Category: Week 4 – Assessment

Reading through the articles this week, I was reminded of a class I took during my undergraduate career. The class was designed for athletic training majors and specifically related to injury assessment. Throughout the course, we had a series of practical assessments where we were given a list of competencies to get checked off. If we memorized the list from beginning to end and recited it back to the proctor you would receive an “A” in the class. However, if an athlete was truly injured I would have had trouble taking the information I memorized for that practical exam and applying it on the field.

 
A student is more than a letter grade! I feel like so many students determine their value by their grades. Providing meaningful qualitative assessment verses a simple quantitative number is much more constructive and provides authentic feedback. I also think it provides value to the student’s work. Rubrics are essentially “a chore list” designed for students that narrow their focus and cap their creativity. Students are focused on the next test and graded assignments as opposed to exploring learning independently. As both videos mentioned, motivation is sparked from autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Creating self-driven assignments/rubrics that allow students to explore learning without strict restrictions will enable students to expand their horizons. Can there be more than one correct answer? Check out this link where a student had the correct answer but was deducted points due to the methodology. Would you have marked the question wrong?

It seems many scholars nowadays have problems with the assessment of education. Their biggest concern is that present evaluating system cannot effectively measure students’ real knowledge or abilities, and thus cannot effectively encourage them to learn.

Riley questioned the “Outcomes-Based Education” and an “evidence-based” philosophy in engineering education and criticized ABET’s (Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology) recent revision of its criteria. She criticized the elimination of some broader consideration of a student’s ability such as political consciousness and professional ethics. She argued that such criteria are indeed useful and their elimination is ascribed to a rationale that these outcomes are not assessable.

Kohn, on the other hand, criticizes present grading system. According to him, grading at least has three shortcomings: it reduces students’ interests to learn, it makes students lazier by encouraging the easiest tasks, and it harms students’ quality of thinking.

Lombardi also indicates that present assessing system could make students passive information receivers who only learn the stuff that would be tested.

While all these researchers have their insights, I would add that the situations they described are largely a Western concern. In the developed world, educational resources are relatively abundant and it is not a dream for the majority to receive decent education, even college education. This is simply a luxury that most developing countries are still dreaming of. The scarcity of education resources causes a series problems, one of which is the corruption of education. In many developing countries students would know that going to a good school often means bribery in one form or another. In the end, the kids from better off families tend to enjoy better education based upon unfair competition. In this situation, objectified and standardized examinations are whole-heartedly embraced by the vast majority, because only such exams can guarantee relatively fair competition. The more “assessable” the exams are, the fairer. These education assessments very much welcome the “Outcomes-Based Education”.

Of course, the problem the third world is facing is not the reason to downplay the problem in the first world. It just provides a different view to look at the assessment of education.

How many of us are scared when they hear the word “EXAM”. I bet most of us do. The reason behind this is the stress caused by studying and digesting fair amounts of information before a predetermined date and our will to pass the exam and get good grades. The exam itself is supposed to be a way of assessing how much knowledge a student acquires in a specific course. Let’s now ask some important questions. 1) Is the time of the exam (at most 2-3 hours) sufficient to design a set of questions that can span the whole syllabus? 2) Are exams the only way of assessing our students’ learning gains? 3) Do we assess our students to just give them a semester grade or to help and guide them improve their learning?

The answer to question 1) is absolutely no. How can I test the student in a set of topics I lectured through a whole semester in just 2 hours? Of course I will not be able to design the questions in such a way that it span the whole syllabus. Accordingly, most of the time I will just focus on those important or hard topics. This is not a real assessment. Unfortunately this is the way we were assessed back home in Egypt when we were applying for university. We were given classes for a whole year and then given a standardized test for 3 hours at the end of the year!! Another way to do that which is what is usually applied these days in the US and other countries is to have midterm exams in addition to a final exam and a set of assignments or projects. This may seem as a good approach at first. Now an exam doesn’t need to span the whole syllabus which is fine and may allow the professor to better assess and improve their students. However, this adds more stress to the students since now they will have to do all the assignments and projects on time and also prepare for the midterm and final exams.

Personally I see that some sort of assessment of course is necessary, but it doesn’t need to be an exam or a strict assignment. In most Engineering disciplines, learning how to do things practically is more important than just learning about some theories or concepts and dump them in an exam without applying them. Accordingly, I believe that practical colleges should focus more on activities that span the whole semester and based on milestones. For example, students can be given a set of projects that they should work on for the whole semester. And the professor should define a set of milestones that they should accomplish and their due dates (with a bonus for those who did it early and some sort of penalty protocol for late students). If the student fail to achieve the milestone, the professor then can sit with the student and discuss with him what he did wrong and how can he better accomplish future milestones. This way, I believe students will master the practical skills required for the course at the end of the semester. On the other hand we don’t want to ignore theoretical and conceptual knowledge. Accordingly, in addition to projects, students can be given a set of assignments that are intended to measure their level of understanding after each topic with the same due date protocol as in projects. The professor now can see the performance of his students and intervene when necessary if he find a student that needs help.

