Category: Week 4 – Assessment

I am all for de-emphasizing grades in school, from kindergarten to college. I think that the focus on outcomes to the exclusion of all else (including actual learning) has caused a mess in our grade schools and high schools. I, like many others, am tired of hearing, “Will this be on the test?” and I applaud the efforts of teachers who have eliminated most grading altogether, as mentioned in “The Case Against Grades” by Alfie Kohn.

That being said, I don’t know how to make it work in my field. It seemed that the examples in the Kohn article were mostly from humanities fields, talking about giving feedback on subjective assignments like essays. There is no right or wrong answer on things like that. You can make grammatical mistakes, but that may be less important than the content of the essay as a whole. How could this be applied to science- or math-based disciplines, where the material is often more objective?

I currently TA a class that is very math-intensive (specifically linear algebra). On a particular quiz, students may be demonstrating their ability to apply a specific algorithm they learned that week. If they apply the algorithm wrong – that is, if they follow the wrong steps or do them in the wrong order – what kind of feedback could I give beyond showing them how to do it correctly? That’s not particularly substantive – they’ve seen those demonstrations in class, their notes, and their textbook. Would that be enough to impress upon them the importance and urgency of learning the algorithm correctly? As is the case with many classes, the topic of the next quiz, a week later, builds upon the algorithm being tested.

I think that sometimes an assessment that has a real impact, like a grade, may be necessary to motivate students to learn foundational topics. I would hate to see a student struggle later in the class because they didn’t understand the early material and “didn’t think it was that important.” Any thoughts?

“Ok class, clear your desks and take out a blank sheet of paper.”

That sentence still sends terrifying shivers down my spine. I remember the countless times I heard this statement all through my learning career. Those words should not be so scary, but we became conditioned to know that it meant a pop quiz, a test, or something to assess our level of skill or knowledge would shortly begin. So conditioned that today it still sets off a PTSD type hypersensitive moment, where I immediately think “Oh please let me remember everything”!

Would it not be great, if our students today could get excited by hearing this request from their instructor? Perhaps curiously thinking what kind of exciting journey will be taken where we need to clear off space and have a blank canvas? Unfortunately, we are still steeped in a world full of testing, assessment, standardized learning, and focusing on a student’s ability to regurgitate information in a specific way.

However, fortunately, there is a wind of change starting to blow. Minds like Alfie Kohn in The Case Against Grades who are pointing out how assessment is undermining a true desire for learning. Or like Eric Liu and Scott Noppe-Brandon who in 2009 reminded us to keep the flame of imagination alive in their book Imagination First: Unlocking the power of possibility. Reading these works, and several others, give me hope that one day students will learn for the education of it, rather than how well they perform on standardized tests.

Let me say just a few things about testing and the killing of imagination. I do not test well, especially on standardized testing.  Then imagine layering that anxiety over top of the thought of the results determining how my future may unfold based on how high my test score outcomes. So I boycotted. Yep, I totally did. Did not take the SAT. Still got into college. Did not take the GRE. Still got my master’s. Got into a PhD program at a pretty impressive school (ahem, VT)….but I did need the GRE. Which I did finally take, but was a formality of getting in; so I felt no pressure for scoring. All that said, I think I’m doing fairly well without the percentile ranking lurking in my virtual file.

I also remember being a senior in high school at a career fair where a female interior designer told me to my face (at 16 years of age) that it was too late for me to choose that career because I did not have the background. That felt like a slap to my face. Needless to say, I am not an interior designer. Good thing she was not a counselor. That was something I began my specific formal training for at age 34. And here I am today, still continuing to educate myself.

What got me to this point was not mapped out curricula, standardized testing, plotted target dates with specific goals, or grooming from Kindergarten to be sure of my education path. What did get me here was my life experiences, my curiosity, my desire to learn more about what fed my passions, and a lifelong goal to learn because I WANTED to know more. There is no test to prove my worth. No test to measure the value in what I have learned. We need to get back to feeding the want to learn rather than teaching our students how to jump through hoops to measure what someone else deems valuable.

What do you think? Should we be placing more value on the process of learning and education versus measuring the outcomes of canned educative studies? And if so how do we inspire the learning in better, truly valuable ways?

 

In my last blog post, I talked about several problems in Iranian educational system. In this post, I want to clarify some of my points.

The first problem regarding to admission process for college studies in Iran is high inequality of opportunity in the system. As the country becomes richer and developed after the end of Iran-Iraq war, inequality increases in the country. One of the aspect of inequality which is harmful for economic growth and development of a country is inequality of opportunity. Inequality of opportunity means inequality in outcome due to circumstances beyond individuals’ control. For instance, inequality in outcome due to gender of individuals is unjust.

