Alternatives to grades: XP, currency, and honorable mentions

I have already covered how grades are a terrible system of assessment, and how a mastery-based system using skills trees for illustrating and enabling progress is superior. There is more to be written on mastery based learning, certainly, and I am likely to come back to that at some point. But first I want to cover some other assessment techniques where technology can help you - the teacher - and your students. I will only briefly cover them, and I might come back to tackle them more thoroughly later.

Experience points and class currency

Image credit: Technoccult.net

XP - experience points - is something most kids and many adults understand very well these days. They are a staple of video games, beautifully and simplistically illustrating progress and giving immediate positive feedback when deserved. In its most simple version, it is simply an open-ended points scale, ever-increasing as the player (student) performs actions and demonstrate skills that fit the goals of the game (lesson/class/subject). In this form, it provides nothing more than a simple Skinner Box mechanism, providing a rapid-fire external motivating force for learning (ideally).

This, of course, is neither an effective nor an efficient use of XP in a learning context. If you look at the games available out there today, only the most simplistic of them use this form of points system. The reason is simple; there is no way for the system to reflect any complexity beyond "good, keep going". This is why it works for games like Flappy Bird, which consists entirely of tapping the screen to flap a bird's wings to pass obstacles, but it would likely not work for even minimally more complex games. So what would be a better approach?

When the game becomes more complex, the scoring system should reflect that complexity. Tiered rewards, collective rewards, level systems (0-999XP = level 1, 1000-1999XP = level 2 and so on) and hidden bonuses are some mechanics you can use to improve a basic XP system. I'm a particularly big fan of collective rewards, because they enable you to use individual and class academic achievements as a tool for managing collective student behaviour. Another mechanic I'm a big fan of is the concept of spendable XP, or "class currency". This could be used to reward pro-social behaviour, cooperation, achievements (both individual and collective) and so on. Three possible outlines: Individual savings only, individual and collective savings, individual savings with collective buy-in rewards. It is important to remember that this is a type of mechanism, not a static system. It is very customisable.

Keeping track of all of these points could be a challenge, but it would be a very simple matter to set up a computer system to do it. You could do it in Excel, for example, and it wouldn't be particularly hard. Check back here again for an example worksheet I have planned to make for a while...

Prof. Lee Sheldon's simple XP scale with levels matching grades.

One final point about XP is that it is potentially very easy to implement. To some extent, most teachers already use a points system in their assessments. At the end of an assessment, this point score is translated into a grade. As I have already covered, this is a dumb idea. In the simplest XP implementation, all you would have to do is NOT convert to a grade and just add this point score to the student's XP - which would just be the sum of all points from all assessments.

This type of assessment has been implemented successfully by teachers in both simple and complex implementations. Many teachers also decide to separate their XP scales from their grading, which does present some significant benefits (as mentioned in the link to the complex implementation above). Keep in mind that many - maybe even most - teachers are forced still to use grades for their final assessments, regardless of their flaws, and any alternative system that isn't adopted on a regional or national level would then have to accommodate for that. It is unfortunate, but it is the reality.

E-portfolios, checklists, iterative grading

These three approaches are often championed by edtech evangelists like myself, and while I do see the benefit for some subjects I don't think they are as widely applicable as many thinks. Moreover, I don't thinkthey are good enough to compete with gamification approaches. There is probably a good case to be made for implementing one of them in combination with some level of gamification, however.

E-portfolios

An e-portfolio, or an electronic portfolio, is an electronically kept portfolio of a student's work. This could be written work, tests, presentations, multimedia content (video, audio, pictures, multimodal texts), hyperlinks, and whatever other work may be relevant to the class/subject. Most LMS software supports student e-portfolios, some are even geared specifically at this form of assessment (see Digication). Assessment of e-portfolios vary, but usually the student will produce more work than is required for assessment and then is allowed to choose what work is used for the assessment.

Immediately, my problem with the concept is apparent: This is not a replacement for grading, it is merely a way of - arguably - improving it by making it more transparent and goal-oriented. But it still carries the inherent problems of whatever final assessment method is used, and that method is usually grading.

Checklists

Checklist assessment can be used for self- and peer assessment, and for clearly showing to your students what exactly they are expected to learn about any given subject/in any given class. I'm generally very much in favour of using checklists in your assessments, regardless of what exact method of final assessment you use. They make it easier to track your students' progress, they help your students get a sense of direction and purpose in their studying, and they help enable peer assessment - which I will almost always be in favour of. However, there is still the problem of checklists not really being a solution for final assessment - unless your school belongs to a system that actually assesses according to learning goals rather than curriculum, in which case the "top layer" of checklist could simply be the learning goals of the given subject.

Still there would be the problem of checklists being black and white, and reality being... well, not. A filled checklist can be thought of as a car; if all the boxes are ticked, you know you have a car, but you have no idea if it's a well used Skoda or a brand new Ferrari. Checklists fill in some of the information gaps that regular grades are missing, but at the same time they lack the quality information that grades actually do - to some extent - contain. This could be fixed by gamification measures, for example a set of Quality Badges (possibly tiered) for each checklist.

Iterative grading

Iterative grading is better than regular grading, in that the process in itself actually teaches some valuable lessons. A student hands in a piece of work, that piece of work is graded and other feedback is given. The student then takes this feedback and is allowed to revise the work before handing it back in. This could repeat a few times, until either the teacher accepts it, says it's enough, or the student decides to not revise it again. Using collaborative writing platforms like Google Docs makes this sort of revision system a simple thing to do, but it applies to any type of revisible work. In the end, however, this method still suffers from most of the issues with regular grades.

There is one part of this method that I think is well worth keeping in mind: Comprehensive feedback. It is a core part of iterative grading that the work is commented on thoroughly so that the student knows what to improve and how, and I honestly believe that these comments are far more valuable and informative than the grades are.

My next post will be a quick summary in the form of an outline of a hypothetical classroom employing some of the mechanisms I have covered. Expect the posts sooner rather than later, since I missed my scheduled post last week!