Hi there! In this blog post, I’ll be describing my Fall 2023 Digital Fellows project. If you are interested in engagement-based grading contracts, ungrading approaches, or useful applications of Google Sheets and Google Forms, you’re in the right place!
background
After multiple semesters of considering it, and lots of advice from folks on campus who use contract grading systems (thanks to Kat O’Meara and Lauren Eriks Cline for sharing so much of this work!), I took the leap in the Spring 2023 semester and implemented engagement-based grading contracts in all three of my courses. In this system students have a number of baseline expectations that they are required to meet to earn a default grade of “B” at the end of the course (for example, turn in all assignments according to the minimum specifications in the instructions). Students who wish to earn an AB or an A would complete tasks above and beyond these criteria (for example, complete a formal peer review of their assignment with a classmate). At the end of the semester, I loved the change in approach overall. Similar to what others have found (see Hacking Assessment edited by Starr Sackstein and Ungrading edited by Susan D. Blum for numerous examples from other educators), I was incredibly impressed with the quality of students’ engagement, participation, and work that they completed throughout the semester — all without the use of traditional grades.
The biggest challenge that came up was simply the logistics of tracking all of this information. Students were completing multiple drafts of assignments, emailing me proof of their “above and beyond” tasks, filling out individual self-evaluations throughout the semester, posting discussion questions on Moodle … there was just so much to keep track of, and the Moodle Gradebook wasn’t all that suited to tracking this kind of information in ways that I needed it to.
Enter my Fall 2023 Digital Fellows project! For this project, I wanted to experiment with using Google Sheets and Google Forms as the major way of tracking all of my students work throughout the semester. The purpose of this tracking system was 1) to help me manage student work in a way that was easily accessible and centralized and 2) to help students have a centralized location where they could get a quick snapshot summarizing how they were doing in the course.
This project was designed to address two of the Digital Competencies from the Bryn Mawr framework: (1) Digital Communication (specifically the Collaborative Communication component) and (2) Data Management and Preservation (specifically the Cleaning, Organizing, and Managing Data component).
implementation
I implemented this system in both classes I taught in Fall 2023: two sections of COME 305 (advanced Difference & Diversity, 30 students in each section), and COME 328 (Communication elective, 19 students).
To begin, I created a spreadsheet in Google Sheets that each individual student would use as their place to track everything. The spreadsheet had three tabs: the home page with a checklist of all of their work they needed to complete, a participation goals tab where they listed their individual goals for participation in the class, and then the submissions tab, where everything they submitted throughout the semester would be accessible. Because this spreadsheet was essentially replacing the gradebook on Moodle, I added links to each student’s checklist on a Moodle page and because of Google’s sharing settings, each student could only access their spreadsheet.
I also created a submission form in Google Forms (embedded on the home page of the checklist) that was customized to each student. Each student had their own Google Form which was linked to their individual spreadsheet checklist. **Side note: Yes, this took a lot of time before the semester began. I had some amazing assistance from Molly Lucareli to make this part of the work less burdensome!** The purpose of this submission form was for students to get in the habit of doing some of their own self-evaluation of their submissions prior to me even viewing their work. The submission form also contained a place for them to let me know if they had specific questions they wanted me to pay attention to when I gave them feedback, which ended up being really helpful. I also embedded their Midterm Self-Evaluation and Final Self-Evaluation questions in the submission form, so that those responses would also all be in one centralized spot. The submission form timestamped every submission and was a good way of tracking the different versions of student assignments.
A few weeks into the semester, I realized that I needed to make one spreadsheet for myself where I had each student’s checklist listed for easier access. This ended up basically recreating the Grader View of the Moodle gradebook. I also included checkboxes for everything, so I could quickly track which students were missing work, or which students needed to resubmit revised work.
My evaluation
Benefits
It was really nice to have everything that students were submitting throughout the semester all in one location. When I needed to meet with students to cover their progress in the semester, it was great to be able to have so much information centralized in one location.
I also really liked being able to see multiple submissions of students’ assignments in one location. I could quickly compare between a first draft of the final project and their final draft, to compare progress.
Some students used the “is there anything specific you would like feedback on?” question in ways that were really great. I think that this contributed to the culture of “feedback is good” that I was trying to cultivate throughout the semester.
TL;DR – This system did help facilitate some of the tough parts of contract grading.
Drawbacks
So, here is where I get really honest. In practice, this system ended up being really challenging all semester. On the instructor side of things, I quickly realized that the few extra seconds I needed to navigate between each of my 79 students’ individual checklists added up really quickly. This is time that is naturally saved if you are clicking through submissions in Google Assignments, for example.
While one of the goals was to teach students about best practices with Google Docs and sharing settings, in reality there were lots of mistakes which also led to this taking longer when I had to request access to students’ work pretty consistently.
Even though I put a lot of work ahead of time into making resources for students to better understand this process, some students just never got it. There was a lot of time necessary to walk students through where they needed to turn their work in, and how to access old versions.
TL;DR – This system was really time-consuming
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students’ evaluation
Benefits
“I think the grading contract was pretty straightforward with the Google spreadsheet/form. I didn’t have any trouble with turning assignments in or receiving feedback.”
“I really liked when you could see what was submitted, what needed to be revised and what was incomplete, I think it was nice to track.”
“I think that the Google Spreadsheet/Google Form tracking system is a great way to track and not much could be improved upon.”
Drawbacks
“I thought using the spreadsheet was difficult at times and was kind of a lot of steps.”
“I was personally not the biggest fan of using the Google spreadsheet. It was just an extra step to jump through to turn things in. I prefer having the checklist built into moodle.”
“The biggest drawback about the sheet and form was that it was sometimes difficult to see feedback and to understand how I’d done on assignments.”
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised that none of the students felt like the Google Forms/Google Spreadsheet system had completely failed or ruined their class experience. The feedback was honestly more mixed than I would have guessed (I anticipated that very few of them liked this system, but in reality quite a few of them felt like it was fine). I had really thorough responses from the majority of my students on this system (another very pleasant surprise), and a number of them had really specific ideas for how to improve this more. I think this system will always add a layer of complication because it’s utilizing tools that aren’t embedded directly in the course LMS.
in conclusion…
This was a hard system to implement this semester in my larger classes, but I do think that it will work really well for smaller classes with a lot of individualized work. For example, the Communication Capstone course that I will be teaching in the spring involves students choosing extremely individualized projects, dividing up the project into unique tasks with individualized due dates, and potentially numerous revisions on those tasks. My plan as of now is to run this whole system again (with a few adjustments) in that class specifically. If you have any of your own ideas for how this system could be revised or adapted to be even more helpful, I would love to brainstorm with you!
References
Blum, S.D. (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.
Sackstein, S. (2015). Hacking assessment: 10 ways to go gradeless in a traditional grades school. Times 10 Publications.
