Transcending the Number: Foundational Incentives for Meaningful Engagement

I empathize with Kohn’s argument that grades are not necessary with the potential to distract from the larger questions of learning or deeper engagement. Of course some kind of reporting/assessment is required, but the positions against grades overlook their fundamental utility as springboards to larger questions, tasks, and education. For me, grades are merely a piece in my toolkit to foster reflection and meaningful engagement with questions beyond mere content.

Kohn’s position on the need to ditch grades on the surface seems compelling, but firsthand experience in my courses suggests otherwise. Rather, grades play an important role in shaping my pedagogy, namely less as a disciplinary tool (i.e., to impose a rationalized order), but as a starting point from which students are encouraged to move beyond. Students want – and need – to perform well in school (and this means assessment), but this is not the sole motivation. No, grades are one of the means to the end I seek – student investment in and reflection on wider questions and issues related to the readings, activities, and even assignments.

Grades are merely one incentive in many, but they are not what holds attention. The actual structure and/or content of the assignments, readings, papers, and tests are what sparks and maintains student interest, and thus offer avenues for deeper engagement. Per our discussion at the last session, I planned an “extra credit” film screening for students in my Arab-Israeli Dispute course this evening. I told students they would earn two (2) extra credit points (out of a total 200 points for the course), if they a) show up (and stay for two hours) and b) write a basic one-page response to the film: Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork (a critical analysis of the history, symbolism, advertisements, politics, and historiography of the storied Jaffa Orange).

Now, I underscored to them that the primary reason for the screening was student engagement – I emphasized that the bonus points were merely an added incentive, the real benefit they would gain from the screening was the post-screening discussion. Again, I told them they would need to stay for the entire 2 hours (the film is 1.5 hours), meaning we had thirty minutes for discussion. Several of the students expressed interest, but only twelve (out of 40) showed up. Nevertheless, those who did engaged in a lively discussion and reflection on the meaning of the film to their own interests, the course content, and their lives. In those moments I saw the student facade drop to give way to curiosity, self-reflection, teasing out patterns and connecting aspects of the film to their own lived experiences. One of the students said she would “never look at an orange or any fruit in an advertisement in the same way” after the screening. While this may be hyperbole, the main point was moving beyond course content for wider engagement.

OK, the symbolic two extra credit points brought them to the screening (or perhaps curiosity, I will never know and they may not, either (humans are complex)), but that premise was the foundation for a meaningful engagement. This helped me to realize that grades are not an exclusive incentive, but may be wielded as a salient entry point into wider explorations and deeper engagements that correspond to their lived experiences. While I sought to build this in to all of the assignments, I encountered this firsthand this evening.

I think our task, then, is less to teach “imagination” to our students, but rather to reimagine our own role as teachers who do not just wield grades as disciplinary tools (to impose an order on students), but as avenues to facilitate meaningful student engagements (or “imagination” as a reflexive tool), and to grade accordingly based on those engagements. I recognize this entails a bit more work (for instructors), but ask yourself: what was a meaningful class when you were an undergraduate? What kind of assignment would you like to complete? What are the lessons you hope your students take away from your course? While I fully realize using grades as a basic foundational incentive from which to build toward deeper engagements will not work all of the time or would be more successful in disciplines premised on subjective engagement, the use of grades provides a foundational incentive from which to inspire is an important consideration for student empowerment. To do so, we need less of the absolutist banishment of grades, and more reflection on the ways that grades – and other activities or class sessions – provide gateways to meaningful student engagement that goes beyond course content.

What, Why… ok! but How?

Since the beginning of the GEDI course, we have learned several pedagogical practices to apply as current TA’s or for our future carriers. Form my personal experience, answering the questions What?, Why?, and How? have helped me to understand different concepts and apply theories into real life practices (personal and profesional).

So far, I have enough materials to start answering the questions for the What and Why pedagogical science have the potential to transform educational teaching practices.  In this blog I will share some found responses during the past 5 weeks, and leave open other questions with the purpose to find more answers.

