Is Specifications Grading Right for Me?: A Readiness Assessment to Help Instructors Decide
In this article, CTE faculty members Adriana Streifer and Michael Palmer describe a readiness assessment tool that prompts instructors’ reflection on how institutional culture, identity, and course/curricular contexts may pose or alleviate the risks of adopting nontraditional grading practices.
Specifications grading is an alternative grading scheme that prioritizes transparency and progress-oriented feedback, with the goals of increasing student motivation, fostering clear communication, and achieving educational equity. Despite its recent, rapid increase in popularity, little attention has been paid to the forms of support faculty need to implement specifications grading successfully, and to the personal and professional circumstances that shape instructors’ experiences with specifications grading. To fill these gaps, we have created a readiness assessment tool that prompts instructors’ reflection on how institutional culture, identity, and course/curricular contexts may pose or alleviate the risks of adopting nontraditional grading practices.