Eric Mazur
Thank you for joining us today for this episode on empowering active learning in the Social Learning Amplified podcast series. I'm your host, Eric Mazur, and our guest on the episode today is Josh Eyler. Josh is the director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and director of the Think Forward Quality Enhancement Plan at the University of Mississippi, where he's also clinical assistant professor of teacher education. He previously worked on teaching and learning initiatives at Columbus State University, George Mason University and Rice University. A sought after speaker for his expertise about the science of learning and about compassion in education, especially in connection with students, grades and mental health. He has spoken at colleges and universities across the country, including Yale University, the University of Texas and Johns Hopkins University. Josh is the author of the new book, Failing Our Future, How Grades Harm Our Students and What We Can Do About It. This came out this year from Johns Hopkins University Press, and it will be, I guess, the focus of our discussion. And another book, How Humans Learn, The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, which was named one of the 100 Best Education Books of All Time in 2019 by Book Authority, which is a leading site for book recommendations. Called A Splendid Repositories of Ways to Rethink How We Teach College by the Los Angeles Review of Books, it was also named Book of the Year in the Chicago Tribune. Josh, thank you for being here today.

Josh Eyler
Thank you so much for the invitation, Eric.

Eric Mazur
Well, I'm really excited because the title of your most recent book on grades resonated so strongly with me. In my own trajectory as an educator, I moved from what to teach to how to teach it. And after I introduced the instruction as a way to help students learn in the classroom, I realized that it's actually the assessment that dictates everything. It's the tail that wags the dog.

Josh Eyler
Great.

Yes, that's absolutely

right. Yes.

Eric Mazur
Students' approach to learning and their study habits are completely dictated by the assessment, not by what you would hope, an intrinsic desire to learn. Now, I frequently speak on assessment, and the title of one of my talks is Assessment, the Silent Killer of Learning. But it's really grades or high stakes exams that are, I think, the killer and that take the

Josh Eyler
Right?

Love it.

Eric Mazur
the joy out of learning. What is it that motivated you to write your book?

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm

Right, and in some cases they're not, they're the not so silent killers. So it was a couple of things that converged at the same time that really led me to writing this particular book. One was that when I was writing the earlier book on the science of learning, I was working on a chapter on failure as a tool for enhancing learning. And I kept running into lots of research about grades and about how they set up obstacles to

Eric Mazur
You

Josh Eyler
not just learning, but the natural process by which people learn, which is trying something out, making a mistake, getting feedback and trying again, that grades sort of arrest that process. And so as I finished that project, I kind of put a pin in the idea of returning to grades as the subject of a whole book. The second thing was that a lot of people in my educator network were trying different experimentations with their grading practices. They were trying out alternative models like contract grading and standards-based grading and things like that. And I dove into those waters as well and tried some experiments in my class. And probably maybe the most important thing that was happening at the time is that my daughter was entering the school system and began to get grades for the first time. And I was witnessing her trying to navigate that world and her response to the grades that she was getting. It all came together and I thought that it might be beneficial if all of us who have a stake in education in this country were all on the same page and knew the contours of this conversation. So this is written for a broad audience of parents, educators, administrators, policymakers, even students, so that we can all kind of move this conversation forward together.

Eric Mazur
Now, you know

As I was listening to you, I think it's great because I think it is really something that has many stakeholders, parents, future employers, educators, students. I was thinking at the same time as we're having this conversation, we have to realize that typically people like to use simple numerical metrics. You see that in product reviews on sites like Amazon or Consumer Reports.

Josh Eyler
That's true.

Eric Mazur
or the infamous H index in academic publishing, school rankings, and so on. And also, I think deep down, we know that they often drive an unethical behavior. People who sell products on Amazon come up with fake reviews to artificially raise their rankings.

Josh Eyler
That's right.

That's right.

Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
Authors in academia chase high impact journals because they know that that will affect their age index or even embellish articles and results in order to get published in high profile journal and increase their age index. Schools and universities do all kinds of things to manipulate their rankings rather than to really look at their mission. So I think that one reason we stick with these

Josh Eyler
That is very true. The US News and World Report, yes, definitely.