What and Why?:

(To apply)

  • Try over and over again till you achieve the objective (Baby Gorge video) to break the barriers of the unkown.
  • Facilitate experiential learning to support students in applying their knowledge and conceptual understanding to real-world problems and situations.
  • Use innovative tools to engage the imagination, such as: digital sources, social media, blogs, twitter, videos, etc. to engage.
  • Promote curiosity, practices related to noticing new things and drawing distinction, new ideas, to encourage mindful and avoid mindless learning, among students.
  • Avoid incentives when rules are not clear or there are not a single solution or clear tsk . On the contrary, motivate to achieve autonomy on learning, promote desire of getting better and better to reach mastery, and seed purpose to for something larger.
  • Think about the grading system and evade diminishing student’s interest, preference of the easiest tasks and low quality thinking, that often performances are to reach a certain grade (extrinsic). Contrarily, motivate desire to learn for its own sake (intrinsic).

How?:

(To get it done)

The hands-on moment! Answering to this will help to apply theories and concepts in authentic circumstances. Literature suggests some answers, However I still have doubts under this question.

  • How to defeat the grading system? How to assess students performance being fair? How to ensure the desired level of knowledge among the students? How to create the right environment to impulse students creativity and desire to learn for its own sake?

Any thoughts????

About the Author

Sofia Rincon Gallardo Patino, is the secretary of the LAIGSA (Latina American and Iberic Graduate Students Association) organization at Virginia Tech. 

 

Hide my grade, so I can get my A!

I am very passionate about this week’s topics. To me, while grades play an important role in the education system, their role can also be misinterpreted to generate negative outcomes from the educational system. Grades have always been a good part of my education, and I have always link my progress of a class to the grades I make. Sometimes people complain that grades are not a reflection about how much you know or understand the class material, or how much you have studied int he process.

To me, grades play an important role in assessing how much material that your instructor wants you to, are you able to retrieve in a specific manner. i think grades, in general, are a good self indicator of your knowledge or an assessment of where do you need to work more. Getting a B in a test, to me, indicates that there is some material that I have not learn it yet, or that I need to revise it again. To me, this is a self-reflection process; which means that you can reflect and learn from a grade to improve in your next challenges. I think that grades help one-self to address issues for improvement.

On the other hand, grades have taken a different role, and they have become the way to evaluate and compare the final knowledge/outcome of an individual in comparison to the rest of the classmates. Nowadays we have distributions about how many A’s or B’s should a class have. It may seem that grades have taken over the overall education assessment.

Grades should play as an external motivator agent for the individual to self-assessment rather than for group placing. There is a case in Quito, where in 2000, an elementary school tried and experimented a new methodology where motivation came from the thrill of playing and not so much for the grades of tests. This was an experimental school where kids learned about math by playing to go grocery shopping, or learned language and grammar by writing letters to Santa, or play that their job is to respond to petitions, etc. This was a successful experiment, and the school became famous for it pedagogical methods. Perhaps it was too futuristic because no other schools adopted such methodology, but that school was recognized for its positive approaches to student learning.

Similarly in the real life work. There is the case of the Chilean State Bank that replaced the Human-resources department for a Happiness department. The goal was to reduce the turnover they were facing due to stress and other negative effects typical of banking jobs. More info here (oops, ti is in Spanish): https://massnegocios.com/rodrigo-rojas-foncillas-gerente-de-felicidad-bancoestado-microempresas-s-a-chile/. The results were splendid! The new purpose was to understand people and support them as part of a family, and not to treat them as workers who must finish specific tasks in a certain time.

Perhaps it is time to rethink grades from rewards that “narrow our view and let us focus to achieve it quicker; into creative, conceptual kind of concept.

Let’s reassess how we assess

Ah, assessment. While complaining about my two-semester assessment course all of last year, I actually appreciate it today. I don’t quite grasp assessment enough to make a career out of it, but I know now that a career in higher education requires an understanding of assessment. And I don’t just mean knowing different research methods or spitting out definitions of external and internal validity. I mean understanding that assessment can be flawed, biased, and not necessarily helpful to student learning.

