Literature Review

Ungrading & Grading:
In addition to the questionnaire, I've done some research and started collecting existing literature around grading and Ungrading to better inform myself around the topic and populate my ungrading resources.

There are many unique factors that go into creating a classroom, and a one size fits all solution or learning approach won’t benefit everyone. Will Ungrading work every time? No, but that isn’t the point of Ungrading. It is meant to be another tool in your toolkit that will allow you and other educators to continue being flexible and adaptable to our ever-changing classrooms and wide variety of student needs. All with the goal of creating a positive learning experience for our students, and to improve our educational practices as educators. Ungrading can be a positive change to the education system but should be implemented carefully to avoid undermining to main goal of education: learning. Ungrading should be a tool that helps, not hinders, a student’s progress in learning.

Generally, the implementation of ungrading has seen the most success when it is utilized throughout a portion of the entire learning process, where ungrading is typically seen in the beginning, or as an option, or for specific courses, to help put students at ease, and then towards the later years students would be evaluated by grades. Otherwise, Ungrading works best for individual students who have a high sense of self-agency/motivation and aren’t motivated by grades to learn.

Lately, the Ungrading approach has garnered additional interest from educators to rethink the way they conduct their classrooms and create assessments with the increased popularity and presence of generative AI. There would need to be more research done around how combining Ungrading and generative AI could affect student motivation, learning engagement, and academic integrity. How effective is Ungrading or traditional grading in the face of generative AI? My online resource of practical examples of application would help educators navigate this new world of generative AI, and to transform their classrooms to be flexible and adaptable to the diverse range of students and their needs, all for the benefit of creating a better classroom environment for everyone.
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Traditional Grading:
Grades often fail to consistently reflect a student’s actual understanding and learning of the course and material. Variations in how educators evaluate can further increase this inconsistency. For example, some educators may:
•     Grade homework based on completion rather than quality.
•      Drop the lowest test or quiz scores, while others do not.
•     Weigh attendance differently, raising questions about how holidays, illnesses, or family responsibilities should be considered in attendance.
•     Offer extra credit opportunities, which may only benefit students who have the additional time to work on extra credit.
•     Evaluate participation, which can favor extroverted students over introverts.
•     Use different assessment weights or grading curves, leading to more disparities in student grade outcomes.

These inconsistencies in traditional grading practices can result in an unreliable and inconsistent representation of a student’s knowledge and learning. Despite this, grading remains a central component in education.  

“As long as grades continue to open or close doors to higher social status and careers, they will remain a core metric that influences how young adults see themselves and others”.

If grading has such a negative effect on students and fails to provide a consistent reflection of student progress, is it time to shift the focus from grades back to the core purpose of education: learning? Ungrading is an educational approach that challenges traditional grading practices and focuses more on student learning, growth, and agency through modified forms of assessment (Kohn & Saffel, 2020). Ungrading has the potential to alleviate these challenges for both students and educators, creating lifelong learners instead of test-takers.  
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Why Ungrading:
‍Without grades, students are more likely to focus on the learning process rather than the product. This shift encourages critical thinking and helps students create a deeper understanding of the subject matter and motivates students to explore and learn more independently (McMorran et al., 2017). There are examples of educators and educational institutions around the world implementing Ungrading to their practice, such as those in Singapore, Sweden, the U.K, and the U.S. Some offer variations of a pass/fail option, either implemented into earlier courses or all courses that will not affect GPA unless a grade value is chosen instead, and students have the option to retake courses without penalty. Other options include narrative evaluations or contract-based evaluations. With Ungrading, students have noticed how it can reduce stress and anxiety around their grades, increase intrinsic motivation which can create a more positive and authentic classroom environment, allow room for risk-taking/mistake-making in learning, and better equity for diverse learners. In surveying 1207 students in post-secondary schools, the researchers found that 66% had reported their interest and support of an Ungrading approach. They cited how it would reduce their levels of stress and anxiety, help adjust to school life, and, most importantly, develop their own sense of agency in learning beyond grades and having a better sense of control over their academic success. After being conditioned to a “stressful, grade-focused education system,” students welcome an alternative like the Ungrading approach (McMorran et al., 2017).

Students have become accustomed to the grade-centric environment that promoted competition and comparison, when educators like myself have long wanted to encourage collaboration and growth in our students instead. As a lifelong student, I have always disliked the notion of grades, especially at the CEGEP level with the “r-score” system, which is used to evaluate your admission into higher education. It creates an environment of competition and comparison, where collaboration would not be beneficial to your individual grade when this
“R-score” is calculated based on the difference between your grade and the class average. As a design teacher in the CEGEP system in Montreal, Quebec, I have always wanted to steer my students away from holding their worth in their letter grades and create a classroom environment for collaboration, hence why the Ungrading approach interests me. Significantly, the Ungrading approach relies heavily on student agency and self-motivation, but students might not have the skills or mindset initially to properly follow an Ungraded approach. Educators must take the time to provide extra guidance and scaffolding to support and help their students develop the skills needed to succeed in this approach (Koehler & Meech, 2021). Before I were to adopt Ungrading in my classrooms, I would need to introduce my students to the approach and gather initial impressions. Then, I could use some specific strategies to slowly implement it as effectively as possible.

