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STLHE 2024

A happy update… We won the SoTL Canada Poster Award for this work! Many thanks to the adjudicators at SoTL Canada, as well as to UBC’s Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL Seed Fund), and the UBC Office of the Provost and VP Academic (SoTL Dissemination Fund) for supporting this work. 

I’ll be presenting the following poster at the STLHE 2024 conference.

How can a Longstanding Norm-Referenced Grading Policy Impact Teaching and Learning? Leveraging Qualitative Research for Culture Change in a Quantitative Department

Authors: Catherine D. Rawn (Psychology), Martin Dammert (Dept of Human Development, Learning, & Culture), & Jeanie Woo (Cognitive Systems Program)

STLHE 2024 Poster Rawn Dammert Woo (pdf)

Abstract

Grading student work is required at most universities. Literature has promoted criterion-referenced approaches for decades. Recent innovations in ungrading have centred student self-evaluation based on criteria. Yet norm-referenced grading approaches can persist in some departmental microcultures experiencing pressures of large, under-resourced, multi-section courses, and concerns about preventing grade inflation (c.f., Schinske & Tanner, 2014). Efforts promoting equity, inclusion, and Indigeneity create an imperative to question the use of norm-referenced approaches, even under these pressures (Hogan & Sathy, 2022). How do members of a large quantitative psychology department perceive a longstanding norm-referenced grading policy, and its impact on their teaching and learning?

This poster invites viewers to choose any of three ways to engage with this topic: SoTL, Educational Leadership, or professional growth. 1) The first column summarizes a mixed-methods study designed to answer the question above. Qualitative interview data, analyzed collaboratively using Reflexive Thematic Analysis, highlighted positive and negative lived experiences of faculty, graduate Teaching Assistants, and undergraduates in relation to this policy, offering a clear a mandate for reform.  2) The second column outlines the ongoing process of departmental change, as informed by scholarship on departmental teaching cultures (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2015) and Students as Partners (Felten et al., 2019). The goal of this change is to create a policy where, in theory, for every student can succeed—while facilitating high standards, cross-section equity, and support for course instructors under limited resources. 3) The third column highlights the process of personal and professional development experienced by the lead author, including epistemological growth. Aligning with scholarly analysis of SoTL as boundary crossing transformation (Kensington-Miller et al., 2021), engaging in this project changed this quantitative psychologist’s perspective on her own discipline. Viewers are invited to steer our conversation to learn about this grading policy research, department change, and/or growth.

References

Kensington-Miller, B., Webb, A. S., Gansemer-Topf, A., Lewis, H., Luu, J., Maheux-Pelletier, G., & Hofmann, A. K. (2021). Brokering boundary crossings through the SoTL landscape of practice.Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 9(1), 365-380. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/brokering-boundary-crossings-through-sotl/docview/2538450692/se-2

Roxå, T., & Mårtensson, K. (2015). Microcultures and informal learning: A heuristic guiding analysis of conditions for informal learning in local higher education workplaces. International Journal for Academic Development, 20, 193-205. DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2015.1029929

Schinske, J., & Tanner, K. (2014). Teaching more by grading less (or differently). CBE—Life Sciences Education, 13, 159-166. DOI: 10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054

See also

Lok, B., McNaught, C., & Young, K. (2016). Criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessments: Compatibility and complementarity. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41, 450-465. DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2015.1022136

Felten, P., Abbot, S., Kirkwood, J., Long, A., Lubicz-Nawrocka, T., Mercer-Mapstone, L., & Verwoord, R. (2019). Reimagining the place of students in academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 24, 192-203. DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2019.1594235

Hogan, K.A., & Sathy, V. (2022). Inclusive TeachingStrategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

About the new banner image

Suddenly it dawned on me… my website is woefully out of date. Time for a renovation! I’ll try not to let it get so dated next time. Well, I’ll try to try. There’s always next sabbatical in 7 years!

I chose as this site’s banner the image of the Hohensalzburg Fortress in Salzburg (Austria) because of how I felt while taking that photo (and because I like the look of it). I was travelling on sabbatical (March 2017), and had uncharacteristically ventured off by myself up the mountain in the middle of the city on a sunny spring day. All morning I simply followed my curiosity and was rewarded by stunning views of mountains, ruins, forest, city, and the medieval Fortress. I learned about that place and myself in equal measure that day.

Finished Pottery!