Having this strategy of assessment, I believe stressful exams are not required anymore and that professors will be now more able to guide and help their students.

Open access journals can be an important part of connecting the academic world with the rest of society. These connections are important in many fields including my area of study international relations. The journal I found was E-IR ( E- International Relations). They call themselves “the world’s leading open access website for students and scholars of international politics”.

I was familiar with this resource before the assignment. I use it when I’m looking for ideas in international politics or if I need a very basic overview of an issue to refresh my memory. Because it is aimed at reaching students and individuals who may not have a lot of literacy in this discipline, the articles are written simply without the abundance of acronyms often found in IR literature.

The journal is based out of Bristol, UK and is staffed with a largely volunteer staff made up of academics, international relations practitioners, and some students. Dr. Stephen McGlinchey the Editor-in-Chief  of the journal is a senior lecturer  in IR at the University of the West of England, Bristol. The journal writes about current events and politics shaping the world today, but it also includes some articles about IR in general to help readers better understand the events they’re reading about. I think that these articles and open access journals in general, fill an important gap. Too often academic research is just reported to the same small community, they are yelling into an echo chamber. These types or resources can help give relevance and influence to research by connecting it to the general public.

Can a comedy play affect the education in a country? Unfortunately, it already happened. In Egypt, the educational system drastically changed because of “Madrasat Al-Mushaghebeen” (The School of Mischievous) play. The play was released in 1973 and was adopted from the the American movie “To Sir, with Love”. In this play, a group of five rebellious students kept failing and retaking their last year of high school. The students’ constant pranks led all the teachers to a mental breakdown which forced them to quit the school.  The play was first performed on a theater but due to its major success, it was recorded and broadcast on TV . For older people, the play was very funny. However, they did not notice that smaller kids got affected by this play and began mimicking these actions in their classrooms to gain their fellows praise. Alas, today teachers in Egypt are not much respected as in the past. I do not mean they are humiliated in classrooms, but they no more have the previous prestigious look from their students.

I remembered this sad story while I was preparing to write about a movie that discuss a great  educational pedagogy. 3 Idiots is an Indian movie which was released in 2009. In this movie, one of the actors was called “an idiot” by his professors in the university as he did not like the way they were teaching and assessing students. In a famous scene (you can watch by clicking the link), a professor asked him to define “the machine”. He gave a good definition and examples one of which was pants zipper. The professor got angry and asked “Is that what you will write in the exam?!”. The professor asked another student who gave a long definition as memorized from the book. The first student is an example of a creative mind which understands and relates things, and the later is an example of  who studies only for the exam (grade). The movie in other scenes also discussed the teaching philosophy of learning under pressure and learning for exams (grades). Finally, the movie shows what each of these students became in the future. It is needless to say that who was called an idiot became very successful in his life and that he deserved more than A+ in the college.

In his article, “The case Against Grades”, Alfie Kohn discussed the same problem of learning for grades. He mentioned that previous research has discovered that grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.  Students are less likely to wonder, say, “How can we be sure that’s true?” than to ask “Is this going to be on the test?”. The author gave good solutions for the case of grading and suggested that instead of giving letter or number grades to students, it is better to give them narrative reports about their progress. This could be hard at the begging especially for students and teachers who are used to use grades. However, experiments show that these descriptive reports helped student to learn better and not to feel pressure at all.

He also suggested a good way of giving grades, if the system insists on using them. The teacher could grab each student alone and discuss with him, according to the narrative report, the grade this student think he should get with the final word being for the teacher. This type of self assessment is being  used today in some school as a reference for students before getting their actual grades. Therefore, I think it would not be hard to apply the de-graded system using narrative reports while the self assessment could be used as a transition period.

Thinking about college, I think this type of assessment is not hard to apply at some fields like engineering. Many subjects now do not depend on exams as a source for grading. They depend on projects where students use their creativity to apply what they have learned. However, I think in some other fields this type of assessment might still not be applicable where students have to take exams.

I should confess from the beginning of this post that I am not an engineer. I have never taken an engineering class, I don’t even have any engineers in my family. But when reading Donna Riley’s  paper about engineering assessments I new exactly what she was talking about. She argues “that this immediate crisis in engineering education is the logical result of an outcomes-based approach if what we value is assessable outcomes, then anything that appears difficult to assess (whether or not it is actually difficult to assess) will be devalued, and will ultimately drop off our list of educational goals”. This is certainly true in my field of political science as well.

