The Ungrading Learning Theory We Have Is Not the Ungrading Learning Theory We Need

INTRODUCTION

While grades have widespread use in higher education, they fail to adequately communicate specific feedback on student learning (Boatright-Horowitz and Arruda, 2013; Lipnevich et al., 2020a, 2021). Grades do not specify how much a student has learned in terms of specific content or skills, how broadly the student has learned that content, or how many learning scaffolds that student has built during the course. Instructors use grades as a primary source for feedback (Brookhart et al., 2016; Guskey and Link, 2019; Koenka et al., 2019), but we know that “grades do not give students, parents, or other educators accurate information about learning” (Brookhart et al., 2016, p. 836). Grades fail to accurately communicate student performance between course sections, to third parties and from one institution to another, particularly when used to compare students between institutions (Schinske and Tanner, 2014; James, 2023). While historically a normalized grading system was likely created to standardize learning contexts nationally (Clark and Talbert, 2023), that grading system was formed within an educational setting that already privileged White, non-Jewish learners (Inoue, 2021).

The research on grades is extensive (Brookhart et al., 2016; Feldman, 2018; Guskey, 2020; Guskey and Link, 2019; Inoue, 2021; Schinske and Tanner, 2014) and spans all disciplinary contexts throughout K-12 (mainly grades 6 through 12) and higher education. The research on grades includes several studies that demonstrate how grades undermine student learning processes (Butler and Nisan, 1986; Butler, 1987; Pulfrey et al., 2011; Klapp et al., 2016; Koenka et al., 2019). Grades incorporate a great deal of variance due to differences in grading criteria, including accuracy-based measures on learning assessments, variance in what is graded and how it is graded, etc., as well as wholistic factors, including effort, behavior, improvement, and attitudes (Brookhart, 2015; Guskey and Link, 2019). Yet, instructors embed these factors within the grades that they are assigning to students without realizing that they are changing the standardization of their grading scale (Rust, 2007; Boevé et al., 2019). Elbow (1993, pp. 2–3) states that grades are unreliable, uncommunicative, and distract students from learning. Richardson et al. (2012) show that grades correlate better with measures of student performance, including goal setting, performance self-efficacy, and test anxiety, rather than with learning.

Higher education instructors, including those who teach Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines, place fairness in grading as a priority (Brookhart et al., 2016; Lipnevich et al., 2020b), but ensuring equity in grade assignment has been shown to be a problem (Guskey, 2013; Feldman, 2018). Higher education instructors may not have sound assessment training and, even if they do, it may not result in any change in their grading practices that enhances alignment to grading standards. This result leads us to the “disconcerting finding [that there] is a lack of congruence between recommendations of measurement specialists and teachers’ grading practices” (Brookhart, 1994, p. 289).

Two studies in the higher education context have highlighted the highly positive effect on student learning detailed, written feedback has and the ambiguous and complex effects grades have on student learning. Lipnevich and Smith (2009) performed an empirical mixed methods study using six focus groups containing 8–9 students each that showed that students who received detailed written feedback alone outperformed students who received only grades or a combination of grades and feedback. Within this study, students unanimously “stressed that detailed comments were the most effective form of feedback” (Lipnevich and Smith, 2009, p. 364) and “stated that grades are ineffective when mastery of learning is needed” (Lipnevich and Smith, 2009b, p. 365). A larger quantitative study (n = 464) was performed simultaneously which had similar findings: “written, detailed feedback specific to individual work was strongly related to improvement” (Lipnevich and Smith, 2009a, p. 329). The main effect of grades on student learning was even more pronounced: “letter grades or numeric scores, being evaluative in nature, tend to turn students’ attention away from the task and toward the self, leading to negative effects on performance” (Lipnevich and Smith, 2009a, p. 330).

Yet, we know grades are the currency of most of higher education. They have specific significance for STEM higher education instructors, specifically in biology, because the final grades we assign to students in gateway classes have direct impact on their future chosen fields (Shultz et al., 2015; Theobald et al., 2020; White et al., 2021). We know that “the grading of student learning has become part of the culture and tradition of higher education…often without question…” (Lynch and Hennessy, 2017, p. 1756). Because the currency of higher education is grades, systems have been put in place to reinforce grading (Kirschenbaum et al., 1971; Kohn, 2013; Tannock, 2017; Blum, 2020b). The problems with grades are systemic and pervasive.