Assessment also comes in many forms. It’s grades, GPA, student demographic data, student engagement, student satisfaction, student involvement, etc. While it’s critical to assess all of these things and more, it’s important for educators to fully comprehend such assessments. To me, the biggest concern with any form of assessment is that a student is producing some outcome, whether it’s a paper to be graded or a answering questions for a qualitative interview, and that outcome can’t ever fully explain student learning. I get that it’s near impossible to perfect measuring something like learning, but I know we can do better.

I’ve loved readings and videos this week about motivation, because so much of learning comes down to motivation. A student may get a perfect score on a test, but if they weren’t genuinely motivated to learn the subject, it’s likely that they’ll forget all the information as soon as the test is turned in. When we’re “learning” to pass a test, it all comes down to memorization. Sure, grades are a motivating factor for many students, myself included. I work hard for the grade, but I work harder because I truly love learning and I want to benefit from it.

I’ll end with a personal assessment/motivation story: Sophomore year of college, I decided to minor in Economics. I hate math and I’m not good at it. But the conversations I had about economics in other classes intrigued me, and I wanted to pursue it. So I took my first class with a professor who I’d heard was extremely difficult but a great teacher. After struggling the whole semester, and ending with a B, I was confident I could keep going with economics. I suffered through the math components of my other econ classes, but still enjoyed learning the subject. My final semester of econ was coming up and I wanted to take one more class with that challenging professor. People tried really hard to talk me out of it, telling me most people fail or end up dropping. Well, I got a C in the class, barely. But the way that professor taught was more about facing a challenge as best you can than it was about acing the class. He graded tests fairly, and even gave credit to explanations of formulas when you couldn’t remember it. He showed me that learning (and grading) shouldn’t reward regurgitating information, but rather an appreciation of effort and thought. It killed my GPA, but it solidified my love of learning. Thanks Dr. Moul!

 

A tale of two brothers: Inseparable at birth, separated by assessments

There were once two brothers, let’s call them Steve and Harry. They were born into a middle-class Indian family in 1989, separated by 5 minutes. It was a different world back then, exciting times. H.W. had just become President, Exxon Valdez was about to devastate the North Pacific and Alaskan Coastline with an oil spill, and the Berlin Wall was going to come crashing down later in the year, lifting the iron curtain over half of the world. When the brothers were 2 years old, the heavily regulated Indian economy was liberated from the socialist clutches of the Government, bringing unprecedented economic growth to the country. Indian middle-class was about to witness a radical change in the standards of living and the recent events had ensured that the brothers would receive the best possible education and a world of opportunity. All was well.

Steve and Harry went to the same schools, were in the same classes, had the same group of friends and were, in other words, inseparable. By middle school, it is clear that Steve is “better” than Harry, as he is always top of the class and has a near-photographic memory, perfect for memorizing everything and dumping it in the exams. Harry, on the other hand, is barely scraping by in school as he is “stubborn and doesn’t want to study”. Steve gets pampered and has access to everything, while Harry suffers in silence. No one knows that Harry has a genius for pattern recognition and numbers speak to him. He can see trends and relationships where others can’t, but he has nothing to show for it, except for his above-average math scores. Recognizing what Harry is good at, would be asking too much from assessments which assign arbitrary numbers to students based on how well they can memorize.

It is April of 2005. The brothers are now 16 and in the 10th grade. This year is extremely important and could “make or break their careers”, people around them can’t seem to stop reminding them. At the end of the school year, they will take the “Board Exams”, which are administered to millions of students by the central education board. The purpose of this is to sort the students based on their scores in at least 5 3-hour exams and limit their options for the last two years of schooling based on it. The top students can pick from any of the 3 streams – science, commerce, and humanities. Who are we kidding, this is India and if you make the mistake of being good at taking exams, you have to pick science, or your parents will pick it for you. Undergraduate degree eligibility will be limited based on this hierarchical system where students who picked science in high school can pursue any degree, while the peasants in humanities are limited to humanities degrees.