Eric Mazur
numerical rankings is that they're easy to obtain and they're easy to process. But I think everybody also knows we should take them with a grain of salt. I like to say easy metric, useless metric. But we also know that no one in society would hire people simply based on the grades they obtained in high school or in college.

Josh Eyler
That's great, yes, I agree.

Eric Mazur
In education, I think grades are not just uninformative because nobody would hire people based on these grades. But you have gone in your book as far as saying they can interfere with learning. So in your opinion, what are some of the most significant ways in which grades are an impediment to learning?

Josh Eyler
us. Well, I think first and foremost, and probably the most studied aspect of the relationship between grades and learning is the role of motivation. so grades are just quintessential extrinsic motivators derived from behaviorism. you know, we know that extrinsic motivators work, but they really work to get people to comply and to do things that they would otherwise not do. Right. So Yes, a grade can get a student to attend class, it can get the student to turn things in on time and to even participate, but just being in a learning environment, complying with the learning environment in no way ever ensures that a student will learn simply because they're there. That takes intrinsic motivation, it takes pedagogical design, it takes relationships between teacher and student.

So the extrinsic motivation of grades only goes so far. What we know is necessary for deep learning is really intrinsic motivation. And that is where grades set up the very first and probably the biggest obstacle. That grades interfere with our ability to be intrinsically motivated for lots of reasons. One is of that it's difficult to find your natural interest in something. when you're always concerned with whether you're getting the right answer or whether it's going to affect your GPA or your employment prospects. It's also grades affect intrinsic motivation because they encourage a kind of strategic learning and the strategic course selection process. So I'm not really doing things because I love them. I'm doing them because they are a means to an end. And that is something that's set up by grades. They also cultivate an environment, not to say that all students will do this, but they cultivate an environment that incentivizes cheating. That if we are creating classrooms where all of the emphasis is on grades, the extrinsic motivator, you're also just psychologically creating an environment where people have incentive to do whatever they need to do to get that grade. Because we have told them, we have given them the message that that's what matters most. And so often, the environments where there's the most pressure on grades also see a rise in incidence of cheating and academic misconduct. The second thing that a lot of research is bearing out is that grades themselves, although we have been told that they are scientific or objective measurements of learning, what we actually know is that grades are really subjective and are disconnected from learning. And so...

Josh Eyler
Some of this goes back to your work on peer instruction, Eric, and those original insights into how students were getting A's on tests but weren't learning the concepts of physics very deeply. And so that mismatch is everywhere in education. And so what we can say for certain is that a grade shows individual students progress on the goals set out by a particular instructor for one course at one time. It is not in any way a kind of universal stamp of knowledge acquisition in a particular field, but too often that is the message that gets sent about grades, that they provide some kind of veneer or mirage of rigor and standardization and therefore we must keep them at all costs. But what we're learning is that that is just not true.

Eric Mazur
I love this discussion. There are so many things that are popping up in my mind as I'm listening to you. I can already see that we're going to run out of time today. You mentioned one important word, subjectivity, and a flip side, so my question to you is, is there really an objective measure of learning?

Josh Eyler
I don't think that there is a truly objective measure for learning because the measurements that we use are created by human beings with particular biases and angles and lenses that they're using to create them. So I don't think that there are truly objective measurements. I think that there are particular insights that we can gain from student work. I think that there are tools out there that do allow us that do give us important information about learning. But I would not say that we have a truly objective measure.

Eric Mazur
I completely agree with that. asked, it was sort of a leading question in a sense. In particular, let's think about Bloom's taxonomy, disputed as it may be, it's still a useful framework to think about from time to time with the lower order thinking skills like memorization and understanding at the bottom and then the...

Josh Eyler
Hahaha

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Eric Mazur

the highest order thinking skill evaluation and creativity or innovation at the top. And if you ask yourself, can I really truly objectively evaluate these six thinking skills I left out, two in the middle? I would say memorization, yeah, of course, I can test that, right? I can ask somebody to remember Swahili words and then...

