Non-Qualitative Contract Grading in Skill-Based Learning: A Comparative Study

Kelley Holley | Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

Abstract

Kelley Holley How do we grade skill acquisition? Unlike courses hinged upon material comprehension, public speaking is a skill-based subject without a clear means of grade standardization. Students enter with a wide range of prior knowledge, while some may have been the captain of their speech and debate team, others have never spoken in public. In this presentation, I offer a comparative study between traditional qualitative assessment and non-qualitative contract grading, utilizing two sections of “The Art of Presentation and Communication.” Non-qualitative contract grading is an evaluative schema in which students effectively select what grade they would like to receive in the course and accomplish the work necessary to achieve this mark. Non-qualitative contract grading operates under the key premise that students improve when they are not distracted by subjective standards, allowing them to take creative risks they might not have otherwise taken. As such, non-qualitative contract grading is a learner-centered methodology that privileges in-depth feedback and provides more opportunities to practice a skill to obtain a higher grade. While many writing classes have utilized the schema (Davis 2018; Elbow 2008) performance-based classes have not widely embraced it. In this study, I compare five-core speech assignments between two semesters. In the first semester, I utilized a traditional qualitative grading schema, in the second, I utilized non-qualitative contract grading. In each semester, I charged students with creating personal goals that identified the skills they wanted to develop. Students tracked their progress over the semester through surveys. Using the digital humanities tool Voyant, I conducted a comparative textual analysis of their anonymized written comments, to analyze their own assessment of their progress towards skill acquisition. Thus, I demonstrate that non-qualitative contract grading is an effective pedagogical tool for skill-based learning, replacing the uncertainty of subjective grading with a learner-centered grading schema that emphasizes progress.

Presentation