So I finished all my pottery pieces in December and they were done firing by early January… and yes it’s March and I haven’t shared the results yet! Well, here I am!

My First Three Pieces

Glazed and ready for the final kiln

And finally complete!

Next came this pair of honey pots

And later a trio of bowls

 

 

which I carefully trimmed when they were exactly “leather-hard”…

But sadly, I lost this one.

It was separated from the others while drying, and I forgot to go searching for it. My best bowl 🙁

 

 

Oh well, here’s another.

Which I trimmed a bit, just to clean it up. But it wasn’t made to be a bowl so nothing fancy.

 

The last three pieces glazed! Just one ugly smear from a poor glazing decision. (I knew I felt like I was missing something. I was.)

 

Ta da! The final set!

Bottoms of bowls are so much prettier than bottoms of cylinders… but I found them much much more difficult to make!

The tallest piece turned out *almost* as big as a coffee mug.

 

That was a lot of work! I had no idea pottery was such a lengthy, complicated, time-sensitive process. I’m happy with the products, but more than that, I’m very glad to have tried my hand at learning something entirely new. It was an experience full of excitement, concentration, frustration, celebration, disappointment, pleasant surprises… much more than I could have expected. Thanks to the staff at Claytek and my fellow classmates for an interesting learning journey. Onward to the next sabbatical-fueled adventure!

I missed a pottery class! Catching up weeks 5 & 6

A few weeks ago I headed to Southern Ontario to meet with colleagues at five different universities. While discussing the 2nd edition of my textbook, I learned about the statistics and research methods courses for psychology majors at the University of Guelph and Wilfred Laurier. I learned how psychology fits into degrees at Renison University College (within Waterloo) and Huron University College (within Western), and how the curriculum has changed since I was an undergraduate student at Waterloo. Spending a day at McMaster was incredible! I learned about their introductory psychology machine (check them out on Twitter ) and amazing Honours program. I also learned how different institutions incorporate (or don’t) teaching focused faculty members, which will be useful for the SoEL research project I’m working on as part of this certificate program. Many thanks to all my hosts!

What I did *not* do during that week was go to my pottery class. Turns out we were learning how to make bowls. That may sound easy after all the cylinders I’ve been making, but don’t fool yourself. Nothing is easy in pottery (at least not right away). I went in for an extra visit to try to make a bowl and the result seemed reasonably bowl-shaped.

After missing the live demo, I attempted to create a bowl.

“Playing Catch-up.” After missing the live demo, I attempted to create a bowl.

I smudged the rim a bit after these photos were taken. Bummer. I also notice some of my errors: for some reason I wasn’t pulling up enough clay from the outside, and somehow managed to create an edge instead of a solid rim because I was hanging on to the clay too long rather than stopping and compressing. But at least I had something bowl-shaped. Unfortunately, timing was not my friend in this case.

The reason why bowls have a curved outside is because you scrape off that part of the clay when your bowl reaches a particular type of firmness (called “leather hard” because it feels like leather or cheddar cheese). I saw the demonstration for how to finish the bottom of the bowl before I had a bowl of my own to practice with. By the time I had returned to this bowl, it was past the point of leather hard, now too firmly set to make any cuts. Sigh. I decided to fire it anyway. It will be an ugly half-bowl half-cylinder creature. I can use it to practice glazing techniques.

I must admit I’m losing some steam for pottery. Part of this is because I’ve been travelling and have now missed a couple of classes. Turns out it’s really difficult to learn how to do pottery without enough practice and without all the instruction possible. I’m having a harder and harder time remembering the steps and figuring out what I miss, I’m making ugly products, and the class is almost over anyway which further reduces my motivation to get closer to doing well at this art.

Do some of my students go through a spiral like this? I can imagine a parallel with a semester here: Starting out keen and ready to learn something entirely knew, hitting a few roadbumps, other required commitments dragging attention away, not building in enough time to work with the material, and before you know it the course is almost over and you’re so far behind it’s not all that fun anymore. Plus, for me anyway, I figure by now have the basics. I now know some of what I don’t know about this discipline, which makes me appreciate it more when I encounter it in everyday life. I also know I’m not going to go any farther in it anytime soon, if ever. Although I’m not going to become a potter, I value the lessons I’m learning about patience and being a novice, as well as the insight into motivation changes for a non-required class. And I’m going to have actual real tangible products to show what I learned. Note to self: Think more on that.