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
you know, after an hour or two hours or three hours or a day or two days or a month, I can ask, you know, the meaning of a set of Swahili words and sort of measure the amount of memorization that this particular individual has mastered. And then it becomes more fuzzier as you go to understanding. And by the time you get to innovation or creativity, I think there's no relationship at all anymore between the evaluation and the person's actual contribution. Think about so many artists that died before they were recognized as being creative innovators or even innovators in society who were not valued for the innovations they brought about. So I think that that is a clear indication that we can't really objectively evaluate human abilities.

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm.

I agree, absolutely.

Eric Mazur
In history, grades are relatively recent quote unquote invention, right? I I've read in some place that it started with the mass tripose in Oxford in the late 19th century, which was not an academic enterprise. It was sort of a competition, an extracurricular mass competition, which was more or less like a sports ladder where people got eliminated in successive round of solving harder and harder problems.

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Right, yes.

Eric Mazur
You you end up with a numerical ranking of people and you think, that's great. I know who's the best students and who are the poor students. Why do you think we adopted this system and why are we clinging to it? Even though deep down in our hearts, we all know that grades don't tell you the story and that maybe even there are social injustice.

Josh Eyler
Yes, certainly they are. why do we have them? Why did we adopt them? And you're absolutely right. These are very recent. In fact, the A through F letter system that is so common now wasn't standardized until the 1940s. So you're talking about less than a century of use. But they were adopted, and there are good records on this, largely for an ease of communication. with parents and across institutions. So if all schools are giving A's, A through F's, then it's easy to communicate with each other and with colleges and with employers. So it was largely about that kind of shorthand for supposed learning and how they could communicate with each other. But what is also clear, is that it was not because they felt it was the best way to measure learning. That had no part whatsoever in it. It was a system that was really set out to communication as quick and as transmissible as possible. Why do we cling to it? I think, like we cling to a lot of things that are sort of rooted in tradition and baked into the foundation of our systems, because it's always been done that way.

Josh Eyler
And the messages that have always been sent about them are that these are pure reflections of your work as students when we're learning, of course, that is not true. And also people who are charged with leading and working in educational institutions often got good grades and believe that grades are rigorous and reflections of student learning. And so it's kind of a system. at the same

Eric Mazur
It's also a system that has evolved. You mentioned A through F. At my institution right now, it's A through A minus roughly. With students becoming almost suicidal when they get an A minus rather than an A. So grade inflation has been so severe that I think grades are becoming meaningless not because they're intrinsically meaningless, they're becoming meaningless because it's almost like a pass fail system.

Josh Eyler
Hmm. Hmm.

Eric Mazur
What's your view of that? And do you see some of the same problems at your institution?

Josh Eyler
sure. Okay. Well, actually, the first thing that you were talking about there with mental health is actually true and real and institutions are starting to learn more about how grades are affecting students mental health. The great inflation conversation is interesting one because this is often a proxy that and this conversation accepted, but it's often a proxy by those who feel really passionately about it for a different conversation. about a supposed loss of rigor over the course of many And so sometimes when people are talking about grade inflation, what they're kind of arguing about is have standards decreased over time and are courses less rigorous now than they used to be. I also find that sometimes when people are talking about grade inflation, what they're really talking about is grade compression. So a smaller range of grades over time has been given when I think in order to say that grades are truly inflated, we would have to know a lot about how the grades had been given in the past, what criteria people had used, and how the assessments were designed. So I think ultimately, is grade compression happening, especially at top universities? Yes, we are seeing a smaller range of grades.
But there was a paper by researchers at Cornell about 10 years ago who were trying to get to the bottom this. Why are there so few grades beyond this scope being given? And they really couldn't come up with, they could not find a single cause, of course. They found better teaching was happening. They found that they were admitting better students or more prepared students. And ultimately, they saw that it probably the preparedness of the students themselves that could account for some of the grading compression, but they couldn't really pin anything on it. So I do think nationally, we're seeing a shift in the type of grades that are given. Does that indicate, that the courses themselves are less challenging? I don't necessarily think that it does. And I don't think that we have at least that we don't have data to make that claim necessarily. But I do think that thinking about the types of grades that are being given and the really does reveal some of these larger issues and nuances of the grade and conversation.

