Month: February 2017

The school environment shapes us by the processes of assessment, comments, and categorization. It is one of the fundamental turning machines, which develops and molds the way we think. We become our future selves with how we did during our education. In a way, this experience determines what we will have access to in a competitive environment. In this sense, it may be the biggest investment of our lives. The goal oriented approach to this process would focus on grades as an indicator of where we deserve to be; however, in practice grades would not help at all, but discovering how we learn and solve problem which is embedded in the learning process itself.

As a student, I have never been motivated by grades. On the contrary, I rather feel stressed about them. However, I was not aware of other ways that is not defined by the pressure of grading, since this process will presented whether I should be considered either a good, intelligent, hardworking student or an average student with a tendency to laziness. Students are in a constant fear of losing their position of being a good student or under the surveillance in terms of their worth. I believe the grade-oriented relationship between educators and students turns the learning experience into a mechanical set of performances, removing the excitement of learning and inflicting the stress of failure.

Grading is reductive in the sense that it imposes a scheme to assess the performances of the student, who have variety ways of learning and processing information. If so, why do we rely on standardized ways of assessing? I believe it is a rather makes the outcome simpler to translate in to our highly industrialized and data-oriented world. Unfortunately, it still the benchmark indicator of how one can contribute to the society. I agree with the following suggestion by Alfie Kohn:

“…our point of departure isn’t mostly about the grading, but about our desire for students to understand ideas from the inside out, or to get a kick out of playing with words and numbers, or to be in charge of their own learning, then we will likely end up elsewhere. We may come to see grading as a huge, noisy, fuel-guzzling, smoke-belching machine that constantly requires repairs and new parts, when what we should be doing is pulling the plug.”

The standardized ways of assessing can be beneficial for the educators to present a depiction of the outcome the students’ learning process; since they are considered to be some sort of measurement and an indicator of success, so that the educators can assess their own performance as well. Yet, how and by whom these standardized ways are created, namely the founding principles of definition of academic success, is taken for granted most of the time. In a world constantly changing and connecting more and more each day, I believe educators need to do better than employing uniform understanding of assessment and to focus on what we can do to minimize the impact of academic assessment on the learning process as Kohn suggests.

A little louder for the people in the back… “ASSESSMENTS ARE OVERRATED!”

Assessments are central to how the education systems determines a students progress (or lack thereof). Assessments  also play a role in stifling a students ability to engage in intellectual work – the creative work that is done outside of the classroom but is informed by the in-class formal academic experience. As Lombardi suggest, “The type of assessment students know will be coming determines when they “tune in” to a lecture and when they “tune out.” Evidence from student diaries indicates that students spend less than 10 percent of their time on non-assessed academic work”. Thus, what is important is only characterized by what is graded.

While I do wholly agree with the resistance to assessments and grading, I wonder if some alternate system is truly achievable. How are we to truly measure students in a manner that is objective? Some suggest that teachers should write about a students progress and gaps in learning instead of offering grades. Realistically how many institutions of higher education are truly going to read write-ups? How does a professor truly know if a student is learning?

I think investing in alternative assessments are more productive – giving students the option to write a paper, complete involved projects, engage in applied work, or do some other extracurricular non-traditional assessment. In this way, students can apply what they know to something they are good at or interested in.

On a personal note, I was admitted to grad school NOT because of my grades, but because of the applied work that I had done outside of academia. I was able to take what I learned from class and leverage it in internships that reflected my true capabilities. It was through internships that I found confidence in discussing my discipline and its application to the real world.

Needless to suggest, assessments were not a true picture of my potential or my ability to do intellectual work. They were a picture of my inability to do monotonous memorization and reverberation learning. Once I figured this out about myself, I was able to approach my academic studies with a spirit of enjoyment; that what was important was actually NOT in the classroom. That the classroom just gave me the tools I needed to be successful in non-graded work. Being reaffirmed in intellectual capability is important for students – and BAD grades certainly do not get the job done in the Department of Encouragement and Affirmation.