The university entrance exam (Concur) is one of the institutions in Iran education system which causes improvement in inequality of opportunity. Based on “Trends in Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) test (which is again a standard test but at least it gives us a measure to compare students worldwide!) Iran has great index of inequality of opportunity (IOP) in education outcome in the Middle East. This exam is held for students in eighth grade both in mathematics and science and Iran’s score in IOP is one of the largest one in the region. Although we don’t have access to data of Concur, the education system mechanism stimulate IOP in education outcome as students move forward in education system from one grade to upper grade. I try to explain the intuition behind that mechanism here.

All families and students know that if they want to be successful, they should be good in multiple choice exam and they should understand all high school materials in a way to answer entrance exam questions in the shortest time. So having a good skill in taking an exam with lots of multiple choice questions is vital. In addition, if a student gets admission from top ten university, she/he can be hopeful to get good job after graduation or have a chance to continue her/his education abroad. So those students who have educated parents or their parents can support them financially to go to good private high schools have more chance to be successful in Concur. While we know parental income or parental education is beyond an individual’s control and as a result it causes IOP.

The second problem related to Concur system is killing innovation and creativity among high school students. Those talented and diligent high school students prefer to study as much as they can during high school to get good points in Concur. At the end of the day, they will rank based on their scores in Concur, so there is no incentive among high school students to be creative, do innovative research, or be active in sport, art, and other extracurricular activities. I don’t want to say that high school students do not do these activities at all, my point is, ranking students just because of one score, give them a signal to be prepared for that exam only rather than doing other activities where they don’t have any point in their college admission.

The third problem is due to inefficient resource allocation due to this system. Part of this problem as I described in previous post is due to cultural problem but the other part is because of education system. When the system gives a signal to high school students that engineering and medical science is good, and then most of good students prefer to go to engineering school or medical school. Since each student can register and take Concur in only one field (Math, biology, Humanities, Art) even if the student finds engineering or medical studies boring and beyond his/her interest, he/she has long and hard time to change his/her major. If the student wants to quit the engineering college for instance and studies in sociology in the middle of his undergraduate studies, he should take Concur again in humanities field which is very risky and stressful. So if a person becomes disappointed by his undergraduate studies, most of people will decide to finish their undergraduate studies and earn a bachelor degree and continue in a field he really likes in graduate school (in Master’s level) which means that person loses at least 2 or three years of his life and his precious youth time. In addition, some of excellent universities in Iran do not offer courses in all fields. For instance Sharif University which is one the most prestigious and well known universities in Iran, is a polytechnic university and courses are offered only in Math, Physics, Chemistry and engineering fields, so if a student is in Sharif University, which means that student is really talented and diligent, s/he does not have any chance to be familiar with sociology, law, political science or even biology and business majors. As a result, that student might be very successful if s/he had a chance to study in business majors, but due to education system, s/he ends up with mediocre outcome!

When I moved from the suburbs of New York City down to the bucolic university town of Blacksburg, Virginia for a PhD program, I expected the culture shock. What I didn’t realize was how much I would divest from my old life to be successful in the new one. Most of my campus colleagues are …

Continue reading »

I don’t know anything about Thermodynamics.

It’s true. I got an A- in Thermodynamics, but I don’t know anything about Thermodynamics.

In that class, I had a very personal experience with Alfie Kohn’s assertion:

“Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task”

When I took Thermo, 5% of the course grade was homework. After two weeks of class, I found that I was spending 3-5 hours to do each homework, and they were due 3 times a week. I was getting bogged down in those assignments and I made a choice. I decided that I wasn’t going to do homework for that class. It turned out that I was missing something that would’ve made the homework a lot easier, but I had a preference for the easiest possible task. And I chose to take a 5 point hit on my final grade to spend my time better elsewhere.

I was doing very poorly in the class, but I can test like a pro. I crammed so hard for the final and actually got a 99. The professor curved the class like crazy and now I don’t know anything about Thermo but my undergrad GPA is okay.

And I was so proud of this at the time. Nowadays, I value homework so highly. It is the place where you have to try to wrestle with the material from class and actually learn things. Homework is where you put into practice all of the crazy things your professor talks about during the lecture.

I missed out on learning something because I was thinking about grades. Have you ever done that?

At the end of last week’s post I touched on how I wanted to encourage creativity and original design, divergent thinking, etc. and laid out a few things I already do to facilitate that.

This week’s readings were nominally about assessment and grading, but they all repeated the point that students’ concerns about grades was a way to kill creativity. Dan Pink’s two videos on the science of motivation said the same thing as well: numerical or financial incentives to perform are actually counterproductive and possibly harmful when creativity and original thought is needed.