UNGRADING DEFINED

While learning assessments usually try to measure student performance and semiequate it to student learning, evaluative assessments compare learning assessments that students complete in the class against standards. Those standards can be external, like standards imposed by the department or institution, or by accrediting or review bodies. The standards can also be internal to the class, including individual instructor standards, personal student standards, or standards that the class votes on. Examples of learning assessments include projects, portfolios, papers, exams, quizzes, homework, etc. Examples of evaluative assessments tend to revolve around grading and feedback (oral or written). All assessments—learning or evaluative—can be formative or summative (Black and Wiliam, 1998) and increases in formative assessment have been repeatedly correlated with increases in longitudinal learning (Black, 2017; Black and Wiliam, 2012, 2018).

Ungrading has been described previously in the literature as a transformative pedagogical practice (Stommel, 2020) and as a mindset (Sackstein, 2020). Ungrading has more prominently been integrated into non-STEM disciplinary classroom contexts (Elbow, 1993; Blum, 2017; Stommel, 2018; Inoue, 2021), specifically classes that require writing as a major portion of assessment. I define ungrading as a set of emancipatory pedagogical practices that change the conversation between instructors and their students about evaluative assessments to embody a more dialogic democracy within the classroom. Ungrading, much like its predecessors “going gradeless” and “degrading,” serves as an umbrella term that functions much like the LGBQTIA+ acronym in that it gathers sometimes disparate ideas under the same umbrella. While the LGBQTIA+ acronym includes almost every group that is not cis-heteronormative, ungrading includes almost every classroom evaluative assessment practice that does not fall under traditional grading or normative grading (grading on a curve).

The ungrading practices I include under the ungrading umbrella are defined in Table 1. Note that the practices listed that are italicized are NOT ungrading practices but are grading practices used to contrast ungrading in future sections of this paper. The similarities between the evaluative assessment practices found under the umbrella of ungrading are greater than the differences. Most ungrading practices focus on: 1) written or oral feedback rather than rating- and ranking-based evaluative assessment (numerical or letter); 2) giving students greater agency in their own learning evaluation through self-assessment and/or conversation with their peers or the instructor; and 3) transforming pedagogical spaces from performance oriented to learning oriented. The point of changing the conversation about student evaluative assessment with ungrading is: 1) to empower students to focus on their learning with agency over their learning choices and processes, and 2) to increase emancipation of oppressed groups in our classrooms by transforming class dynamics into participatory democracies through dialogic evaluation practices.

RESEARCH PURPOSE

As ungrading practitioners, we hope that by employing ungrading practices, students learn the skills and content of our courses in an environment that supports their learning processes and embraces their learning agency. Therefore, a theory of learning must undergird ungrading practices. Self-regulated learning (SRL) is often referred to, directly or indirectly, as a major learning theory that undergirds ungrading in the ungrading literature (Kohn, 2013; Stommel, 2020; Blum, 2020b; Guberman, 2021). Yet SRL is often deficit-framed (Vassallo, 2013); thus it is not a suitable learning theory for ungrading. I propose an asset-framed learning that combines funds of knowledge (FK) and community cultural wealth as a learning theory that undergirds ungrading appropriately. The primary research purpose of this paper is to explore why SRL is not suitable as a learning theory for ungrading and to provide literature evidence for why the asset-framed learning theory proposed is suitable to undergird ungrading.

IS UNGRADING THEORETICAL?

Koehler and Meech (2022) explicitly argue that SRL is foundational to ungrading practices, stating “to realize benefits from an ungraded experience, learners need effective SRL skills” (p. 87). In many higher education classrooms, graded and ungraded, online or in person, SRL is often required as either prior knowledge or as a goal (Zimmerman, 2002, 2008; Pintrich, 2004; Broadbent and Poon, 2015), as “learners’ ability to self-regulate their course participation can influence resulting outcomes” (Koehler and Meech, 2022, p. 78).