Warning: the following post will come out as a jumble of thoughts and words. Prepare yourself.

I can’t even tell you how many classes that I have been a student of where the conversation has meandered over into the debate over the value of grades. Every time the feeling of the majority is that grades are bad and qualitative assessments are good, and yet I have never seen anybody (including the instructor) make efforts to move in that direction. This all sounds well and good. A healthier educational environment sounds great. Students that love to learn and are intrinsically motivated to do so sounds cool. I am a little hesitant in fully throwing out the grading system without some actual plan in place that is not the exception to the rule, but a lot of people are complaining for it.

I’m not calling anybody out. I think that I am so exasperated with the current environment (politically and academically), that I am hoping to eventually see a shift in the current. I hope to see my peers or instructors listen to their own opinions and take action.

This torch is once again picked up in Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades“. Overall, I understand Kohn’s points and where they come from, but some parts of me are frustrated. I have been feeling a shift in the students I see as schools shift to being gentler. Everybody gets a trophy. Don’t use red ink. Etc, etc, etc. As such, I have students walking in with a sense of entitlement that they have already earned an ‘A’ in the class just for being present. I wonder how students would take to being qualitatively graded. Right now, the studies mentioned feel like they are the exception to the rule. I hope they are not.

Either way, I think the focus needs to be on influencing students’ intrinsic motivation.The intrinsic motivation is an important, if not the most, important element to consider. Having students be intrinsically motivated is not only good for their education, but vital for their existences as well as our cultural existence as a whole.In Liu and Brandon’s book “Imagination First”, there is much discussion over the need to allow for imagination to thrive. Right now, it seems to be suffocating. Perhaps, if that feeling of intrinsic motivation is instilled in students from the get-go, imagination will become an abundant resource once more.

One side argument regarding pure qualitative grading: I know how much public elementary school teachers work. I know how much is demanded of them from their administration and government. I know what stress standardized testing has placed on them. If qualitative grading is enforced then something has got to give. Teachers are not paid or respected nearly enough as is to then expect them to adopt this qualitative grading model with ease. I think that most teachers who have “heard the call” would love to incorporate it, but like I said something would have to give somewhere else. Writing 30 qualitative grading reports on a semi-frequent basis is extremely demanding. Yes, maybe research has shown students benefit from this, but what about the teachers? They do not receive nearly enough support to enforce such a system at this point in time.For the most part, teachers want what is best for their students and to provide them with a “learning community”. That being said, that is a lot to just place on their shoulders. Reflecting back to last week’s Ted Talk by Ken Robinson, I think there needs to be more discussion regarding the government and administration’s role in curriculum planning and testing. If we want real change, we can’t just pester poor teachers to follow along with what we think is best for students. Something has got to give.

Alfie Kohn makes the decades-old case against grades (and against tests, in his referenced posts) come alive by speaking to the very issues that trouble me and make me long for a different job.

I have spent years in pursuit of perfection in my grading, in designing tests that are more foolproof against cheating, and in crafting the perfect rubrics, the ones that make submissions easy for me to grade and put the blame on the student if they don’t like their grades.  Strangely, the ideal that drives this frenzy of constant activity is a quest for fairness and consistency.  I don’t like arbitrary assessments.  Being subjected to someone’s whim always made me angry, and I’m not going to do that to students.   So the rubric attempts to mute my opinion in the grading process and base the grades on a set of easily quantifiable and justifiable rules.   The rubric is an attempt to enforce consistency, but it cannot make grading fair.  The rubric is merely a proxy for whatever outcome is supposed to be assessed, much like grades are a proxy for the supposed degree of success or failure of students who took the course.

