Our approach to grading has connections to everything in our class design. We are joined by guest host David Clark to talk about alternative grading approaches that can focus on supporting student growth and protecting motivation by rejecting assumptions about how grades must work.
Later, we read about the impact of even slight training in note-taking on student metacognition… but then we go right back to debating what we need from scholars who want to talk about grades.
- First Segment – 04:58 – Approaches to “ungrading”
- Second Segment – 24:49 – Training students in deep notetaking
- Third Segment – 33:41 – Alternative grading… to what?
Featured Guest
Primary Citations
- Johanesen, K. E., Claiborne, L. L., Falk, E. S., Hubbard, K. P., Kohfeld, K. E., Nadin, E. S., & Schmidt, A. H. (2024). Common-sense teaching for the 2020s: Ungrading in response to covid-19 and beyond. Journal of Geoscience Education, 72(4), 422-437. https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2023.2259784
- Liu, M., & Uesaka, Y. (2026). The mind, not the pen: Deep notetaking instruction enhances lecture understanding by mitigating overestimation bias. Learning and Instruction, 104, 102360. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2026.102360
Supplemental Citations
- K12 Education Design, DLR Group
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- 108 Personalize or Differentiate and Inquiry Classrooms (Two Pint PLC)
- New research turns the Dunning-Kruger effect on its head: Rethinking the confident incompetent (Phys.Org)
- Talking the talk, not walking the walk: The coevolution of overconfidence and loss aversion (Dawson, 2026)
- Grading for Growth (Clark, 2023)
- Grading for Growth, The Blog
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- Keep it Coherent: A Meta-Analysis of the Seductive Details Effect (Sundararajan, 2020)
- 051 Retrieval Practice & Metacognition Translation (Two Pint PLC)
- Retrieval Practice Consistently Benefits Student Learning: a Systematic Review of Applied Research in Schools and Classrooms (Agarwal, 2021)
Featured Beverage
Laurence and Michael drink Framboise, a raspberry lambic beer from Lindemans Brewery in Brussels, Belgium.
David drinks Framboise 2025, a raspberry framboise from the 2025 thumbprint series by New Glarus Brewing Co. in New Glarus, WI.