SRL is a learning theory that describes all the skills, processes, etc. needed to be able to learn on one’s own when given learning objectives and assessed on the depth of learning by an instructor. The origins of self-regulated learning are from cognitive/educational psychology, and it has been typically used to describe learning in formal learning environments. Self-regulated learning theory was developed originally by the students of Albert Bandura, specifically Schunk and Zimmerman. Zimmerman (1989) offers the broadest definition of SRL by stating that “students can be described as self-regulated to the degree that they are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process” (p. 329). Schunk (2001) focuses SRL on learning goals more explicitly: “learning that results from students’ self-generated thoughts and behaviors that are systematically oriented toward the attainment of their learning goals” (p. 125). Saks and Leijen (2014) describe self-regulated learning in a more learner-focused way, stating that SRL is “an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and attempt to monitor, regulate and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and contextual features on the environment” (p. 191). Given these definitions, it is unsurprising that faculty would link SRL to ungrading. However, there is reason to rethink this connection: SRL is often framed in a deficit way. Davis and Museus (2019) state that deficit thinking (or framing) “holds students from historically oppressed populations responsible for the challenges and inequalities that they face” (p.119). The deficit thinking model has been in place for at least a century, if not several and “is an endogenous theory—positing that the student who fails in school does so because of [their] internal deficits or deficiencies. Such deficits manifest, adherents allege, in limited abilities, linguistic shortcomings, lack of motivation to learn, and immoral behavior” (Valencia, 2010, pp. 6–7).

When we consider how authors describe students in studies of SRL, we notice this deficit framing. For instance, Paris and Paris (2001) argue that most students do not become self-regulated learners through indirect experience outside the classroom. Voskamp et al. (2020), Paris and Paris (2001), and Boekaerts and Cascallar (2006) all argue that unless instructors specifically scaffold students to employ self-regulated learning skills, students do not necessarily have or build these skills effectively. Voskamp et al. (2020) shifts that argument slightly to higher education instructors as well—higher education instructors are often unsuccessful, unable, or unknowledgeable to explore or teach their students self-regulated learning skills as part of their pedagogical practice. Paris and Paris (2001), Loyens et al. (2008), and Winters et al. (2008) describe through a deficit frame practical strategies for how to incorporate SRL effectively in the classroom. This deficit frame commonly underscores SRL, as authors describe how some students lack the will to engage with SRL in positive or productive ways or how some students must learn SRL skills indirectly or directly from instructors because their tacit learning of SRL may be deficient or defective. In some contexts, deficit thinking goes further than the idea that students need to be taught self-regulated learning skills—it blames the students for not already having these skills.

To illustrate how SRL can be implemented with a deficit frame, let us imagine this scenario—fictional Professor Smith, a fully tenured professor at University Y, is frustrated by his students’ seeming inability to perform at a passing level (70% or higher) on his high-stakes exams. He thinks his exams are fair and equitable because a majority of his students in prior classes who never dropped during the semester performed at passing level on these exams in previous years. He decides to teach his current students how to take notes effectively using self-regulated learning techniques, a method he learned when he was in graduate school that lead to great success, to increase his students’ pass rate on these exams.

However, Professor Smith has failed to account for several factors regarding his current student population and the effects of COVID-19 in making this change. The factor that best explains how SRL is deficit framed is this—Professor Smith has failed to account for several students like Sam and Nox, siblings who have worked in their father’s business office since their early teens and who have already learned to take highly efficient and effective notes in that setting. When they go through Professor Smith’s SRL note-taking training, they abandon their highly efficient note-taking scheme because, since the training is so different from how they learned to take notes, they think they have been taking notes wrong this whole time, even though their previous note-taking scheme resulted in greater learning for both overall.

A further critique of SRL comes from Vassallo (2013), who argues that “the discourse of self-regulated learning is aligned with the logic of adaptation, prescription, and dependency—three processes and practices…[that] can be construed as compliance and obedience to neoliberal governance…” (Vassallo, 2013, p. 578). As compliance and obedience without critical inquiry and consciousness is contradictory to emancipatory pedagogies, this means self-regulated learning is incompatible with emancipatory pedagogies. Vassallo argues that even if “SRL carries with it connotations of social emancipation and social betterment…SRL narrows possibilities for what can count as emancipation” as well as how one can pursue it (Vassallo, 2013, p. 578).

Because SRL is often discussed in the literature from a deficit frame and its skills are translated into practice using a deficit frame, it is incompatible as a learning theory for ungrading.

