Note: This post is the third in a three-part series on neurodivergence and alternative grading by Sarah Silverman and Emily Pitts Donahoe. Each post is co-authored and cross-posted to both Sarah’s newsletter Beyond the Scope and Emily’s newsletter Unmaking the Grade. Please consider subscribing to both of our newsletters.
In the first post for this series, we talked about why we’re curious about alternative grading and neurodivergence:
In the second, we reviewed some existing discourse on the topic:
Today, to end our exploration, we’re sharing the “so what” of the series. At the end of the last post, we introduced three points that we will expand on here. They are:
Alternative grading methods are not best understood as “good” or “bad” for neurodivergent students; rather, they can be implemented in more or less neurodiversity-informed ways.
Alternative grading needs structure, multiple sources of motivation, and executive function support in order to be maximally accessible to some neurodivergent students.
Methods like labor-based contract grading (LBCG) and others that ask students to track their effort may be fairly treated with suspicion by neurodivergent students. Instructors may want to reconsider whether effort tracking is a necessary component of their alternative grading approach, and if it is, provide students a significant amount of autonomy around what they track and report.
Moving beyond “good” and “bad”
We (Sarah and Emily) believe that traditional grading introduces barriers for many students and even serves as a form of “steep steps” (to use Jay Dolmage’s term) for some disabled and neurodivergent students. Why might this be? Many traditional grading methods define success based on a narrow set of criteria, offering little tolerance for error, and labeling students as failures if their skills and abilities do not align with these criteria. Traditional grades are also associated with normality (sometimes literally in the case of curved classes, where students’ grades are determined by how much they deviate from the average grade).
Alternative grading methods, on the other hand, tend to make fewer assumptions about the ideal way for students to express and demonstrate their knowledge and place more focus on student autonomy and an interactive feedback process. Most forms of alternative grading provide multiple opportunities for students to show that they have achieved the learning goals, and they account for the fact that not all students will achieve those goals on the same timeline. Additionally, methods like “ungrading” or collaborative grading tend to value and embrace students’ individual strengths and unique abilities, rather than measuring how they do or do not match a predetermined ideal.1 For instance, giving students the opportunity to set their own goals and then assigning grades based on their achievement of those goals may benefit students whose personal aims or ways of working differ from the norm.
But alternative grading may also—depending on student needs, the type of alternative grading scheme, and the way it’s implemented—introduce other barriers or create points of access friction. Making a course more accessible to one student or group may sometimes make it less accessible for others. A loose deadline structure or attendance policy may be an important lifeline for some neurodivergent students while causing others to fall behind. Providing high levels of student choice or autonomy may motivate some neurodivergent students while overwhelming others.
It’s not just neurodivergent students, however, who may struggle with certain elements of alternative grading. Many of the difficulties reported by these students are similar to those reported across demographics. For example, students are often troubled by the inability to calculate numerical progress towards a specific grade in collaborative grading and labor-based grading schemes. Similarly, neurodivergent and neurotypical students alike report that adapting to new grading systems is often disorienting, especially at first.2
Alternative grading advocates (including us) do not deny these difficulties, but rather suggest that the benefits of alternative grading outweigh them—and that not all forms of difficulty are necessarily obstacles. Going into this project, we both worked under the assumption that some of the difficulties of adapting to alternative grading methods are actually similar to “desirable difficulties,” a concept first introduced by psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork and elaborated in the book Make it Stick. Desirable difficulties are the initial struggles that support learning in the long-term. We would suggest that while adapting to alternative grading does present a difficulty for many students, that difficulty leads them to a positive outcome: focusing more of their efforts on demonstrating learning and reflection, rather than attaining certain grades.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that all students will experience the difficulties of alternative grading in the ways that we would hope. We believe an important direction for future research is to further explore whether these difficulties are more intense for neurodivergent students and/or whether they rise to the level of a barrier, as it is certainly possible for one person’s desirable difficulty to be another’s barrier.
All of this is to say that alternative grading is not “good” or “bad” for neurodivergent students. It may, however, be implemented in more or less neurodiversity-informed ways. Which brings us to our next point…
Making alternative grading accessible
Implementing alternative grading in neurodiversity-informed ways means carefully considering not only the barriers our grading systems might create for neurodivergent students but also the assumptions those systems make about students. Often, inaccurate or unfair assumptions can have a disproportionately negative impact on neurodivergent students.
One potential assumption is that all students learn best when they rely extensively on intrinsic motivation and self-direction, or that students will automatically benefit from looser structures. Often, we associate rigid deadlines and extrinsic motivators with manifestations of “toxic rigor,” which alternative graders naturally want to avoid. Karen Costa reminds us, however, that some neurodivergent students will have a more complicated relationship with the idea of intrinsic motivation and self-direction, relying extensively on external structures like schedules, reminders, and routines—and yes, deadlines.
Similarly, we often assume that more autonomy—particularly in how to complete assignments or when to turn them in—is better for students. But some neurodivergent students in the work we read expressed a desire for more direction and “rigidity in individual assignments” and noted that they struggled without it.