Eric Mazur
Hmm. I'll tell you what's happened in my class. 10 years ago, I decided to completely change what I was doing, rethink my classroom, rethink my learning goals. That was actually the first thing I did. And I decided to settle on four main learning goals. One, self-directed learning. Two, content mastery. Three, teamwork, effective teamwork, or engaging in effective teamwork. And four was professionalism. Each of those have subcategories. For example, professionalism is punctuality, engagement, ethical decision taking, and so on. And so all my assessments, which are continuous, there are close to 100 of them. There are many assessments sort of map onto these four learning goals. So at the end of the semester, I end up with, you know, something on self-directed learning, on content mastery, on teamwork and on professionalism. So it's sort of like a vector, if you want, describes the students with different metrics in each dimension. Unfortunately, at the end of the semester, the registrar knocks on my door and says, Eric, what is the grade for this student? And I have to sort of collapse those four grades into one.

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm. Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
And I struggle with how to handle that. Do you just average them? But if you average them, what happens is you squash the distribution. It's highly unlikely that one student does very poorly or very well in all of those categories. So you end up narrowing the distribution tremendously if you just average them. You take the lowest one to prevent students from being strategic.

Josh Eyler
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
That's kind of harsh and will create a lot of resistance. So I found that as I try to come up with a metric that gives more information, but for example, measuring people's abilities in more than just one dimension, which is what we typically do, content mastery, by being forced to squash that into a single dimension at the end of the semester, we lose all interesting information.

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm. Right?

Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
You know, how do we fix these issues?

Josh Eyler
Well, unfortunately, I don't think that there is one, you know, kind of one solution to rule them all. But what I am encouraged by is that kind of nationally, both K-12 and higher ed, lots of people are trying out different models, just as you are, to try and solve or make steps towards solving some of the biggest problems with grades. So you know, have folks out things like contract grading, standards-based grading, which a lot of STEM faculty that I know who want to experiment have moved more toward, collaborative grading, things like this. a couple of things that they all share, they share a desire to release some of the pressure on students that students are feeling because of traditional grades. Another thing that they share, is that they seek to honor the fact that learning is a deeply complex process that occurs at different rates for different students. So that one student may easily grasp the concept of photosynthesis by the exam in week three, but another student, it may take to week seven to master the concept of photosynthesis, and that neither student should be penalized for the rate of learning that occurs. So all of them kind of try to account for that in different ways. And some of the experiments like you're describing shift or add dimensions to the grading so that, and that to me is a signal of wanting to honor the complexity of learning and also the weighting of those different. levels of grading as well. So lots of people trying lots of different things. We're not going to solve the ultimate problem yet that you're describing, which is that we have to put a grade in the grade book or the registrars get mad at us. But all of them, all these different models are really trying to figure out how do we help students reorient their experience with grades and put the focus back onto learning rather than the evaluation.

Eric Mazur
Yeah. What I would really very much like to see is sort of a transverse grading where we sort of as a university or a school or a major or whatever, decide on here are the important skills that these college graduates or school graduates or perhaps majors need to have mastered and make sure that each course sort of has activities to measure students' performance.

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
And that in the end, a picture emerges not from a single instructor and a single course, but across the entire, you know, two, four, six year, whatever curriculum. I think we'd end up with a much better picture. But here's perhaps one point we didn't talk about. Most evaluations that take place in society

Josh Eyler
Right.

Sure.

Eric Mazur
It's not the person doing the selling or the action or the manufacturing or whatever doing the evaluation. You have other people doing the evaluation. In education, we're in the weird situation that we're not only teaching our students, we're evaluating them too. There's sort of, you know, what I like to call this Jekyll and Hyde transition that we make from, you know, the coach as an educator, as a teacher.

Josh Eyler
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Eric Mazur
to the bad guy who is doing the evaluation. We have sort of this internal conflict that on the one hand, we want to make sure our students come out of the course scoring as high as possible. And on the other course, we want to be coming up with a distribution that differentiates the students, one from the other. Isn't that perhaps maybe the root of the problem that in education

Josh Eyler
Right.

Eric Mazur
It's the person who is doing the teaching, who is doing the evaluation.

