outcomes were for the courses. They might be getting enough points to speak by and pass but because of all of the other systems that were in place it didn't necessarily mean that they were learning the material and to what degree they had to learn the material. The outcomes and assessment and grades didn't align and that really is what we're just talking about on the fact that they could get the points enough points to be able to pass and what their grades weren't telling us is how were they doing on those outcomes of the course. You know we had taken the time to figure out what we really wanted the outcomes for the course to be and so those really should align with how they were doing in the class, what they were passing. That was really important to us so that what our grades were actually showing to our students and to the next instructor in the class is that they had mastered or become proficient in these skills. The enforcement of the rules got on the way of building those relationships with students. It became about you know here's my late policy you missed the due day now I've got to deduct 50% of the points whatever our rules might be those became the focus versus my role as a facilitator of your learning is to ensure that you become proficient you've mastered these skills you reach these outcomes whatever term you want to use that is what should be important it's my relationship with you as your facilitator of your learning is to support you to get there instead of this gatekeeper of if you turn it in one day or one minute or two hours late you get a deduction of a certain amount of points and so we really found that all of the traditional grading and assessment really stood in the way of getting those relationships with students that was really important for their learning so we came to a point where we needed to find a new way of doing things and a new guiding principle and so it really came down to the fact that students who learn the material should pass the class and so many of the policies that we had in place and that a lot of instructors have in place these days gets in the way of that and so with this guiding principle it helped us to better align all of our class policies our assessments with what our students needed to be successful and so it came down to a few things that that this kind of led us to we implemented OER resources in our classes so that everyone had equal access to the content right from day one and that wasn't impeded it the cost wasn't we also wanted to ensure that our grades were accurate so they were reflective of learning and not the compliance that we so often gets in the way of students being successful in the class and third flexible policies that had natural consequences rather than arbitrary ones were really important to making this work and helping us build relationships with students a clear communication was another really important one we implemented rubrics that were really clear and given upfront to students so they knew exactly what we were looking for and then we also followed that up with really good feedback to help students improve over time and in all of these guiding principles we listed that using OER as the first principle and really it was the foundation for all of this that we were doing because if students don't have access to all of the content how can we say that their grades are accurate because they're googling the content they're guessing what it might be and they're not all having the same equitable access to that content and so really that was a huge piece of advocating for these principles and we talk about this on our campus it's one of the things that Julie and I stress is that's a key part of moving into a more equitable assessment is this use of OER because students all have equal access to the content from day one yeah it really was the building block that started everything else that came after it and that last one is giving students an opportunity at redemption so including low stakes and no stakes practice in your assessment and in the course is an important part of ensuring that students were learning the material so we really had to start reconsidering all of our greeting pack the practices and these were the ones that we really had to dive into and make some changes too so great did homework became a thing of the past because this is an opportunity for students to practice with that low stakes opportunity to learn the material make mistakes and improve over time as they prepare for the assessment things like participation points effort points extra credit all these things either drag a grade down or raise a grade artificially and get in the way of actually getting accurate grades that reflect what the students learned in the class so those all went away as well and then to get those opportunities at redemption we started including retake opportunities or resubmission opportunities that kind of varied with our different disciplines but opportunities for students to keep continuing trying to learn the material it wasn't a one and done kind of thing especially since we removed the graded homework this is another place where we see that OER was really an important part of this because if we're telling students you know you can retake this test you can resubmit that project and providing feedback between that then it's really imperative that for them to learn the content that they might have missed the skill they didn't master what they didn't come proficient at that they have that content at the ready and they're not waiting to go check it out again at the library are waiting to be able to borrow it from a friend or photo copy it or whatever it might be but if we really want to encourage them to retake or resubmit that project they need to have access whenever they can to that content and so that really was an important part in that retakes and resubmission is that they always have access so that they can grow from what they didn't master that first time we also had to rethink deadlines and really make things flexible and there's still a schedule but students can work beyond that they need to and late penalties are a thing of the past here because again these are things that make grades inaccurate it's not reflecting what the student ultimately learned it can just drag down grades of students who need a little more extra time to learn the material and the last piece that we had to reconsider is the grade scale to make all this work really re-evaluating this the grade scale was a key part of this traditionally we use a zero to 100 percent scale the problem is is there just so much wide variance in this kind of scale it's very hard for me to describe to a student what the difference