Methods like collaborative grading, sometimes called “ungrading,” may be particularly prone to the assumptions listed above—but they can show up in any grading scheme, including traditional ones. We can work to make our grading systems more accessible to neurodivergent learners by making sure that flexibility and autonomy are paired with reliable structures students can fall back on; that we’re attentive to the many kinds of motivation in our classrooms; and that we’re providing, or helping students access, the kinds of executive function support they need to thrive.
Considering what we track
Our research for this series helped clarify some of our existing thoughts about effort- or process tracking as a part of alternative grading. We find some of the critiques of this tracking offered from a neurodiversity perspective to be compelling, and are interested in exploring how instructors can implement process tracking activities in a way that embraces neurodiversity.
Sarah had written before about the vulnerability in revealing thought or writing process to others as a neurodivergent student—it feels risky in an academic setting to disclose that you think differently from many other people. As we saw in Kryger and Zimmerman’s piece, neurodivergent students may follow a considerably different process to complete their assignments than other students, they may use time differently, and may take much more time than the instructor expects. What would it look like to embrace these variations and learn from them?
Given the vulnerabilities involved for many students, instructors should carefully consider their reasons for incorporating effort- and process tracking and determine whether it’s a necessary component of the course. But we also think this kind of tracking work—and, more specifically, the reflection it spurs for students and teachers—can be helpful for everyone involved, neurodivergent students included.
If effort- or process tracking is important for your course, we suggest remaining open to many different ways of working and speaking honestly with students about the varied processes people in your discipline might use to consume and produce knowledge. If it feels safe to do so, sharing your own process (as one example among many) may make it easier for the vulnerable students in your class to share theirs.
Instructors might also provide students with multiple options for what they track and report in the class, so that they can share what they feel most comfortable with. For example, options could include outlines, drafts, voice notes, web search or reading activity, or detailed plans for how they will complete the project. A neurodivergent student once told Sarah that creating “the plan” (especially with the specific times they would be working on the assignment) was the most effortful and most important part of their process, and that they wished that could have been shared with their instructor.
In general, we think embracing neurodiversity in our tracking systems means supporting students in exploring and defining their own process (especially for writing) rather than verifying that they are moving through the assumed “right” one. As an added benefit, learning more about how our neurodivergent students work can provide a helpful source of reflection as we design our courses and grading systems. But we should make every effort to ensure that we’ve provided a safe environment for students to reveal that information to us.
What’s next
There is certainly a lot of room for further research on how neurodivergent students experience alternative grading systems, and how these experiences overlap with and differ from neurotypical students. Here are a few directions we think would be particularly valuable based on this collaborative project.
Many existing critiques of alternative grading written from a neurodiversity perspective come from a very important source: neurodivergent instructors. While some sources also incorporate the voices of individual students, we’d like to see more, and larger-scale, studies of how neurodivergent students are currently experiencing different forms of alternative grading. We think that at least some of this research should be conducted in a focus group or semi-structured interview setting so that student perspectives on some of the complexities of alternative grading can be explored. For example, how do neurodivergent students who both need the structure of clear due dates but also benefit from deadline flexibility think this issue should be handled?
Given the vast differences between alternative grading schemes, we would also like researchers to be as specific as possible about the particular kind of grading method they are studying. Additionally, we saw some research and commentary on how neurodivergent students experience collaborative grading and LBCG, but we would like to see more studies on how neurodivergent students experience methods like specifications and standards-based grading.
Finally, we are particularly interested in learning more about how neurodivergent students experience different forms of motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) in the classroom and different kinds of effort- or process tracking. So far, we’ve made some educated guesses about these topics, but we think more concrete information would better inform our course design and grading decisions.
Thanks for joining us on this exploration of neurodivergence and alternative grading. We’re interested to hear your thoughts! If you have further ideas, experiences, or research to share, please reach out to us. We’re looking forward to investigating this subject further and seeing how the conversation develops.
Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash
Alternative grading approaches could also be said to align well with the neurodiversity paradigm, a perspective introduced by Nick Walker which holds that variation in cognitive style among humans is valuable and that there is no “one right” way to think, behave, or communicate.
While most published work on “ungrading” recounts successful experiments, many authors also note student reservations about the practice. For a representative sample, see Casler-Failing, S. L. (2023). Grades or no grades? Promoting deeper learning in a middle level mathematics methods course. Journal of Practitioner Research, 8(2), Article 4; DiSalvo, L., & Ross, N. (2022). Ungrading in art history: Grade inflation, student engagement, and social equity. Art History Pedagogy & Practice, 7(1); Kehlenbach, E. S. (2023). A study of ungrading in upper-level political theory courses. Journal of Political Science Education, 19(3), 397–407; and Wolf, A. M. (2022). Adventures in ungrading. In L. Britt (Ed.), Teaching matters, volume 3: Essays by faculty and staff of the University of Maine at Farmington (pp. 15–22). University of Maine at Farmington.
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