It is May of 2006. Steve and Harry, along with hundreds of thousands of others, await the results of the board exams. Steve, as expected aced the exams achieving 95%, while Harry barely scraped by with 62%. Their parents are elated for how well Steve did, and are worried about what Harry will do in life.

It is June of 2006. There is sort of mad rush to sign up for limited spots in science for 11th grade in most schools. The brothers’ parents are able to get Steve admitted to a top private school to study science and eventually pursue engineering. They have high expectations from Steve. But Steve doesn’t want to study science. He has a passion for English literature. He devours works of the likes of Hemingway, Eliot, Shaw and, Yeats. But he did so well in the board exams. How can his parents let him make the mistake of not picking science? Fights and arguments ensue. The parents win. Steve enrolls to study science. Harry has no choice but to study humanities. No reputable school will allow him to study science or commerce. But he wants to study math. He got a perfect score in math in the board exams. The schools don’t care. Their policy is to look at the percentage score and not individual subjects. Harry’s parents try and finally give up. Harry enrolls to study humanities. The brothers are separated for the first time in 10 years. They go to different schools, take different classes, have different friends. Both brothers are miserable, and the assessments have claimed two more victims.

It is August of 2008. Steve is about to join a private university to study computer engineering. He “wasted” too much time in the last two years reading novels and hasn’t done as well as his parents hoped. He can’t get into the top public universities in India, so an expensive private university is the only option. Harry is getting ready to move to the UK. He has an uncle who wants him to come and work in his restaurant and is willing to help him go to college in London. Harry is determined to find a way to study math. The past two years have been tough, but there is hope now that the brothers are moving out.

It is 2017. A lot has happened in the past 9 years. Harry is now running his uncle’s restaurant in West London, as uncle is ill and can no longer do it on his own. He enrolled in college but had to drop out as it was too expensive and he was in too much debt. He is doing a decent job managing the restaurant and makes enough to lead a mediocre life. His passion for math was long forgotten. Steve is furiously typing his way through a complex piece of python code. He is on a deadline and needs to deliver this module to his client in the US in a few hours. It is the middle of the night, he is in a dimly lit office, in a generic IT company in India. He hates his job, but it pays the bills. His passion for literature was long forgotten. One brother adds to the statistics of Indians who left the country in search of better lives, and the other adds to the statistics of Indians stuck in IT jobs with minimal growth.

There were once two brothers, inseparable at birth, separated by 5,000 miles. What if they were born in a different time, in a different place? What if the assessments were better suited to figure out what they were good at? What if someone had looked beyond their scores and encouraged them? What if there were no scores at all? What if….

Alright, if you are still reading, I will let you in on a secret: I made this story up. I used it as a means to channel my frustration and anger at the education system in India. The sad part is, India has 1.3 billion people and there probably are thousands of Steves and Harrys out there.

Education and Empowerment

Alfie Kohn elaborates on the effects of how an educational grading system can be problematic for student learning, as well as it can reduce the quality of students’ thinking. From my point of view, Kohn’s analysis arises as a consequence of educating people so they can get a job, but not to empower them.

Empowerment is defined as the authority or power an individual has to control one’s life and claim one’s rights (Conger & Kanungo, 1988). However, this complex construct can be understood by both the economic growth and the capabilities approach. Within the economic growth approach, development is associated with efficient economic growth and productive forms of market participation (Keleher, 2007). In this context, empowerment is the ability of a person to make market-related decisions and autonomously control his/her economic status (Keleher, 2014).

On the other hand, empowerment within the capabilities approach is a process of expansion of the substantive freedom people enjoy, and it relates to an individual’s ability of being freely to perform in life (Keleher, 2014; Sen, 2011). This approach positions empowered people as owners not only of their economic activities but also as owners and managers of all the different spheres of life (Alexander, 2008). Additionally, unlike the economic-growth perspective, in order to achieve a lifestyle that a person has reasons to value, empowerment cannot be delivered by anybody, but it can only be achieved by individuals their-self (Conger & Kanungo, 1988), and each individual has to do it at his/her own pace (Rowlands, 1995).

