Episode 13: Stress, Grades, and the American Way! Time for a Re-boot.
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Thank you to Howard Hughes Medical Institute BioInteractive for providing these bilingual transcripts.
Stress, Grades, and the American Way! Time for a Re-boot.
The percentage of students on our campuses suffering from depression doubled from 2009 to 2019. Student suicides increased 50% over the same period. The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. Campuses nationwide are responding by increasing access to health care professionals and training staff and faculty to identify stressed students. However, most campuses are not dealing with one of the most significant stressors in student’s lives, GRADES! In this episode, we talk with Dr. Joshua Eyler, Director of Faculty Development at the University of Mississippi about the stress of grades and how institutions and faculty need to rethink approaches to decreasing stress by changing how we think about and act on grading and evaluating students. We rely on grades, a time tested but inaccurate and misleading assessment system, a human construct, first brought into higher education in the 1790s. Time for a reboot, perhaps?
References
Eyler, J. (2022). Grades Are at the Center of the Student Mental Health Crisis (2022). Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/grades-are-center-student-mental-health-crisis. This article has links to important data resources.
American College Health Association National College Health Assessment.
Transformational Reading
hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress. Amazon. B&N. Powell’s.
Frieire, Paolo (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Amazon. B&N. Powell’s.
Love, Bettina (2020) We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Amazon. B&N. Powell’s.
Gannon, Kevin (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Amazon. B&N. Powell’s.
Related Websites
Josh Eyler’s blog. https://josheyler.wordpress.com
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Univ. Mississippi
Related Readings and Links to Communities
Hibbs and Rostain (2020). The Stressed Years of Their Lives. Helping Your Kid Survive & Thrive During Their College Years. Amazon. B&N. Powell’s.
Twitter: #ungrading
Twitter: #TG2 (Teachers Going Graceless)
TG2 Facebook group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/277181926058422/?ref=share