between a 75 and a 76 is and a 77 and so on so it's really a problematic thing with this and also as you can see it's very weighted towards failure there's so much that students have to get to just to get to that passing grade and it can make it difficult or even impossible for a student to pass at a certain point if they've struggled in the class so instead we switched to a zero to four point scale it's much easier to describe these different levels of grade versus the 100 point scale and that's exactly what we did we created rubrics that actually described each level what i what we were looking for for each thing that we were assessing them on and you can see if you're wondering well how did we make that grade breakdown work for this if you're not using 100 point scale you're not doing a 90 to 100 and a and so on so since everything is rated on a four point scale we use this breakdown instead which makes it just a little bit easier for students to get from one grade to the next and we're no longer so weighted to a failing grade and if you're curious here's an example of what those rubrics look like so this is given to the students up front and there's a lot of different ways to do this this is just how i did it for my math class where i have the objective uh described at the top and then a description of what each level looks like so students know exactly what i'm looking for uh when i am doing uh when i'm assessing them and grading them on them we've also found that it's feedback that that is so imperative we can have a really great detailed rubric and really when you're putting students at that one or that two not yet met standard and that's an important thing that i also want to draw your attention to it's saying that you're not yet there but you will be there or the two approaching standard that feedback is so important because we're letting them know here is what you need to do to help get to that three met standard and help get to that exceed standard and again bringing it back to that important use of having OER in the course is here you haven't met the standard but if you go back to that content that i gave you you know if you meet with me or if you look back at our textbook having access to that is so important because then they can go back and say oh i see what you're saying here i didn't get this concept but i've got the textbook right here because i'm using an OER and i can relearn i can brush up on that skill and now i'm ready to retake that exam or resubmit that project whatever it might be to get up to that three so that's where that retakes and that resubmission is so important paired with these rubrics so that students can see here is what i need to do to meet that standard meet that outcome meet that skill whatever verbiage you want to use it's really important to making this all work logistically when you're limited to just four points and you can clearly describe each level your grading is a lot more consistent and it's much much faster to determine the grade on assignment so now i spend very little time figuring out how many points to give and i get to spend most of my time providing detailed feedback to my students to help them improve or that reassessment if they need to take it so if you're wondering you know how do we get retakes and resubmissions to aren't because it is more work to have to be grading multiple assessments this was a big part that made it possible so if you're wondering well was it all worth it because this is a lot of work we want to be upfront it was something that we really had to commit to but it was absolutely worth it that especially that initial investment of time where i'm more focused on learning and my students are more focused on learning they still care about their grade of course but they know that we're here to learn and not to grab points and it's present in every communication that we have so a student has not yet met standard then the communication that we have is you're not quite there yet these are the things you need to do to get there but i know you can can do it and so it's that focus on learning versus you failed you didn't get the points we really want you to be able to learn that content and so here resubmit it do it again look at the content whatever it might be so it changes the whole focus of the course it's also really motivational for students because they have that opportunity to continue learning so if they didn't get it that first time or if they didn't get it by that deadline they still have more chances more time to learn at a pace that works for them and it also ties into the whole personalization the students really have an opportunity to make my class fit into their life rather than me expecting them to fit their life around my class and they're able to to spend the time that they need on concepts that they might need to revisit you know some students might be stronger in one concept whether it's math like Julie teach teaches our early childhood like Jennifer and i teach they're able to pause enough to relook at the content that they might need to instead of blazing through and never going back and filling that gap that they have in their knowledge and if we're talking about sequenced courses that's really important that they don't end our class that just because they got enough points but they still have that gap and this really helps to ensure that all those gaps are filled this also made the grade accurate we removed things like late penalties and extra credit and effort points that were really inflating or deflating grades then we have grades that we're closely aligned with the outcomes and the outcome assessment which became much easier by doing things this way and at the end of the day the most important benefit is the relationship that we experience with our students now they know after we get all of this explained to them and the experience it they realize okay this class is about learning it's not about compliance and meeting arbitrary deadlines and so it really makes the whole experience of working with your students much better i enjoy teaching so much more now than i ever did when i was trying to get my students to comply to deadlines hi everybody this is jennifer paris i'm the faculty in early childhood education at college of the canyons and the course that i converted to this new way of grading was child growth and development which is a g e course but also one of our major courses so i want to briefly talk about my starting place and so this started from a passion about creating a more equitable environment and i was in the process of reading the book on grading by susan blum and it just really resonated with me and so i decided that even though i didn't