Mental Health, Pass-Fail Grading, Online Pedagogy

I came across an article this weekend about a provost under fire from students for an apparently callous response to their concerns about mental health, and her refusal to consider deploying pass-fail grading to alleviate student stress. I’m not particularly focused on who is right and wrong here or disentangling the various allegations around this story — instead, I want to explore some of the things it made me consider.

The story hit hard for me for many reasons — I work in higher education as both faculty and (low-level) administrator. In that seat, I am able to see first-hand the very real mental health challenges that students face — before the pandemic and now, exacerbated, afterwards. I’m also employed by a major research institution, and with colleagues across the country (Jordan Booker, Robyn Fivush, Dea Follmer Greenhoot, Kate McLean, and Cecilia Wainryb), have been working on a longitudinal study examining the impact of covid-19 on the mental health and development of first-year students from the 2019–2020 academic year — those whose first year of college was disrupted by the pandemic-related shut-downs. And, in my administrative role, I consulted our student government as they sought an expansion of pass-fail grading at our own institution. So, make no mistake: students are genuinely stressed, suffering, and struggling with the challenges of covid-19.

At the same time, institutions of higher education are, and have been, working hard to support students on multiple fronts. At my own institution, which I suspect is relatively typical, these efforts have included initiatives to provide for basic needs — food pantries, device loans to enable students to continue their education, emergency financial assistance. Institutions are making efforts around maintaining and expanding services for mental health needs. And, institutions like mine have encouraged faculty to acquire new pedagogical skills for online learning and to be flexible with students over this stressful year. CARES funding has supported these efforts, and others — like maintaining flat tuition, supplying wi-fi to parking lots, and so on.

So, why this apparent gap between institutional efforts to address student concerns — which certainly seem comprehensive and directly aimed at reducing stress, enabling academic progress, and addressing mental health — and students’ emphasis on the pass-fail grading option (at my own institution and in the context of this article) as critical to well-being? Certainly there are some obvious answers here — at large institutions, especially, getting students information about the supports available is a challenge, and institutional capacity to address mental health concerns is perpetually strained and sometimes, frankly, inadequate. But, I think there is another thing happening — and it has to do with some disconnects between the pedagogical support and advice that faculty are receiving, the experiences students are having with online classes (and the explanations they are giving themselves for those experiences), and a kind of under-addressed intersection of these two things.

Recall that elsewhere, I have pondered motivational challenges in online courses, and I concluded that figuring out relational elements in online courses was going to be really important. While I’ve not done anything particularly rigorous to examine this, students I have spoken with largely agree that they do not build relationships in online courses very easily — even when they are trying to do so, and when the course involves synchronous meetings with video interactions.

Students surveyed at my institution also noted that their biggest challenges with the online courses included motivational challenges — and I want to note that students feel responsible for managing motivation themselves. That is, when I say that I struggle with motivation for my online class, I am owning responsibility for my struggles, locating my struggles “in myself.” A lack of motivation, extended over a year of pandemic education, can start to feel so much like depression it’s hard to distinguish the two, or perhaps meaningless to do so. Further, the isolation of doing coursework in a remote, asocial way also challenges people’s capacity to feel the connections that are fundamental to mental health. So, students begin to feel like their motivational issues are mental health struggles — and in a sense, they are correct. But in another sense, these are mental health struggles that might be effectively lessened by changes in the pedagogical experience they are having in their mostly online educational experience. What changes? Changes that prioritize helping students build relationships.

In the meantime, what are faculty being told about online education? At my institution, a few things that I think will exacerbate the lack of relational elements in students’ educational experience. We have been told that 1) asynchronous online courses are superior to synchronous ones because they enable more flexibility for students; 2) asking students to keep their cameras on is not inclusive teaching practice; and 3) to be as flexible as possible about attendance and participation online. In principle, all of these pieces of advice seem very reasonable and there are crucial elements of truth to each. In practice, these also undermine the already compromised potential for relationship building to happen in online courses, and it is that relationship building that might combat motivational challenges, help students feel connected, and in the case of serious mental health struggles, enable faster provision of more significant supports.

So, I am asking myself, what might it look like if we had prioritized relationship building in our online courses right away — recognizing that online courses in a pandemic were not addressing the same population and same needs as online courses in “normal times”? It is utterly do-able to build relationships online — here are some ways that it happened at my institution. In writing courses, faculty can pair students with one another for the provision of detailed feedback on drafts throughout the term, and this builds connections and intimacy. In a course we offer called “Radical Quiet,” students experience a supportive environment, meditate together, and are encouraged by the instructor to use cameras so as to engage with one another. I recently appeared as a guest in that course, and observed students responding to one another rather than lobbing questions at me, the guest — relationships had been established that felt real and authentic. So — you may be thinking at this point that such techniques are all well and good for small courses, of the sort we offer in our Honors College. But I also heard from a student about a large class, in which the instructor had students take exams in groups of three, and work on a project together. The student noted that over the semester he came to know and feel a connection to his small group, and this was forged by common goals and the need to rely on one another. So it is do-able — but it has to be a priority and a focus, and at least at my institution — it wasn’t.

In some sense, when students are pleading for pass-fail grading, what they are really saying is that the pandemic pedagogy didn’t work for them — and that it is too late to salvage their academic record. They’re framing that plea in mental health terms — and for young adults growing up in a competitive environment with deeply uncertain economic and climate futures, it is a mental health concern. We on the faculty and in administration need to think hard about these requests — not only whether they should be granted in the moment, but also, about the things we didn’t consider earlier on, that might have made a difference for students. In the future, we might do well to ask ourselves whether what we know about good education, reputations of institutions, and what students really need, really generalizes to the situation in which we find ourselves. And when we get it wrong, as we often will, we need to own that, and try not to visit the consequences of our errors on students.