Josh Eyler
Yes, I do think that that is a major part of this issue and it affects the classroom environment. It affects the learning that can happen as a result of that. And it's certainly not why I wanted to be an educator, right? I wanted to be more of the coach, less of the judge. And I do think that the muddying of the waters makes the classroom a really fraught place for learning to happen because

I will say that one of the benefits of some of these alternative grading models that people are trying are that it shifts our role more toward the coach model rather than the judge or the evaluator. I myself, some of the ones that I've tried, it has just kind of rejuvenated my approach to teaching because it has allowed me to really focus more on them as learners and to allow the

with the comments and the feedback and the evaluation part of it to really be in service of those efforts rather than kind of.

Eric Mazur
Which approaches that? Can you give us more detail?

Josh Eyler
Sure, I've tried a lot. I've tried portfolio grading in my writing courses. I've used contract grading for the graduate courses I teach. And I've experimented a little bit with collaborative grading, ungrading, some of those models as well that really put the emphasis on student self-assessment. So I've done a lot of different things. Like many, I try to match the model to the context and to the level of the student. what might be best for them depending on what level they're at, lots of different approaches.

Eric Mazur
I see. So you've used the word grading a lot. And when I started thinking about grading, I used the word assessment where I really in the back of my mind were thinking more about high stakes assessment and grading. And you just mentioned the word ungrading. Do you think a future without grades is possible? Or maybe let me rephrase my question here a little bit before you address that future.

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Eric Mazur
If you take away the grades, is it still possible to motivate the students sufficiently to learn? Because I can already hear my colleagues saying that. I like you. think I know the answer to that question, but I'd love to hear your view.

Josh Eyler
Yes, right.

Sure. The answer is yes, but it's also not an easy thing to do, right? So when you take away the grades, you have to pay much closer attention to the course design, the assignment design, all of the learning activities to make sure that they are, that they will connect to a student's intrinsic motivation, really drive the learning forward. but also there's more emphasis necessary on building trust and relationships in the classroom. And also to take time throughout the semester to keep coming back to the model you're using and explaining it to students as to why you're doing it. But the benefits of this, students discover their autonomy as learners. They develop agency. for the purpose of their own education, they find elements of the course that they're genuinely interested in and want to explore further. And they ask better, more meaningful questions because their curiosity is allowed to run free in ways that it simply can't if you are worried about taking intellectual risk because it may affect your

Eric Mazur
So maybe I can rephrase my first question now, because what you just described sounds like a lot of work. I know that most of my colleagues, even though I think they do take teaching seriously, see this as probably too much work to

Josh Eyler
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Eric Mazur
to invest. do you think we're headed perhaps to a grade less future or is that out of reach?

Josh Eyler
You know, I think like a lot of questions like that, ultimately the answer is unknowable. But here are a few reasons why I'm optimistic. I think like a lot of major change that has happened in education and society writ large, big questions like this need to be asked. And the answer seems unknowable until small. groups of change happen over and over again over time and eventually that creates momentum toward this bigger change that we're talking about. What I think is perhaps more achievable in the short term is institutions not only embracing but incentivizing faculty to explore other approaches to grading and to reward them for trying these things out. And so the workload is an issue. I have found it not more work, but redistributed work. So a lot at the beginning, a lot at the end, but the middle has changed for me. So I think it's redistributed work. think a lot more openness and incentivizing of experimentation is possible before we get to a great less future. But I am optimistic. There are lots of people doing a lot of amazing work in this area, and I think it's all to the good for our students.

Eric Mazur
Well, on that optimistic note, Josh, thank you so much for a thought provoking discussion. I would like to conclude by thanking our audience for listening and inviting everyone to return for our next episode. So on behalf of all of our listeners, Josh, thank you again for joining us today.

Josh Eyler
Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate it.

Eric Mazur

You can find our Social Learning Amplified podcast and more on perusall.com slash social learning amplified. I hope you will also join our Perusall engage event with Josh Eyler starting on January the 13th. And if you don't know what a Perusall Engage event is, it's an opportunity for you to engage with Josh's new book and Josh on the Perusall platform. Subscribe to find out about other episodes of our podcast. And I hope to welcome you back on a future episode.