(120d) Ungrading and Student Motivation: Allowing Room for Point Totals and Assessing the Impact on Student Productivity

Ungrading refocuses the emphasis of a course onto learning and the mastery that students should have achieved at the end of the course, as opposed to students focusing on achieving certain grades and defining their success on the grade. In general, grades are de-emphasized for greater focus on students learning, processing, and applying the instruction in the course, through means such as greater levels of feedback and discussion with each other and the instructor. Many approaches fall under the broader umbrella of ungrading, including contract grading, mastery-based grading, portfolios, and self-assessment, but the general approach allows an instructor to provide less stressful, more equitable assessment.

When flexibility is more centered at the core of the assessment approach, allowing students to adjust how they can prove their mastery, as well as the overall breadth, depth, and body of work of mastery to be showcased, changes can be made to the assessment system over time to provide better support for students of all backgrounds and enable their mastery development. In previous iterations of implementing ungrading, changes were made to deadlines based on student feedback to reduce the flexibility of the deadlines throughout the semester, which resulted in higher student productivity. Further suggestions for improvement included assigning a point total to each exercise to allow students to 'gamify' and better score their work as the semester went along. As this potentially introudced a larger change to how students might approach the course, it was worthwhile to evaluate what elements of the course design were connected to student motivation.

In the third iteration of implementing an ungrading portfolio approach into a process control course, students could self-determine the assignments they would complete and how many assignments to complete, with all student deliverables culminating in one portfolio of demonstrated work by the end of the semester, but now with a point total assigned to each exercise to further delineate the depth of mastery shown by work completed. To evaluate the continuing impact of the ungrading approach as a means of course design, student feedback was assessed using the MUSIC model for student motivation, evaluating factors including empowerment, usefulness, success, interest, and caring as relevant to student productivity and motivating for overall effort. Students had been more highly productive with the ungrading approach compared to a traditional homework-and-exam semester; however, adding in a point score component opened parallels closer to the more traditional approach. The results of the ungrading implementation over three years, student feedback, and analysis of student motivation will be discussed in this paper.