have time to figure it all out i was going to jump in and i was going to figure it out as i went and for any of you that know me that is a huge stretch i did not like to figure things out as i go but it was important to me if i were to define my approach i would call it a hodgepodge so there's definitely classic ungrading there were no points in my class but there was a lot of self grading and self reflection and they actually proposed their own final grades and then i used mastery based grading to try and structure the process so that they could see their performance on the different course outcomes and skills while this wasn't a truly linear process the way i'm going to present it i did want to kind of presented a step so that if you wanted to consider making some of these changes you kind of had an outline of what you might want to do so roughly step one was to really think about changing my policies and this was an overall change in the environment that i wanted to create in my classroom and this did happen to be a virtual classroom completely online and this also coincided with provisions that i made to our OER textbook throughout the semester that that allowed them to see themselves to understand equity and diversity and to you know make connections when it came to what i was going to be doing as far as grading or lack thereof i shared my why and then what i was going to try and so i didn't have it figured out when i gave them the syllabus and so i was transparent about that and then throughout the course i created opportunities to kind of check in how are you feeling about this do you have any questions and make sure that you know there wasn't too much discomfort with something this drastically different than what they were used to the next step that i actually came to after talking with Amanda about what she was doing in her courses was to think about the skills that i wanted my students to leave the course with so that if they were to say they successfully you know met the expectations for this course what would that look like and so i broke down the course objectives into 12 discrete skills that was a lot at the end when it was time to propose final grades so i did combine those again into four major categories at the end of the class then i went through the course in in retrospect and when you're planning ahead do this completely backwards do this as you're going not make it fit as you're going but i went through and everything that i asked them to do had to be tied to one of those 12 outcomes so that they could see the purpose and i could be transparent about what they were getting out of each part of the work that they were doing and if there was something in the course that i felt was useful but it wasn't tied to one of those outcomes i made it optional then it's really really important to provide feedback i kept my rubrics i got rid of the points on the rubrics and i did add an outcome at the bottom of each rubric that talked about did they exceed expectations or meet expectations or were they not yet meeting expectations and i think that yet's really important because the goal is for everyone to meet expectations and to resubmit work that doesn't and then i worked to create comments and narrative feedback that was there to provoke thought not just to criticize work and tell them what they did wrong or right but to actually get them to think about what they were learning step five for me was to create opportunities for self reflection and self evaluation so each module had a reflection survey that connected some of the skills that they were gaining to how they thought they were doing based on the work that they completed i also tried really hard to make it obvious where they were building on work they'd already done so maybe they did a similar assignment or there was an activity that was building the foundation so that they could see that the learning was layer by layer a very little in this course was a once one and done type of situation the skills continued to build throughout the semester and then step six was to really put it back in their hands with obvious instructor oversight they showcase their learning in a digital portfolio i had them build the portfolio before they actually had to to put the stuff into the portfolio so that they didn't have to worry about that at the end of the class it consisted of five pages one page for each of the four outcomes that i had recombined those skills into where they displayed samples of their work throughout the course and i gave them a chart showing where they worked on each of those skills throughout the course so they knew where to go look to see their level of performance and then they had a final page on their learning journey they gave themselves an overall rating on each of the four outcomes reflected on what they've learned and they proposed their final grade which i either agreed with or disagreed with and with the exception of a few students that i thought were a little too harsh on themselves i gave them the grades that they gave themselves and that they justified they earned quickly quickly lessons learned it was worth it it was a lot of work it was chaotic i didn't have the time that i needed to stay caught up on providing feedback effectively students didn't know they didn't understand the process they submitted their work resubmitted their work way less than i would have liked but there actually wasn't a lot of work that didn't need expectations they need more practice with self-evaluation and it is way better to design backwards than to try and make a course that already exists it and building off of that my next steps when i implement this again is i want to build in more options for student demonstrations of skills so while i gave them the ability to not turn in typed work um things were still really structured and kind of there was one assignment and i want to build in options and really embrace that universal design for learning i want to scaffold self-evaluation more effectively by the time they got to the end of the course they were pretty accurate in self-evaluation in the beginning they definitely overrated how much they understood something based on the work that they had done i want a more fully embraced backward design so that i can make sure everything is covered equally and is really well balanced and i also want to use the mastery gradebook in canvas because the regular gradebook doesn't work for ungrading very well if you got any questions you can always reach out to me thanks and i hope you enjoyed learning about my journey so if you're if we've piqued your interest at all in this feel free to contact us we love talking about this all the time all the time anytime