Hi, I'm Alison Melley. And I did not record my talk. It's like one like I had planned to. So I figured I would just do it here. And so I'm just going to follow along on a slide like I did at the talk. My title on the first page on the first slide is flexible policies and alternative grading. What should I do? I clarified at the conference that I really am just talking about flexible deadlines, because it was pretty much all I could fit into 15 minutes. We did have a discussion later and there should be notes in the wiki from those discussions about some of the other things alternative grading and flexible policies on the fronts on the first slide I also have a QR code that takes you to a tinyurl.com/flex a MEL that's flex a m e LL. And that will take you to a bookmark manager that has just some resources on this topic, as well as the slides and recording. So the second slide is just an agenda focused, focusing on flexible deadlines. So first, I'm going to talk about why consider flexibility and then talk a bit about my classes and then share what students do and say. So first, I talked about slide three, I why consider flexibility and I wanted to share a story before I got started. And that was leading up to the conference. I had a lot of things happen. One involved a deadline that I had actually planned pretty well for, but then almost missed because of something I didn't know and there was no way I could have known the thing that I didn't know. And then I had some major computer problems two days before the conference, that again, we're about something that I didn't know related to using a university owned laptop away from home. It wasted hours and hours of my time. And that's all I was going to mention in the talk until I was driving here driving to the talk and to the conference. And I got a call from my husband telling me that I had left my entire garment bag at home. So I had no clothes. So the day of the conference, I was wearing someone else's clothing Ellen carpenter. I also went to Target and filled in the gaps that I needed to get through the next couple of days. So the fourth slide is the same as the third with that says that sinking feeling, but it also has a picture of my daughter and I have the Taylor Swift concert and my T shirt that says this is me trying because I have tremendous empathy for my students. When we try our hardest and life still gets in the way which is part of why we want to consider flexibility. The fifth slide mentioned some other reasons why. One is reducing stress. The another is improving learning. It can increase pass rates for us, a care for our students. And it can fly can equalize a bit some of those unequal barriers that we all know our students are facing and which fits in into a universal design for learning structure. So for approach to classes, it can also disrupt that power structure in the classroom. So I'm going to talk mostly about the last three. On slide six. I've got I'm sorry, I'm now on slide. I'm now on slide oh slide six I have why consider flexibility and talking about unequal barriers. So I have two pictures on the slide one has a fence sort of an open fence on a road and the other one has a brick wall that somebody is trying to climb over so those that was representing unequal barriers for students. So some are just enough structure to help support them through the class and others are absolute barriers that they can't get over. And sometimes the same thing. The same policy is an all structured scaffolding type of barrier for one student but as a brick wall for another student. A large percentage of students with disabilities do not have formal accommodations. And this is why I use universal design for learning as an approach to increase the accessibility of my courses. We have. Some estimates are up to 40% of students who use formal accommodations or who could benefit from accommodations but only about 13% nationwide. Actually have formal accommodations. At my university, it's 11%. And I usually only get about six to 7% in my classes who actually use them. So I think it's very important to consider one of the most common accommodations is flexible deadlines. And so if we can provide that to all of our students, then we are going to be capturing a lot more of those students who would benefit from that formal accommodation. So slide seven talks about power structure and it has an infographic on it from the STP resource on decolonizing intro psychology, which is a great resource and is listed in the tiny URL bookmark that I've provided. So we have power in our classroom, we have more power than we realize sometimes and disrupting that can give over some autonomy to students autonomy. We know that students do better when they have some autonomy in the classroom and they feel like they can make some decisions for themselves and control some of the things in the classroom. And so giving them some flexibility can allow for more autonomy. Now, I say this realizing that not all faculty have a lot of autonomy at their at their schools or or teachers. And, and that that is a consideration. I do think that we need to we need to think about teachers, instructors and faculty who need some flexibility in their jobs, both for making their own course policies and also for for the same reasons our students do. Many of us also have disabilities that could qualify for formal accommodations that in the workplace that really aren't there for us. Okay, moving on to Slide eight in my classes. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I've tried in 2020. I had a class of no firm deadlines at all. They could pretty much turn everything in at the end. Then I moved to firm deadlines. And they were firm deadlines, but they were low stakes assignments. And then I moved to firm deadlines with revision which is which meant that if you got it in by the deadline you could revise but otherwise you could just turn it in whenever and then I moved to this one week extension that anybody could get as long as they requested, which was fall 2023 And then spring 2023. I took away that need to request it. So the slides eight to 10 sort of mention our list those four iterations. My class is feedback intensive. I allow revisions and a grade we try to make the grade increase indicate progress or learning or both. And what happened with most of these policies is that we had
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I'm sorry, we had we had very overwhelmed TAs and overwhelmed me as well. So let's move to spring 2023. things got a bit better. I had a Best Buy date and a an expiration date and my classes for the due dates. (LONG PAUSE - so sorry!!!)