Based in those two delineations, I consider essential to understand that education is a process in which students can get the tools they need to get empowered so they can achieve the lives that they want. Seems to me, that an education system which focus on its majority in the importance of grading, is a system that will be limited to prepare students so they can get a job, accordingly to the economic growth perspective. Consequently, by realizing that any education system should go beyond numbers and grades, and by focusing more on student’s learning experiences, education will be about empowering students so they can find the tools they need to make their difference in the world.

 

References:

Alexander, J. M. (2008). Capabilities and social justice: The political philosophy of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=H4DcWEDqAngC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Alexander,+J.+M.+(2008).+Capabilities+and+social+justice:+The+political+philosophy+of+Amartya+Sen+and+Martha+Nussbaum.+Ashgate+Publishing,+Ltd&ots=I2mZsvg5Gp&sig=Z9I7DrTWlDOsYF_FT1mCVw703eo

Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1988). The empowerment process: Integrating theory and practice. Academy of Management Review, 13(3), 471–482.

Keleher, L. (2007). Empowerment and international development. Retrieved from http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/7584

Keleher, L. (2014). Sen and Nussbaum: Agency and Capability-Expansion1. Retrieved from https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/10936

Rowlands, J. (1995). Empowerment examined. Development in Practice, 5(2), 101–107

Sen, A. (2011). The idea of justice. Harvard University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OM4RBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=Sen,+A.+(2011).+The+idea+of+justice.+Harvard+University+Press&ots=0soNdLyTdy&sig=vB8F0R0yo6Y_yNn9zuUbkXk4XzE

 

Grades shutting down student interests

The opportunity given students to take electives at college allows them to explore and awaken interests, and to acquire new views on topics. General education classes offered stimulate intellectual interests and offer students a broader understanding of the world through the introduction of material  that they would not necessarily be exposed to within classed associated with their majors. In picking elective classes, students are inclined to classes that are interesting to them, ones taught by professors with excellent teaching reputation, or, unfortunately, ‘easy’ classes to merely complete the requirement.

Current student evaluations of their teachers in higher education are biased and the metric they have are difficult to assess teaching with. In fact, with support implying that expected grades have a positive effect on course evaluations, evaluations in some cases have lead to a negative effect on teaching quality as biases in evaluation provide professors incentives for grade inflation further leading to a misrepresentation of student learning.

Regardless of learning expectations the choice of ‘easy’ classes plays a major role as students pick their classes. This is particularly clear as students recommend classes and professors to other students merely depending on workload and grades. Such classes are commonly known as ‘easy A’ classes that give students more time for other pursuits without risking their grade point average. Hence, factors resulting from detrimental issues of grade inflation impel students to choose easy classes over ones that allow the engagement in genuine intellectual interests and prepare them for their careers.

WHAT DOES A GRADE MEAN?

Grading, as a major assessment approach in education nowadays, is used to evaluate the students’ performance in classes. Combining the grades for all classes together, each student has a GPA, which is used to evaluate if a student is good at studying. If someone has a GPA of 3.9, he/she is considered studying better than a student has a GPA of 2.9.

It might be true when the difference in GPA between two students is significant. However, when the difference becomes smaller, say 3.9 vs 3.8, can we make the same conclusion? The student with a GPA of 3.8 may take a class offered by a harsh professor, who usually give low grade. The student with a GPA of 3.9 may intently avoid tough classes to keep a high GPA. There are so many factors that can affect students’ GPA.

A question I have been thinking a lot since college is what does a grade tell us. It seems to me that GPA almost always weigh the most in Graduate School admission and fellowship/award application. If someone have a good GPA, his/her chance of being accepted by top schools is high. Does a higher grade indicate a student is more intelligent or what? I am very confused about this.


6:30 pm: will you give me an A+?

