The "Top 5" (sort of) posts at Grading For Growth
Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend with some of our most engaging posts from the past
It’s a holiday here in the US, and as we like to do on holidays (also at times other than holidays) David and I are taking the weekend off from the blog. Last year at this time, we published a best-of post with a new call for guest authors. This year, I thought we’d do another “greatest hits” post.
It turns out that determining what our “greatest hits” are, is surprisingly similar to determining “student engagement” which is to say that there’s no clear best way to do it, or even a single way to define it. Our Substack back-end, for example, doesn’t keep track of how many people actually read an article, or how much of an article is read. Instead, it bases all engagement metrics on email1. We have two metrics that are approximations of “reader engagement”: Email opens, and open rates. The former is simply the number of unique clicks from an email that the article in the email received; the latter is the former divided by the number of subscribers at the time the email was sent2.
The stats nerd in me wants to go deep in the weeds on this, but instead I’ll just say that for your Memorial Day reading pleasure, here are the top 5 all-time posts at Grading For Growth as measured by the number of email opens it received (at the time of this writing).
Number 5 on the list (with 5308 email opens) is this post from David that was itself a compilation post with links to three other articles about the mathematical and statistical issues with traditional grading.
Number 4 (5448 email opens) was our most recent guest post (from Kelsey Grinde, Allison Theobold, and Leslie Myint) which grounded alternative grading in Rachel Gutiérrez’ “Four Dimensions of Equity” framework:
Beyond Achievement
At number 3 (5654 email opens) was this article from me, back in December, about three different ways to encourage participation in class without grading it:
Prioritizing participation
At number 2 (5663 email opens) was this article where David summed up four key research results supporting the effectiveness of alternative grading. No surprise, as this one is likely forwarded around to people a lot.
Four key research results
And at number 1… with 5846 email opens… is this one from March that gives 20 ways to do “small alternative grading”.
All of these posts have the engagement they have because of you — our readers. There are currently 4777 subscribers to this Substack and more are joining the movement every day! This time last year, the number of subscribers was 2731. On behalf of David and myself, thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to more engagement with you.
I’m not sure whether reading from the Substack app is included as part of this.
It’s more complicated than this. There’s more here and it’s kind of interesting. For example, if you are a subscriber and you forward your email with an article in it to four other people, and they all click on the link to open the article, it only counts as one user but five opens (assuming you open the article as well). And, Substack detects an “open” by tracking the loading of images. If you have your email client set to block images, as my Outlook does, then it will not detect an email open if you click the link.
Bottom line: We don’t monetize this site and never will, so do what you want, but we encourage subscriptions and reading articles via the Substack app or email rather than simply visiting the gradingforgrowth.com site in a browser, because this way your engagement will be part of our stats.