A study a few years back asked graduates students in the political science department to create a political utopia. They were supposed to be unhindered by any material considerations. This hypothetical exercise was meant was supposed to leverage the creativity and innovative spirit of young scholars. The results were dismal. Not one of them was able to even hypothetically propose a system that differed from the one in which they lived. Their answers instead described minor tweaks in areas like healthcare, welfare programs, and education. This example highlights that overwhelmingly student’s creativity is hindered by something much more foundational. They’re natural problem solving abilities are being crippled by a system which is weighted too much on an “outcome-based approach”. Assessments are changing what we value in the academic world and creating students with a fear of failure. Assessments are an educational tool– a tool that now dictates how we educate students. This is a ludicrous as a hammer that informs the carpenter what he can and cannot build.

I am currently reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Hermann Hesse.  It is called The Glass Bead Game (and yes, it is the inspiration for this blogs name).  It is a wonderfully rich text and is resonating particularly strongly with me because of its relevance and similarity to the current stage of my life (graduate school).  Below is a quick analysis of the novel, I plan to further develop the connection of the novel’s themes to more specific, contemporary discussions regarding public schools and higher education in a Part 2.  My hope for this post is that it will inspire educators and learners to investigate this magical story for themselves.

“No noble and exalted life exists without knowledge of devils and demons, and without continual struggle against them.” (284)

Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is widely considered the author’s magnum opus and an important achievement for justifying the award of his 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature.  The novel lends itself to being read on several parallel and intersecting levels; however, its plot and primary content are particularly well suited to making connections with current trends and phenomena that appear in significant discussions of teaching and pedagogy, schools, the role and function they serve – or ought to – in the context of larger society, and the importance of institutions that are primarily devoted to the development of intellectual pursuits, the imagination and life of the Mind.

The story is largely about Castalia, the Pedagogical Province, set in the distant yet strictly unspecified future.  It takes the form of a biography of an exalted member of this Province, Joseph Knecht, who attains its highest office: Magister Ludi or Master of the Glass Bead Game.  The Glass Bead Game is important as it serves as a “perfect expression” or symbol for Castilian goals and ideals: “the conception of the inner unity of all man’s cultural efforts [and] idea of universality” (233).  This “spirit of [the Province]… is founded on two principles: on objectivity and love of truth in study, and on the cultivation of meditative wisdom and harmony” (237).  While the Game’s rules and structure defy precise description, Theodore Ziolkowski, in his forward to the text, describes the Game as, “an act of mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are perceived as simultaneously present and vitally alive” (xi).  A more in depth description can be found in the ‘Layman’s Introduction’ preceding the biography:

The sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines.  The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture…Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe… within this fixed structure, or to abide by our image, with in the complicated mechanism of this giant organ, a whole universe of possibilities and combinations is available to the individual player (15).

We are offered more insight into the enigmatic Game when the biographer later clarifies differences in styles of gameplay that hint at the significance, beauty, and sacramental reverence the Game holds in Castalian culture:

In the formal Game, the player sought to compose out of the objective content of every game, out of the mathematical, linguistic, musical, and other elements, as dense, coherent, and formally perfect a unity and harmony as possible.  In the [pedagogical method of Game construction], on the other hand, the object was to create unity and harmony, cosmic roundedness and perfection, not so much in the choice, arrangement, interweaving, association, and contrast of the contents as in the mediation which followed every stage of the Game.  All the stress was placed on this mediation.  Such a… Game did not display perfection to the outward eye.  Rather, it guided the player, by means of its succession of precisely prescribed meditations, toward experiencing perfection and divinity (197).

While it is obvious the Game is meant to be a metaphor for human intellect and creativity and Castalia “represents any human institution devoted wholly and exclusively to affairs of the mind and imagination” (xii).  The Game is also described as a tool used

to arrange and sum up all the knowledge of [one’s] time, symmetrically and synoptically, around a central idea… not just [as] a juxtaposition of the fields of knowledge and research, but an interrelationship, an organic denominator… [a] way to channel all [one’s] various talents toward a single goal (166).

The goal being to experience “perfection and divinity,” to shift the experience of consciousness from the world of time and images into one of timelessness and tranquility, and “[extract] from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos” (197).

            Compared to his other works with which I am familiar (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and Demian), The Glass Bead Game stands out with its focus on an institution at least as much as its central individual.  However, these novels are connected by the appearance of a character belonging to a group that Hesse referred to as “the Immortals” in Steppenwolf.

