Develop Soft Skills Without Including Them in the Grade

Intent

To remove soft skills from grades and establish the connection between soft skills and academic performance, so that students enhance their intrinsic motivation to develop those soft skills for improving their academic performance.

Problem

Soft skills, such as self-regulation, meeting deadlines, cooperation, etc., are non-academic skills and behaviors that students should learn and are important for students’ success in the professional world. In traditional grading, evaluation of students’ performance in the soft skills are considered as part of the grade. This creates the following problems:

• It makes grades inequitable as it no longer accurately represents students’ academic performance in the course.
• It makes grade less transparent and unclear as grades on soft skills are often added holistically and are subjective and biased.
• Grading soft skills, make it independent from the academic performance. Students often try to be compliant of the soft skill to earn points rather than understanding that the soft skill, such as meeting deadlines or asking questions in class, could lead to their academic success.
• Penalizing soft skills misrepresents the real world, making it seem harsh and unfair.

Solution

Following are the ways equitable grading can help students achieve soft skills and self-regulation. These will equip students with skills necessary for self-assessment that will lead to developing a sustainable assessment system.

• Creating a community of feedback: Foster a classroom community where feedback - from peers, oneself, and teachers - is an integral part of learning. This happens when the responsibility for evaluation and feedback is shared between instructors and students. Empowered with the knowledge and ability to provide meaningful feedback, students gain greater control over their learning. They also develop essential soft skills, including giving constructive feedback, listening and reflecting on input, and self-assessing progress toward their goals.
• Using student trackers and goal-setting: This structured process allows students to document their progress over time while developing essential soft skills. A student tracker enhances soft skill growth by: 1) encouraging students to take responsibility for recording and monitoring their performance, 2) fostering reflection on their actions and how they influence outcomes, and 3) empowering them through a structured cycle of goal-setting, action-taking, and outcome evaluation. By using trackers, students gain a sense of ownership and control over their learning. This method shifts grades from being teacher-controlled and seemingly arbitrary to something students can actively influence through self-assessment, planning, and reflection. These processes help students to develop soft skills - such as setting goals, taking responsibility and reflecting on their progress - to enhance their graded performance, eliminating the need to grade soft skills separately. Student trackers foster metacognitive skills, helping students recognize the link between soft skills and performance. They enable students to identify strengths and weaknesses, focus on areas for improvement, reinforce a growth mindset, and enhance motivation.

Applicability

This approach is adaptable to different class sizes, courses, and structures, providing instructors with flexibility on how to implement it. Below are some examples.

How to Implement

• Creating a community of feedback: To foster a feedback-driven learning environment, instructors should develop rubrics that clearly define expectations for academic performance. These rubrics empower students to assess their own and peers’ work objectively. Instructors should guide students in providing constructive feedback rather than judgmental comments, using tools like sentence starters and role-playing exercises to refine their feedback skills. Instructors can also help students learn how to sift through the feedback and identify next steps and goals to improve performance – an important soft skill.

  Beyond performance, rubrics can also define essential soft skills, such as such as ‘staying on task’, and ‘collaborating effectively’, making behavioral expectations explicit and transparent. Students and teachers can share examples of different behaviors and identify where those fall in the rubric. Teacher can use the rubric to assess students and provide feedback on their soft skills and students can use the same rubric to access their group’s collective behavior or their own behavior and compare these assessments. This structured approach helps to create a classroom community that has a shared understanding of soft skills, which empowers students, and the relationship between teachers and students are strengthened.

  The source provides an example of a soft-skill rubric on schoolwide Habits of Scholarship from the Windsor Locks Middle School in Connecticut.

• Using student trackers and goal-setting: One way to use this tracker is for students to set performance goals for each criterion in an assignment rubric and compare their targets to their actual performance. This process fosters soft skills such as goal-setting, self-assessment, reflection, and continuous improvement, helping students identify weaknesses and focus on areas for growth.

  A variation of this approach includes tracking homework performance, identifying improvement strategies, recording subsequent results, and reflecting on the impact of their efforts. Teachers can offer guidance on actionable steps students can take before their next assessment, further supporting their progress.

  The source provides an example Writing Performance Tracker sheet.

See Also

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Source

Source: Feldman, J. (2023). Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms. Corwin Press.

Described by: Debarati Basu, basud@erau.edu

References

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