Today is Sunday, according to the calendar we use to “track” the pass of time, and also based on my current location, because in Europe/Africa, Monday is already starting. Here in Blacksburg, VA, it is 5:15 pm, and I still have some time left to publish this post and make it available to the GEDI community to “make it count”, otherwise my efforts might not receive a corresponding grade. Previously, by this time, I would have already published something, but this weekend was different. For multiple reasons I got derailed from reading and writing, and no, not because I can skip one post (apparently no more than one), simply because I did not feel like doing it, although I always had on mind to write before the deadline, which is why I finally started the readings and now trying to write. What time is it? It is 5:25 pm.

Ten minutes of my life have gone writing the introductory paragraph, and I have the option to erase it and lose the precious time, or leave it as it is and just keep writing, hoping that it was good to keep you reading… But if you decide to leave, then, I guess I am lucky that this post is not being assessed by the number of comments (or is it?), and there is no way to know how many people have read it (or is there a way?), in fact, I have no clue how it is graded at all. But if time spent writing could be a criterion in my grade, then let me share with you, it is 5:34 pm. Which means that I am writing a paragraph every 10 minutes more or less.

It is likely that time spent doing the assignment cannot be used to grade, and that is good, because each person takes different paths to accomplish something. For some it might take a long time, while others are able to convey a clear message really fast. Some might need to erase and erase until the desired product has been achieved, others might have a natural easiness and clear vision from the first time. I could go on and on with examples of how people learn differently or how tasks are done differently, and could potentially site research related to this, and yet, no matter how many situations have been described, all students are typically evaluated the same way: same test, same time limit, same grading scale, etc… is this fair? By the way, it is 5:44 pm.

Alfie Kohn, author of “The Case Against Grades” (2011) and other articles, provides a nice narrative to this case, and is striking that some of what he discusses is not new. Some of the thoughts that caught my attention in respect to the effects of grading are:

  • A danger in grading is that students would not take intellectual risks to avoid failing a class
  • The competition between classmates leading to fear of failure and cheating
  • No desire to learn, rather desire to simply pass…. There is no real motivation towards learning

It is 5:54 pm, and comparatively speaking, the lines immediately above kind of resemble a paragraph, so it seems I am being consistent in my writing speed, perhaps this could be a measure of assessment?

I have no idea what you might think is the reason for me sharing the time after each paragraph is completed, what I do know, is that whatever you think it is, you have a very high chance of being wrong. Therefore, if you were grading this post based on how much non-relevant details were included, you could not (or should not) take any deductions for me sharing the time… and that takes me to reflect how in previous grading that I have done, I used to scratch parts of lab reports written by students, with aside comments like: “this is not necessary”, “you are wasting paper” and even if I didn’t necessarily took points of from their assignment for “excessive” writing, I did truncate in a way their learning process. Likely, I framed future reports to be within certain constraints, and that could have resulted in future poor performance by avoiding key words with the fear of being too much. It is 6:05 pm.

So, to clarify the reason to keep writing the time, in case I could be judged for including non-relevant information: I felt like doing so. Liu and Noppe-Brandon (2009) point out to the value of “imagination first”. I have to admit that while writing this post, I never imagined that it would take me 10 minutes per paragraph, I did however, imagined how I wanted to share my thoughts on Kohn’s article and how I wanted to finish my last paragraph discussing the power of imagination. But, I have run into a problem, it is 6:15 pm, which means that the time I have allotted myself to write this post has come to an end. Will I be penalized for my honesty?

Ok, I didn’t want to just cut today’s journey like that, because I do have some more inquiries to share: Have teachers become “killers” of potential great student’s ideas? Is the education system promoting the assassination of imagination? Is the “job market/world” dictating how learning should occur? Sometimes it seems like that is the reality, and even though I believe that student’s performance, especially in engineering and medicine must be evaluated, to make sure that someone’s life will not be at risk. I do have to admit, that assigning numbers or letters, and ranking students by performance does not sound like the best alternative after all.

Ok, it is 6:25 pm, time to choose a title for this post, publish and move on…

Let’s keep learning. Let’s keep educating. Let’s keep moving forward. Let’s keep asking WHY. Let’s continue to be more MINDFUL… give me an A+ ? … and then let’s discuss how to remove grades from the education system… 6:30 pm

Carlos F. Mantilla P.

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