In The Glass Bead Game, the “Immortal” is the Music Master – Knecht’s mentor – who at the end of his “life of devotion and work, but free of obstructions, free of ambition, and full of music,” is described as an old man transforming in retirement into a “state of grace, perfection,… bliss,” surrounded with an aura of “cheerful serenity and wonderful peace,” and moving in “the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity” (257-260).

His death was not so much a matter of dying as a form of progressive dematerialization, a dwindling of bodily substance…, while his life more and more gathered in his eyes and in the gentle radiance of his withering old man’s face” (279).

In his final days, the Music Master is described as “a manifestation, a personification”, or “only a symbol” of music (261) until, in death, he takes on the qualities of “a magical figure no longer readable but nevertheless somehow conveying smiles and perfected happiness.”  As a Castalian, “the grace of such an old age and death, of the immortal beauty of the spirit” that the Music Maker represented, as well as the descriptions offered of the game are very suggestive of what Hesse believes may be the rewards of a contemplative life (280).

Father Jacobus, another of Knecht’s significant teachers, on the other hand

was far more than a scholar, a seer, and a sage; he was also a mover and a shaper.  He had used the position in which fate had placed him not just to warm himself at the cozy fires of a contemplative existence; he had allowed the winds of the world to blow through his scholar’s den and admitted the perils and foreboding of the age into his heart.  He had taken action and shared the blame and the responsibility for the events of his time; he had not contented himself with surveying, arranging, and interpreting the happenings of the distant past.  And he had not dealt only with ideas, but with the refractoriness of matter and the obstinacy of men (192).

In Father Jacobus, Hesse provides a counter example to the Music Maker and creates a tension between the active life of engagement and a more scholarly life of discovery.  And this is one of the important themes of the novel that is borne out in a variety of ways.  For instance, Knecht’s outlines in one of his lectures that

Every Castalian should hold to only two goals and ideals: to attain to the utmost command of his subject, and to keep himself and his subject vital and flexible by forever recognizing its ties with all other disciplines and by maintaining amicable relations with all (233).

As he continues to praise The Game and highlight its historical importance, he describes its function as “repeatedly [having] to save the various disciplines from their tendency to self-sufficiency” (234).  He emphasizes “the best and the most vital aspect of our institution is the old Castalian principle of selection of the best, the elite” (235).  He explains to his elite students that they “are more than a reservoir of talented and experienced players” and commends them for being the only ones to play the Game “properly and correctly… shorn of all dilettantism, cultural vanity, self-importance, or superstition” (236).  Knecht goes on to reiterate the dangers of disciplines but warns “that the Glass Bead Game also has its hidden diabolus, that it can lead to empty virtuosity, to artistic vanity, to self-advancement, to the seeking of power over other and then to the abuse of that power” (237).

A more striking example of this tension is in Knecht’s contemplation of the transitory nature of Castalia and the Game due to the Provinces’ reluctance to stay relevant to the outside world.  While Joseph holds them both “sacrosanct,” he recognizes they have become

Vulnerable to the danger of aging, sterility, and decadence.  The idea underlying them always remained sacred to him, but he had recognized the particular forms that idea had assumed as mutable, perishable, in need of criticism.  He served a community of the mind whose strength and rationality he admired; but he thought… by forgetting its duties to the country and the outside world… it was doomed to fall into sterility (275).

Many tensions are resolved by Knecht’s transcending the false dichotomy of his reality.  Instead of struggling to define himself using the arbitrary and passing values of his time, he comes to embrace polarities in life such as the contrast between the Music Maker and Father Jacobus in a larger unifying vision.  We can see this when, as Magister Ludi, Knecht – during one of his meditations – recalls a childhood memory of meeting the Music Master for the first time.  They are playing piano together.  To Knecht,

it seemed to be the young man who showed honor and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth.  And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both (221).

Later on, we can see Knecht continue this move towards a more tempered education in his lecture to the elite Glass Bead Game players when he explains,

We need another kind of education beside the intellectual…, not in order to reshape our mentally active life into a psychically vegetative dream-life, but on the contrary to make ourselves fit for the summit of intellectual achievement.  We do not intend to flee form the vita activa to the vita conteplativa, nor vice versa, but to keep moving forward while alternating between the two, being at home in both, partaking of both (237).

            I think there are obvious parallels to be drawn between Joseph Knecht and contemporary educators – especially university faculty, as well as connections to be made regarding Castalia’s and the higher education system’s similarities.  Specifically, I think Hesse’s novel offers lessons on what the role of intellectual should play in society?  What constitutes a good teacher? A good student?  It offers Joseph Knecht as an archetype for both.  What is the purpose of education?  Why is it worthwhile to pursue an education?  And countless other quandaries.