Ungrading is Emancipatory and Requires Asset Framing

The notion of deficit thinking contrasts with asset, strengths, or anti-deficit thinking, where students are assumed to have prior knowledge or experiences, including those born out of cultural and familial contexts, that are critical and informative to their education and to their ability to cultivate meaningful relationships with those who are well connected in their field of study (Harper, 2010; Mejia et al., 2018). The point of learning in an asset frame is not to fill a hole in the student or assume that they have the wrong knowledge upon entry to higher education classrooms, but to enable students to share their knowledge openly and to build on that knowledge in ways that benefit the learning of student and the learning of the class (Mejia et al., 2018; Exarhos, 2020; Verdín et al., 2021a, 2021b).

How can We Design Evaluative Assessments that Uphold Emancipatory Aims?

Emancipatory pedagogies are designed to liberate oppressed groups through educational means. Emancipatory pedagogies go further than inclusive pedagogies in that inclusive pedagogies work within the educational system to bring as much equity to the classroom as possible and emancipatory pedagogies break the constraints of the current educational system in ways that specifically benefit learners from oppressed groups. Nouri and Sajjadi (2014) expand the definition of emancipatory pedagogies further by stating that “emancipatory pedagogy is founded on the notion that education should play a fundamental role in creating a just and democratic society” (Nouri and Sajjadi, 2014, p. 76). If emancipatory pedagogies are meant to liberate every student, and particularly those from oppressed groups through educational means, then those educational means must be equitably attainable.

Common themes between emancipatory pedagogies include seeking to change the power structure of the classroom (Rodriguez, 2013; Nouri and Sajjadi, 2014; Aronson and Laughter, 2016; Clack, 2019), affording students more agency (Giroux, 1988; Olitsky, 2007; Aronson and Laughter, 2016; Phuong et al., 2017; Bali et al., 2020), involving students in participatory design (Klenowski et al., 2006; Könings et al., 2011, 2014), and embracing dialogic engagement in the classroom, including the questioning of authority and authoritative institutions (Freire, 1970; Hannafin et al., 2014; Nouri and Sajjadi, 2014; Aronson and Laughter, 2016; Bali et al., 2020; Blum, 2020b; Kent and Taylor, 2021; Paris, 2012).

Typical grading practices (including traditional, equity, and binary grading as well as grading on a curve) are based in a model where the instructor is the sole authority and expert in the classroom and the communication in the classroom—in terms of grades—is exclusively monodirectional from instructor to student. Therefore, typical grading practices are not emancipatory as they maintain authoritative power structures in the classroom, afford students little to no agency, and are hallmarks of instructor top-down instructional design.

I argue that ungrading is better aligned to emancipatory pedagogy, compared with typical grading practices. According to several emancipatory pedagogies, including culturally responsive pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995b; Aronson and Laughter, 2016) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1988), a major aim of emancipatory pedagogies is to eliminate deficit thinking/framing as it is damaging to the aforementioned goals of these pedagogies, especially the goal of embracing dialogic conversation in the classroom.

The ungrading practices shown in Figure 1 are aligned to show which practices are most student agentive and most student learning oriented versus which are least agentive and least student learning oriented. Figure 1 shows two axes: 1) the y-axis shows a progression of student agency from student learning agency at the top of the axis to instructor compliance at the bottom of the axis; and 2) the x-axis shows a progression of less student learning on the left to more student learning on the right. For the y-axis, student agency refers to engagement or power that students have over their own learning processes, assessment, and evaluation. Agency is sometimes referred to as “socially transformative” with intersecting and overlapping roles based in “context, position, knowledge, and identity” (Barton and Tan, 2010, p. 191). Emirbayer and Mische (1998) defined agency by stating that agency is a temporal relational context, focusing on its iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation (p. 970). This means that agency moves beyond simply a choice a student might make in specific educational context—it is a choice based on how they interpret that context and their place in it and whether they interpret their choice to be impactful. For the x-axis, the use of student learning in this context refers to the learning the student acquires from the evaluative assessment itself. Therefore, more student learning should occur when more student agency is encouraged, and less student learning would occur when more instructor compliance is required.