Adventures in Being a Complete Novice

Yesterday I failed miserably. I was frustrated, a tiny bit embarrassed, and delighted. I was delighted because one of my personal goals for my sabbatical is to learn something completely new from scratch. I want to feel like a complete novice, so I can improve my empathy for what my students may be going through when they join my class. The phenomenon called the hindsight bias or curse of knowledge basically means that once we know something it’s really difficult to imagine what it’s like to not know that thing. Imagine not knowing what the traffic lights or temperature mean. Imagine not knowing how to decode what these letters that form this sentence mean. Weird, eh? The challenge is, it’s my job as a teacher to imagine what it’s like to not know about psychology (or some aspect of it), and then try to teach that topic to people who actually do not know (as much) about it. What makes this action trickier is that the longer I do my job, the more I know about psychology, which makes it harder and harder to imagine what it’s like to be in my students’ chairs. I try to get around this challenge in a few ways, including talking with my students about their thoughts. But let’s be honest: it’s been a while since I’ve had a pure experience of complete and utter lack of understanding.

Enter: Pottery class.

Yesterday morning I wandered down to a studio I’ve passed a million times but never entered. I was excited to embark on a new learning adventure! I was going to create something! It might not be beautiful, but I could create! I was the second person to arrive, out of a class of 10. I met my teacher, she used our names to introduce us to each other. I felt welcome. Someone said she had done this before and I didn’t think much of it until later. (For the record, my only foray into art was a single class in high school that was half history, and included zero pottery.) The teacher showed us around the facility. I was trying to absorb all the information. The keywords I remember, in no particular order, include: kiln, bisque firing (as opposed to another kind of firing I forget), plug, glaze, members only shelf, don’t touch, student shelf, slip, washroom, clay, silicate, wheel, clean, wedge, centering. Soon, my brain was full of terms, but I was still excited. Read: without some sort of handout or way to take notes, jargon became a jumbled mass quickly… but maybe that’s ok as I don’t really need to know all this right.

It felt like an eternity until we finally got our clay! Read: all I wanted to do was *DO* the discipline of pottery, which made it difficult for me to concentrate fully on the orientation. The teacher demonstrated wedging, which is kind of like kneading dough and is essential for a strong final product. I measured exactly 2 pounds of clay from my large block (instant success!). My wedged clay looked reasonably good for a first try. Great! With confidence I prepared my wheel station. I watched the teacher’s demonstrations carefully, and tried to emulate her precise hand and body actions. Things were going reasonably well until suddenly half my clay came off in my hand! I made do for a while, and then I tried to make a cylinder, carefully watching the steps and trying to follow with a half portion of clay. After trying to be so careful with it, my cylinder fully collapsed in on itself. It was such a disappointment. I suddenly felt frustrated, especially when I looked over at the person who had done it before. Hers looked just like the teacher’s. Read: social comparison framed my feeling of disappointment and pushed it into failure, but also motivation to make another one.

I stayed an extra half an hour because of a fierce desire to make SOMETHING, ANYTHING that didn’t resemble a pile of grey mush. I tried three times and couldn’t even get the clay to stick to the wheel. It kept slipping off! That most fundamental starting point eluded me, despite the careful attention I had paid to the demonstration, despite the fact that I’d successfully done it just an hour before when my teacher was there. Frustrating! I gave up — but only because I realized I had actual work I had to do and couldn’t just spend the rest of the day on pottery. Reluctantly, I left. All the way home I was frustrated and annoyed because I couldn’t get it. Slowly, I began to laugh at myself. I had taken one single class in a completely unfamiliar discipline and somehow I wasn’t a magical unicorn prodigy in pottery so I was frustrated by it. Ha! Later, I actually uttered the words, laughing, “Turns out I’m not a great potter!” and they made me pause. Really? Is it true that I don’t think I’m a great potter because I got one lesson and couldn’t make something? Of course not. Read: This reaction is consistent with something I’ve suspected for a long time. I tend to have a fixed mindset, and correct to growth when I notice it. I’m reminded of when my statistics students say “I’m no good at math” and I try to convince them otherwise. It takes time and practice and willingness to fail but not feel like a failure.

Scorecard: Pottery definitely won the day. I won insight about failing and a pile of clay covered in mud (called slip) that looked kind of like this (actually this is nicer than mine was):

When I searched for “Pottery cylinder collapse” this image from “Fine Mess Pottery” came up, in a post aptly titled “To that beginning student.”  Apparently I’m not alone.