I’m definitely de-emphasizing grades in my class and in most cases they’ll either be simple completion grades or a more holistic look at someone’s work–if they applied the concepts they learned and demonstrated original thought, that warrants a high grade, regardless of the “success” of the design. Their final project grades will be based on how accurately they can interpret their own results, improve upon them, and communicate their work to myself and the rest of the class, rather than a point-by-point rubric.

I’ve been thinking of more ways to help people generate more and better ideas for their designs in class, and the one I keep coming back to is discussion and collaboration. There are few better ways to strengthen your ideas or see their vulnerabilities than being challenged. Discussion is a great way to add other perspectives into an idea and incorporate things you never thought of before.

However, there are risks to solely using discussion, with nothing else. Since everyone in the class has learned from the same lectures, you risk creating an echo chamber, where everyone come up with the same idea–the one idea that they were taught. I’m unfortunately low on real-world experience with the concepts that I’m teaching, but I’ll hopefully gain much more over the summer. Thankfully there is another grad student who has that veteran experience who sits in on the class regularly to contribute.

I definitely want to include more real-world examples and challenges in my class, like bringing in a finished casting from an actual production foundry and asking the students how it was gated. Or to acquire the gating design for a produced part and have the students improve upon it. Whether or not I’ll be able to actually get any of these real castings this semester is another issue entirely.

(To those of you who were intrigued by the title, my apologies for writing a post that does not live up to it)

I wonder sometimes – what made me to choose Liberal Arts? Why did I study Economics and English Literature in college…why didn’t I study Calculus or Chemistry? What was I thinking when I choose not to go for the Fine Arts College entrance exams? What caused me to shy away from Management School? What in the world was I thinking? What factors in my life were resulting in my choices? In simplistic terms – what was motivating my decisions?

Motivation. What a fascinating concept! When I chose Psychology as an elective in High School I was really interested in understanding people, their behavior and most of all what made them tick. Motivation can be very simply explained as what makes people tick, can’t it?!

Watching the Ted Talk by Dan Pink resulted in a Ted Talk binge and during one of the other talks I heard the words intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Lightbulb! One of my specializations during my Master’s degree in Psychology was Human Motivation. We read about the Self Determination Theory proposed by Deci and Ryan in 1985 which talks about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But why am I stuck on motivation when we, in fact, are supposed to be talking about assessment?!

Let’s think about this, could it be possible within the realm of assessment to think about assessing what makes your student tick? What is your student passionate about? What does she/he want to learn about? What would inspire them to connect the little dots of information that go from one detail to another, overlap, shadow, play tag with each other (cause nothing in education is ever simple), and what would be the result of that inspiration.

Traditionally assessment has always been thought of as an extrinsic motivator – if you do this you get that. If you study hard you will get good grades. If you get good grades you can go to any school you want. If you go to any school you want you can study anything you like. If you study anything you like and get good grades, you can get work. If you get work, then you can make money, gain status and be successful. Extrinsic, right?!

The key questions that need to be asked with regards to improving assessment in education are:

Do assessments define learning?

Do assessment results define humanity, humility and honesty?

Do assessments define intelligence?

Is a good grade only evidence of the fact that a student is paying attention in class or that she/he is involved in learning with her/his brain, body, mind and heart?

If the answer is ‘yes’, then we don’t need to talk about this anymore. But, I am guessing that the answer to these questions is probably ‘no’.

I have sat through several exams/assessments in my life. Board exams throughout my schooling years, college exams, entrance exams like the CAT (common admission test) in India, the TOEFL and the GRE. I have questioned the usefulness of these assessments in defining my intelligence, my learning and my humanity. The last time I took the GRE though I was constantly asking myself one question – “how does being able to find the value of x on a slope define how I am going to use Roger’s Person-Centered Approach in my office with a client? It won’t.

We have talked about sideways learning previously. It is an inspiring concept. Should sideways learning then result in sideways assessment and what would that look like? What would happen to entrance tests and college rankings? How would people decide who comes to their college to learn as the Class of 2020?

Too many questions and not enough answers. We have to ask ourselves, If the end result of education is the growth and development of human beings…if the end result of education is independent thinking then why do we even have assessments? All extrinsic, for the benefit of the school, the college counselor, the admission representative. Or is it a way to delay independent thinking? Are we conveying to our younger generations “slow down you are moving too fast for my comfort so I’m going to slam a number, a letter on you and say that you cannot move as quickly as you want to”. What is that teaching them and what are they learning? If we want our students to be capable of “putting knowledge into practice in creative ways” as Lombardi calls it in her paper Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning, then let us be creative with assessment. Let us start with being creative about selection procedures, college interviews and job interviews….let us use all the research being done to inform every decision. Let us start assessing intrinsically.

This requires a shift. It requires uncertainty, it requires us to think outside the box, it requires thinking on our feet and it requires us to change…..and that is a scary concept.