The two student evaluation techniques in the bottom left corner of Figure 1—grading on a curve and traditional grades—are the least agentive for students and usually result in the least student learning. These two evaluative assessment techniques contrast highly with the ungrading techniques in the top right corner—self assessments, narrative evaluation, and interview-based grading—that result in the greatest student learning and incorporate the greatest student learning agency. There are, of course, two more quadrants. Binary grading, which lies in the lower right quadrant, results in greater student learning than other grading techniques because it is often (but not always) coupled with mastery learning techniques that allow students to iterate their learning process. Yet, because binary grading is still a grading technique, it requires more instructor compliance. Other ungrading techniques generally lie on the side of more student learning but are scattered between less student agency (more instructor compliance), like standards-based grading and competency grading, and more student agency, like portfolio-based grading. Most grading—equity, traditional, etc.—and one ungrading technique—performance-based student contracts—fall more in the less student learning side of the grid but performance-based contract grading still exhibits more student learning agency than most grading techniques.

Is Ungrading Emancipatory?

A major component of ungrading involves mitigating power differentials to more effectively reduce the impact of classroom power imbalances between students and instructors (Foucault, 1977, 1982). Ungrading instructors mitigate the power differentials so that students can control their own learning journeys more effectively. Reconceptualizing the classroom as a participatory democracy, in which each member has equal power to make decisions about how the class will be designed and implemented, is an overall goal of ungrading, but it is also a far-fetched ideal. A participant democracy can never truly exist in the ungraded classroom for two reasons: 1) The instructor will always have higher levels of expertise in the course subject matter compared with students, and 2) the instructor will always have a greater distribution of power because they need to assign final grades, as long as grades are systematically embedded in higher education and the systems it serves (e.g., workplace expectations).

Mitigating power differentials to students often is ascribed to increasing student agency in the ungrading literature (Kohn, 2013; Blum, 2017, 2020b; Stommel, 2018; Sorensen-Unruh, 2020). Ungrading relies on giving students agency to provide their own evaluative assessments of their learning. This learning agency then often infiltrates other aspects of the ungrading classroom, leading to increased participatory design. Participatory design is also a way to reduce the impact of power imbalances within the ungrading classroom. Participatory design occurs in several ways, including cocreation of syllabi (Katopodis, 2018), assignment cocreation or choose-your-own-adventure (Cormier, 2021; Miceli, 2021; Mitchell-Buck, 2019), and/or learning tools cocreation (Bali, 2018; Cangialosi, 2018; Blum, 2020b).

The tradition of dialogic engagement dates back to Plato and Socrates in Ancient Greece and “originally emerged as a communicative process or technique for discovering truth by subjecting ideas to deliberation and scrutiny” (Kent and Taylor, 2021, p. 2). In emancipatory pedagogies, including ungrading, this practice also includes the critical questioning of authority figures. Ungrading uses dialogic engagement to foster learning between student and higher education instructors, student and peer, and student and self. Some of this dialogic engagement happens orally in conversations regarding the student’s progress and some of this happens via text-based feedback.

The above arguments support the notion that ungrading is an emancipatory pedagogy. By calling ungrading an emancipatory pedagogy, I acknowledge that ungrading must be adopted with emancipatory aims in mind. Most emancipatory pedagogies allow the practitioner to interpret how the pedagogy will be enacted in the classroom, which often results in confusion on a practitioner level. If I want to change the power structure in my class, how do I make that happen in a way that my students can perceive clearly? Ungrading, in contrast, provides an excellent set of pedagogical tools to help enact emancipatory pedagogy in the classroom. From a practitioner perspective, this set of tools is invaluable for classroom transformation and may help instructors overcome the activation energy required to enact emancipatory pedagogy.

