Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
English
Major Professor
Jeffrey Ringer
Committee Members
Lisa King, Jessi Grieser, Jud Laughter
Abstract
A longitudinal case study of grades and grading in the 1920s and 30s and the turn towards ungrading (2020-2022) in the First-Year Composition (FYC) program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), this project argues that institutional architecture structures classroom writing assessment and that the outcomes of ungrading (an umbrella term for a range of alternative assessment practices, including labor-based grading) vary based on teachers’ values/beliefs about writing. While rhetoric and composition scholarship on writing assessment typically frames ungrading as an individual, classroom-level choice that improves learning and increases equity, this project approaches ungrading from an institutional perspective, focusing on how programmatic and university contexts shape the function of conventional and alternative writing assessment and teachers’ experiences with ungrading. Drawing on archival data from the University Special Collections, the project opens by arguing that grades/grading prioritize institutional needs/reputation over student learning, mandating the use of standardized American English. Analyzing gradebooks kept by English professor John C. Hodges (1926-1938) shows that grades assigned in first-year writing courses fall along a bell curve, artificially depressing students’ grades and constructing students as in need of remediation. Grades do not track learning but rank students by the then-emerging standard of formal academic English. The project then jumps ahead a century to the contemporary First-Year Composition program (2020-2022), exploring the emergence of ungrading, or non-authoritative forms of writing assessment that center students’ labor and experiences in the course. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews/focus groups with graduate instructors and non-tenure track faculty, the project shows that programmatic architecture is key in depressing or expanding the use of ungrading. A resistant or hostile programmatic architecture may cause instructors to limit their use of ungrading, but writing programs can provide a more hospitable institutional context by ensuring faculty have the permission and resources to use alternative assessment. When instructors do use ungrading, they experience its outcomes as variable, dependent on their own values/beliefs about writing. This variability also means that the longer faculty use ungrading, the more likely they are to see meaningful results from its use.
Recommended Citation
Von Bergen, Megan, "(Un)Grading as Institutional Ecology: How (Alternative) Assessment Choices Shape Writing Classrooms. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2023.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/8502