So the way that we did it was it was automatic one week deadline for every student and for everything, and they did not have to request it. They just got it. So some treated it as a as the Best Buy day was the deadline and that's kind of the messaging that I gave. And then the expiration date was a late period, right. Some some did just use the expiration date as the as the deadline. But we did try to frame it as a late period. So what did they do with that flexibility? I'm now on slide 13. So about 65% used that extension at least one time. Slide 14, what do they what have my students say? I'm sorry, I think I mixed up my slides. A little bit. But anyway, slide 14 is I want to share a little bit about my students. They 36% First Gen 46. Historically minoritized. And about a third are have English as their additional is an additional language for them for some for many. They added English as an adult or later in their life. As I said before, many have disabilities that are not captured in formal accommodations and we're looking at of course survey and student evaluations of teaching. So in the slide 15, we've got what do students say about flexible deadlines? We've got I asked them to in a course survey, so about three quarters of the way through the class, I asked them to rate their agreement on several statements. So for the late policy, they they rated the late policy is either is confusing makes it hard for me to turn things in on time. helps me to feel less stress is helpful when I forget. So those are the four choices. And then slide 16 Has the results. So 15% said it was confusing. 18% said it makes it harder for me to turn things in on time. Which, you know, there seems kind of low but, you know, I still take that pretty seriously. I don't want to lose 15 to 18% of my students, right. So I do need to think about the exact students who struggle with executive functioning and persistence. So the confusing part, I believe, is likely due to persistence, and or lack of persistence in figuring or listening or that sort of thing, right. And then executive functioning in making it harder to turn things in because they had that extra week and so like they just would keep putting it off right. And then 84% said it helps them to feel less stress. And 86% said it was helpful when they forgot so I thought that was pretty good. I did have some federal students sort of anecdotally mentioning that it was so great that it was 12:05am and they had just missed the best pie and they realized it was okay because they could still turn it in without any penalty. So then we'll move to student evaluations of teaching, so I did a thematic analysis of the comments. And there were four open ended questions one about barriers. What about the most helpful in your class, most helpful thing about the class the least helpful thing about the class and suggestions for changes? So I had some themes that came out of that when I did the analysis were themes about course design, the comments specific to the professor comments specific to tech or the LMS and comments. Specific about a student themselves, right. So slide 19 83% of the course design comments were about flexible deadlines. And Ford so that means 42% of all comments. Were about flexible deadlines and that was under the the most helpful what was most helpful to their learning? And then what do students say was least helpful? To their learning is on slide 20 12% of students cited the course design and this specifically was things like confusion overcomplicated grading, too many different assignments. And flexible deadlines being not good for my work ethic. So none of them really were overwhelmingly about the deadlines. They were just I mean, it wasn't an overwhelming percentage of that 12% About the deadlines. So slide 21 talks about DNF rates, so I usually have a pretty high rate of mostly F so with the unlimited extensions that we had in 2020 I had 23% D's and F's 2020 2021 And then in when they could when they had to request an extension which was last fall 2022 It was it went down to 17%. And that was when they requested with a form and an auto extension it was 16%. So I saw that as a decrease from the unlimited extensions to some sort of extension that had some structure to it. Hence the flexible structure recommendation and the auto extensions had the ideal workload for faculty and TAs. So my last are close to the last slide 22 says to flexible structure doesn't hurt and it can make you stronger. The slide after that mentions as long as you include clear direction and transparency. So I had to rush in the wrap up at at site one. But overall I just wanted to comment on that. We we need to provide some flexibility, but it's also very important to consider some scaffolding and some structure in that flexibility. Introductory Psychology students are very often first year students and they they haven't quite often haven't quite figured out college yet. And they need some of that structure. Right and especially students who might have executive functioning or other other things going on that make it more difficult for them to manage their time, things like that, right. So so in general, get to know your students figure out what works well for them. It's going to be different depending on your population. And make sure that you're very clear. Whenever we do something different. That's different than the usual you know, not traditional way of doing school. It is really important to be very, very clear with our students, even if we are doing it because we think it's what's best for them. It may not be what's best for them. If we don't provide enough structure and clarity in in how we communicate it to them. So if you got this far, thank you so much for listening, and let me know if you have any questions. I'd love to hear from you. from you