Emancipatory pedagogies, including ungrading, try to validate students’ lived experiences and their intersectional context in a way that encourages the building of relationships and belonging. Therefore, ungrading, as an emancipatory pedagogy, needs a learning theory that focuses on asset framing. Although it is not an entirely sufficient learning theory to describe all aspects of emancipatory pedagogies, the theoretical framework of FK should help reframe the learning that occurs within ungrading classrooms from a deficit to an asset orientation. Moll et al. (1992) defines FK as “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al., 1992, p. 133). The theory undergirding FK can be coupled with Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), briefly defined as “a set of dispositions through which the world is perceived, understood, and evaluated” (Rios-Aguilar et al., 2011, p. 166). Dina Verdín and her colleagues have used FK in engineering education (Verdín et al., 2016, 2021a, 2021b) to counter deficit framing by recognizing that within the FK framework, student “experiences are treated as sources of knowledge, and a family’s knowledge, social networks, and resourcefulness are emphasized as assets from which students learn” (Verdín et al., 2021b, p. 673). Verdín and her colleagues used a survey based experimental design to confirm that “minoritized students enter classroom spaces with lived experiences that carry knowledge, skills, and practices they can leverage to support their interest, confidence, and choice of an engineering major” (Verdín et al., 2021a, p. 203). Helpful instructional activities included “practical hands-on activities [that] take apart or assemble household objects”, including reverse-engineering its design and understanding its life cycle; using cultural understanding and practical prior knowledge to engage with stakeholders and design simple, but impactful engineering solutions to real-world challenges (Verdín et al., 2021a, p. 204). According to Chen et al. (2021), leveraging a student’s FK in the STEM classroom “affirms that they belong in the discipline and aligns to research on how people learn showing that activating prior knowledge supports learning recognition and appreciation of their cultural tradition and experience” (Chen et al., 2021, p. 85).

The FK theoretical framework differs from Yosso’s community cultural wealth (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2005; Yosso et al., 2009), which was derived from critical race theory (Crenshaw et al., 1996), by the relative lack of focus on power dynamics in FK compared with community cultural wealth (Rodriguez, 2013; Neri et al., 2021). Community cultural wealth can be defined, then, as “an interdisciplinary framework that identifies and highlights the various assets and resources utilized by Communities of Color as they navigate schools and other systems” (Acevedo and Solorzano, 2021, p. 2). While Yosso (2005) specified Communities of Color as the major historically excluded group in this definition, community cultural wealth can be expanded to individuals who fall along other axes of oppression including disability and LGBQTIA2S+. Neri et al. (2021) argue that FK lacks a focus on power dynamics by saying:

Community cultural wealth, on the other hand, focuses primarily on power, emphasizing multiple and intersecting power axes that “support students not only to navigate, but also to resist, racist and other systemically oppressive logics and devices” by “empower[ing] the agency of all groups to mobilize the use-values of their diverse cultural assets with equivalent agency” (Neri et al., 2021, p. 16).

Both FK and community cultural wealth are firmly rooted in praxis—practical applications of theory—and are undergirded in asset-framing. These two theories in tandem also critique and expand Bourdieu’s analysis of forms of capital (Kiyama and Aguilar, 2018; Rios-Aguilar and Neri, 2021). To illustrate, Kiyama (2018) used FK as a primary theoretical framework with social capital and cultural capital as supplemental frameworks, specifically integrating constructs from each framework, to investigate the role of education ideologies in Mexican American families. She concluded that “the use of FK with cultural and social capital illustrate the importance of considering a theoretical overlap especially when understanding social relationships, networks, and issues of access and power” (Kiyama, 2018, p. 101). Many more examples of blending FK with other theoretical frameworks can be found in Kiyama and Aguilar (2018), which could serve as a textbook that provides a foundation of how FK can work in Higher Education for practitioners and researchers who want to learn more.

Previous literature has placed FK and community cultural wealth in dialogue with one another for educational purposes (Rios-Aguilar et al., 2011; Rodriguez, 2013; Neri et al., 2021), and has found that both theories espouse emancipatory aims, drawing from source material by Freire (1970) and Gay (2010), and embrace counter-storytelling (Solorzano and Yosso, 2001), particularly in resistance to deficit thinking (Rodriguez, 2013). Therefore, FK, with its focus on integrating each student’s prior knowledge and familial and cultural experiences into the classroom, coupled with community cultural wealth, which explicitly focuses on reframing power dynamics using critical race theory as its basis, combined might produce a theory to describe students’ learning best within ungrading classrooms.

If ungrading used an asset-framed learning theory, such as the proposed combination of FK and community cultural wealth to describe the many kinds of learning experienced in an ungrading classroom, the effect might be a pronounced and important shift. The asset-based learning theory proposed reiterates and builds on the emancipatory learning that occurs in the ungrading classroom through dialogic engagement, participatory design, increased student agency, and reduced classroom power imbalances between students and instructors. Table 2 lists some ungrading practices and how they might look with SRL vs. the proposed asset-framed learning theory as the learning theory that undergirds them.