Sorensen-Unruh (2024), discusses how Ungrading offers a range of flexible approaches that can be adapted to different classroom environments. Whether it is for primary, secondary, or post-secondary settings, the following list of approaches allows for educators to pick and choose how they want to implement Ungrading into their practice:
• Mastery-Based Progression
• Feedback-Focused/Narrative Evaluation
• Contact Grading
• Competency Based Grading
• Specification Grading
• Standards Based Grading
• Interview Based Grading/Regular Check-Ins
• Peer Review
• Student Self-Assessment
• Portfolio-Based Evaluation
• Collaborative Goal setting/Competency Based Grading
• Conversations about student work with and between students
• Multiple attempts on assigned work
• Framing and scaffolding the Ungrading process
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These Ungrading approaches can fit a diverse range of disciplines, learning objectives, and students, all to promote a deeper learning environment and student engagement.
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Ungrading in Primary and Secondary Education
‍The research around the use of Ungrading in schools is generally scarce because of how prominent the use of standardized grading is across educational institutions, and how each classroom is unique and different. However, there has been some greater success of Ungrading implementation found in post-secondary education institutions. There are many unique factors like classrooms, educators, students, and resources that go into creating a cohesive classroom environment and a one size fits all solution or learning approach won’t benefit everyone. In a 2023 research study following students in Sweden, Kjærgaard et al. implemented an optional use of grades in their classrooms from primary to secondary school to see if there were any changes to their grades, and the results were mixed. The findings consisted of looking through their performance before and after the implementation of Ungrading, exam results, and interviews. For students who typically do not perform as well, an Ungrading approach had more of a negative effect on their grades, while students who typically performed well found that an Ungrading approach had positively affected their grades (Kjærgaard et al., 2023). Some subjects in the same primary and secondary mix had reported that an Ungrading approach had either slightly lower or an unsignificant amount of change in students’ performance, with some citing that Ungrading would work better for some subjects more than others.  With mixed results in primary and secondary education, continued research is needed across multiple schools, in different regions, following along a diverse set of students, and all pursuing different subjects, to properly understand the long-term effects of Ungrading in primary and secondary education.
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Ungrading in Post-Secondary Education
It has been reported that there is higher success with the use of Ungrading in postsecondary education institutions, mainly attributed to student motivation (Kjærgaard et al., 2023). Student motivation or agency is an important factor in the implementation of Ungrading, which is typically found to be lower in primary and secondary education because it is often mandatory to attend. While in post-secondary education institutions, their motivation or agency is higher because their decision to attend is tied to students’ interest, career aspirations, or passions. The handful of post-secondary education institutions that implemented an Ungrading approach have often integrated it into the first year of their education to ease students’ transition all in hopes it would reduce stress and anxiety while increasing students’ well-being and to encourage the “love for learning” (Kjærgaard et al., 2023). A post-secondary institution in Denmark decided to implement Ungrading into three cohorts of a business program and followed their progress from 2017 to 2022. The researchers examined the students’ grades from before and after the implementation of Ungrading and their exam results, in addition to administering self-assessments on well-being, learning strategies, and motivation, and interviews. The results had shown that there was no decrease in academic performance, an increase in students’ motivation, a reduction of surface level learning, and an overall positive change in students’ learning approaches (Kjærgaard et al., 2023). Researchers had also noticed the opposite to their initial speculation that Ungrading would reduce students stress and anxiety, potentially because students were not used to not getting grades, which resulted in students feeling unsure about their performance. This could have caused a bit of an identity crisis for students who place a great deal of importance in their grades (Kjærgaard et al., 2023), which needs to be addressed and changed immediately for Ungrading to work successfully.  The Ungrading approach had the most success in the post-secondary environment, where students had an increased sense of motivation and agency, and it did not negatively affect academic performance. However, it still needs to be carefully molded to fit each situation appropriately. Kjærgaard mention that there are limitations to the research where many of the results were based on students voluntarily answering their survey. 23% to 47% of each cohort in their study had decided to submit their results, and self-reported data has its own limitations of accuracy. The results were also taken partly over the Covid-19 pandemic, which could have made a difference in the results. Researchers also noted that if the Ungrading approach was only implemented in the first year for some students, it might undo and undermine any long-term benefits that it could have created, and students would revert to a grade-centric focus. McMorran mentions another older longer-term study conducted between 1960 to 1970 in the U.S. that followed post-secondary medical students across multiple institutions and their implementation of Ungrading, which then they called gradeless education. Their results were mixed, where some reported a decrease in academic performance, while others said it had made no difference. Many mentioned that it did reduce students’ stress and anxiety, but that they did not have enough data at the time to measure student agency and their motivation to learn, generally because the kind of students found in the medical field are already highly motivated. Other limitations affecting the success of Ungrading that would require more research are a students’ social and cultural backgrounds, a school’s demographic, or students with learning differences. It would require additional ethical and careful research to tackle these various factors and see exactly how it could affect the results.

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A Conclusion:
Ungrading isn't the perfect approach that I initially thought it would be, and there are many unique factors that go into creating a classroom. A one size fits all solution or learning approach won’t benefit everyone, it'll be a case by case basis, or class by class. Will Ungrading work every time? No, but that isn’t the point of Ungrading. It is meant to be another tool in your bag of tricks that will allow you and other educators to continue being flexible and adaptable to our ever-changing classrooms and wide variety of student needs. All with the goal of creating a positive learning experience for our students, and to improve our educational practices as educators. Ungrading can be a positive change to the education system but should be implemented carefully to avoid undermining to main goal of education: learning.

Ungrading should be a tool that helps student's progress, and not hinders their learning. There still needs to be further research and development into Ungrading to improve our grading approach, but implementation of bits and pieces from Ungrading is my recommendation towards a better learning environment (attached in the resources section of my website will include strategies and information on Ungrading strategies and implimentation of it).

Generally, the implementation of ungrading has seen the most success when it is utilized in combination with multiple grading strategies. All in all, we should remain flexible, adaptable, and continue to look for new solutions to benefit our students.

In my own teaching practice, I've decided to blend both traditional grading and Ungrading approaches to best utilize the positives of both. With the aims of remaining practical and flexible, understanding that there is no one method that'll always work. My continued focus is on student success and enrichment, and this blend feels like the right approach for me, and I hope this inspires others too.