A tale of triumph: A journey toward equitable assessment

Presented by:

• Amanda Taintor, Faculty Coordinator Instructional Design, Distance Education and Outcomes, Reedley College
• Jennifer Paris, Early Childhood Education Department Chair, College of the Canyons
• Julie Kehoe, Math Faculty, Program Review Coordinator and Data Coach Lead, Reedley College

Speaker Bios:

• Amanda Taintor is the faculty coordinator of instructional design, Distance Education and Outcomes, for Reedley College. In addition to her current faculty responsibilities as an instructional designer, Amanda has written and managed multiple HSI and state grants for Reedley College. She is highly passionate about Open Education and the adoption of openly licensed resources to support equity on campuses. Before these roles, Amanda taught as a full-time child development instructor for eight years at Reedley College. Amanda serves on the Reedley College institutional effectiveness committee, the strategic planning committee, and numerous district committees centered on using technology in instruction.
• Jennifer Paris is the chair for the Early Childhood Education department at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California and a Regional Lead for the Academic Senate for the California Community College’s Open Educational Resources Initiative. She is passionate about creating equitable environments in online education that support student empowerment and success. She is active in OER, coordinating the development of an online early childhood education pathway for students with zero textbook costs and has authored or co-authored four OER textbooks. She is also helping sustain collaboration in sharing of resources and pedagogy for early childhood education faculty statewide.
• Julie Kehoe has been a full-time faculty member at Reedley College since 2016 and math faculty at Merced College for seven years before coming to Reedley. As Program Review coordinator, she leads the Program Review and Assessment Committee and is an active member of the Reedley College Council committee. Ms. Kehoe designed and now facilitates the data coach certification course for the College and currently is the data coach lead. Currently, she leads two faculty inquiry groups devoted to supporting faculty in exploring and implementing equitable grading and assessment practices.

Session Info:

Within these unique contexts, each instructor will outline their process of creating courses focused not on the cumulation of points as a determining factor of learning but skill and outcome mastery. The presentation will outline the utilization of student self-evaluation of learning, redesign of course policies, and a course narrative consistently returning to support of learning instead of “how many points until you pass.” The presentation begins by covering the orienting principles each instructor based their course from and how those principles were communicated to students efficiently and effectively in a fully online and asynchronous environment. Connections between the approaches of ungrading and mastery-based grading will be made throughout the presentations and how they diverged in each course.

The presentation aims not to present a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a more equitable learning assessment or the application of ungrading or mastery-based grading. Instead, each instructor can outline what they discovered was the best application for their unique online course structures. Each instructor will share their lessons learned and the changes made from one semester to the next as they discovered what worked, what failed miserably, and what needed tweaking. Even with the unique application of each instructor, and the unique forms of assessment designed and implemented, attendees will walk away with uniting principles connecting the applications of concepts in each online course.

Session Outcomes:

• Understand the basic principles of ungrading and mastery-based grading as applied to fully online courses.
• Learn changes to basic course policies to implement more equitable assessment practices.
• Be introduced to practices to create a culture of learning in an online course.

Session Resources:

A Tale of Triumph TAINTOR

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