While Table 2 is by no means comprehensive, we can begin to understand the differences in how the learning theory affects the way ungrading is practiced. While several specific documented practices discussed in the FK literature are addressed in Table 2, ungrading expands and captures some of the documented gaps in FK practices as well, including communal ways of knowing and disrupting power imbalances (Rodriguez, 2013). Table 2 helps us see that using an asset-framed learning theory allows: 1) learning to occur at a deeper level because elevated trust exists between instructor and students; and 2) ungrading to connect to its emancipatory aims. Two major themes can be seen as reoccurring in Table 2—student agency and classroom power dynamics.

The differences in student agency between self-regulated learning and asset-framed learning are the first theme in Table 2. In self-regulated learning, the focus is on the instructor’s agency and how the instructor will allow students some increased learning agency at carefully scaffolded points in the class if the students have enough SRL skills to be able to handle that increased agency. In asset-framed learning, the focus is on the students and how they will participate actively in the design of the class. Using FK in participatory design and thereby “engaging students in the coconstruction of knowledge to deepen or extend academic knowledge” (Rodriguez, 2013, p. 95) is a well-documented classroom practice in the FK literature in addition to its primary aim in emancipatory pedagogies.

The differences in classroom power dynamics between self-regulated learning and asset-framed learning are the second theme in Table 2. In self-regulated learning, power to enact design and implementation lies primarily with the instructor, who sets the learning goals and assessments, etc. In asset-framed learning, power is distributed primarily to students. In the asset-framed classroom, instructors “are more like air traffic controllers—an instructor’s power and pedagogical worth exists in their necessary facilitation of student learning and their responsibility to improve dialogic engagement within our classrooms” (C. Denial, personal communication, January 20, 2022).

The analysis from Table 2 helps us further elucidate critical reflection as a foundational aspect of ungrading. Critical reflection is a process that tries to create meaning and connection from learning and experience. Critical reflection is also a foundational component of both critical pedagogy, which Freire called concientização, or reflection in action (Freire, 1970; Mejia et al., 2018) and culturally responsive pedagogies, which Ladson-Billings called critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 1995a, 1995b). Thus, critical reflection might be considered a foundational component of all emancipatory pedagogies.

The scholarly implications for the higher educational research community more broadly, and the biology educational research community more specifically, for the asset-framed learning theory are dual-fold. While the benefit of an asset-framed learning theory is clear, the specific combination of FK with community cultural wealth may not provide the breadth or depth to describe all the types of learning in ungraded classrooms. Future studies are needed that investigate (and trouble-shoot) the plausible incoherence between emancipatory aims and learning theories. These future studies would be helpful if they specifically had a focus on mixing theory (as I have proposed), then determining whether those mixed theories adequately describe the learning that occurs in the ungraded classroom.

There are also practical implications for the STEM and biology practitioner communities regarding this proposed learning theory. The ungrading community needs detailed accounts of ways in which faculty in higher education have activated FK and community cultural wealth within the ungrading classroom, and specifically in STEM gateway classrooms, like introductory biology. These accounts might include a variety of institutional, teacher-oriented, and learner-oriented considerations, such as revised institutional policies, teacher training including guidance on how to simplify the concepts for a broader audience, and curriculum design. The accounts might also include detailed instructional materials or specific examples of ungrading using this proposed learning theory as a foundational learning theory for the classroom. These accounts will help confirm the practicality of the proposed learning theory. We also need more communication among ungrading faculty that specifically addresses ungrading as emancipatory and as an asset-framed model.

CONCLUSION

SRL is often referred to as the major learning theory that undergirds ungrading in the ungrading literature (Blum, 2020a; Guberman, 2021; Koehler and Meech, 2022). Because ungrading is an emancipatory pedagogy that relies on asset-framing, self-regulated learning as a learning theory for ungrading is insufficient due to its deficit frames in both the literature and in practice. The proposed asset-framed learning theory, which combines FK with community cultural wealth, provides a better foundation to understand the learning that occurs in ungrading classrooms. Yet, many further studies are needed not only to test this learning theory in ungrading classrooms, but also to expand the understanding of ungrading as emancipatory and asset-framed. Our need to transform our students’ classroom experiences with ungrading cannot undermine our overall goals of emancipation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

REFERENCES