Reading this post was like looking in a mirror. One thing I struggle with (and many others, from what I hear) is ignoring the mostly positive feedback and dwelling on the occasional negative feedback. Documented responses like this let me know that I'm not alone.
In regards to the student complaint of "I work too much to spend time on resubmissions," I recall that Nilson's "Specifications Grading" cites a study showing that the average students spends half of the expected time on college out-of-class-work (e.g. 15 credits should equate to 30 outside hours, but its normally 15). I have yet to have a student who alerts me that they spend more than the syllabus-recommended time on the class. But, students seem to inherently compare their workload to other classes and to their perception of their classmates.
I'm curious now if I can find a way to report the number of resubmissions class-wide so everyone can see (kinda like I used to be told what the class average was on an exam)
I'm curious if we have any data from instructors of various demographics, particularly queer instructors and women of color who tend to get more push back from students in general. I'm also wondering if there are alternatives to university learning management systems that may not allow the flexibility needed to display anything other than a numeric grade.
I would add that I am a WOC and get the same responses, so I'm very grateful for this post as I've already replicated the tracking sheet and plan to share some of this in my evaluation to administrators as I know it is going to come up.
Something I didn't put in this post is that I am indeed A Gay. I don't think this had a lot of impact on this set of student feedback -- Westminster prides itself on being inclusive and I've generally had good experiences here.
However, I'm mindful of the intersectional experiences of, in particular, women of color; it's generally true that people who more visibly belong to more marginalized categories are going to have less useful and more biased student feedback.
All that said, I don't think we have much data in general about student feedback on AGSs, let alone disaggregated data on the particular experiences of marginalized instructors.
As far as LMSs: My opinion is that no LMS is particularly good at coping with AGSs yet. I know that Canvas has made some strides in this direction with the learning mastery gradebook, but it's still built on a foundation of numbers and points.
My further opinion is, therefore, that it's more useful for individual instructors to build their own grade tracking tools that correspond more exactly with whatever their particular AGS looks like. This is some work up front, but ultimately I don't think it's too bad and it's worth the effort.
The key piece, as always, is open communication with students: "Here is the grading system we're using; the LMS doesn't know much about it; here's a more useful tool I made for you instead."
Reading this post was like looking in a mirror. One thing I struggle with (and many others, from what I hear) is ignoring the mostly positive feedback and dwelling on the occasional negative feedback. Documented responses like this let me know that I'm not alone.
In regards to the student complaint of "I work too much to spend time on resubmissions," I recall that Nilson's "Specifications Grading" cites a study showing that the average students spends half of the expected time on college out-of-class-work (e.g. 15 credits should equate to 30 outside hours, but its normally 15). I have yet to have a student who alerts me that they spend more than the syllabus-recommended time on the class. But, students seem to inherently compare their workload to other classes and to their perception of their classmates.
I'm curious now if I can find a way to report the number of resubmissions class-wide so everyone can see (kinda like I used to be told what the class average was on an exam)
I'm curious if we have any data from instructors of various demographics, particularly queer instructors and women of color who tend to get more push back from students in general. I'm also wondering if there are alternatives to university learning management systems that may not allow the flexibility needed to display anything other than a numeric grade.
I would add that I am a WOC and get the same responses, so I'm very grateful for this post as I've already replicated the tracking sheet and plan to share some of this in my evaluation to administrators as I know it is going to come up.
Two very good questions!
Something I didn't put in this post is that I am indeed A Gay. I don't think this had a lot of impact on this set of student feedback -- Westminster prides itself on being inclusive and I've generally had good experiences here.
However, I'm mindful of the intersectional experiences of, in particular, women of color; it's generally true that people who more visibly belong to more marginalized categories are going to have less useful and more biased student feedback.
All that said, I don't think we have much data in general about student feedback on AGSs, let alone disaggregated data on the particular experiences of marginalized instructors.
As far as LMSs: My opinion is that no LMS is particularly good at coping with AGSs yet. I know that Canvas has made some strides in this direction with the learning mastery gradebook, but it's still built on a foundation of numbers and points.
My further opinion is, therefore, that it's more useful for individual instructors to build their own grade tracking tools that correspond more exactly with whatever their particular AGS looks like. This is some work up front, but ultimately I don't think it's too bad and it's worth the effort.
The key piece, as always, is open communication with students: "Here is the grading system we're using; the LMS doesn't know much about it; here's a more useful tool I made for you instead."