The problem here is that following rules is only one thing that future engineers need to learn.  It’s a big, important thing, but it’s not the only thing.  Sometimes, it’s better not to follow rules.  At times, making up new rules is the way forward.  Maybe sentences need to run on from time to time, do you get my point?  The rubric is not a good way to measure creativity, insight, or persistence, and why would we want to measure those things anyway?  A measurement is something that confines.  I want my future engineers to make mistakes and let their own experience, not my measurements, guide them.  The assessment tries so hard to be fair and consistent that it is necessarily arbitrary because it is blind to the important things.

As Kohn points out, students who value grades highly will tend to make safe choices.  My experience bears this out.  Furthermore, some of the best design work comes from “B” students (which is why B students rock!)  As part of the design assignment, I asked the students to write a reflection piece about why they chose that particular design and what they learned from it, and to include their review of the design software and recommendations for other users.  The “B” students often chose ambitious design objectives, and evidence of the quality of their learning is captured in the reflection writing.

“I chose to make a guitar because I really want to learn to play the guitar. I made the base of the guitar, starting out with 7 points and then with the spline tool I connected the points. The spline tool is what [creates] the round edges of the guitar.  After that, I mirrored the spline line about the centerline to make the guitar symmetrical.  Finally, I extruded the sketch.  To make the base hollow, I used the shell tool. I also used the shell tool to make the guitar three millimeters thick.  After I finished the base of the guitar I added the accessories on top. First, I made the hole by sketching a circle and extruding the opposite way. After that I added the part that holds the strings and the squiggly design on top with the spline tool. Lastly, I made the second part with the line and extrusion tool.”

• – Mariam

Oh my gosh!  The students don’t need me to grade them; they can express the quality of their learning most eloquently with their own voices.

“While making this design, I learned a lot about how to dimension because I had to make the [guitar] symmetrical.  I also learned how to use most of the features in Creo, thus I can call myself a professional at using Creo.”

The type -“A” students tended not to submit the reflection piece. I suspect that they thought that they had satisfied the aim of the assignment with the technical drawing.  Maybe they considered the “extras” unimportant or something that I added so that students who could not master the software would be able to get some points for the assignment.

The reflection writing expressed the students’ challenges and struggles, and their gratification with a job well done.  I recall that the best learning experience I ever had was not graded.  When I told my English teacher why I believed that Lewis Carroll’s “Butcher” character in The Hunting of the Snark was a self-portrait of the author, he did not reward me with a grade at that moment.  The reward was my teacher’s admiration of my profound insight, and my belief that I figured out something that nobody has ever known before, except maybe Lewis Carroll.

If I let students assess themselves, then perhaps the grading outcomes would stop being upside-down, and hardworking, ambitious “B” students would not be relegated to second place.

Alfie Kohn has convinced me of the need to abandon traditional grading.  I have not yet assigned any grades in my digital class this semester.  Maybe it’s not too late to change this crazy game now, and shift my attention to encouraging and supporting actual learning.

This week’s readings on assessment, grading, and motivation offers an interesting study of politics and education. I’ll return to this in a moment, but in short, we find Kohn suggesting and Riley demonstrating the obligation of educators to challenge standards and structures that essentially remove the “liberal” from liberal education. On the other hand, we find Liu and Noppe-Brandon arguing to liberate imagination, even collective imagination, and yet seemingly oblivious to the social conditions that allow for some imaginations to be much more expansive and possible to realize than others.

Now Liu and Noppe-Brandon aren’t necessarily wrong in their argument and possibilities for imagination. They rightly challenge the myths that constrain imagination. And yet their own imagination seems oddly constrained within a dominant social and political order. They cite the 9/11 commission for instance, that found “the government failed to imagine that terrorists might strike at America in such a stunningly symbolic, asymmetrically powerful way.” But what about the imagination that would question the very motivations of the terrorists? Of course if the dominant rhetoric is because “they are radical Islam,” or they are simply evil, one doesn’t need to have any further imagination.

Liu and Noppe-Brandon also suggest that imagination trumps material conditions. They cite, for instance, J.K. Rowling’s imagination of “a world of wizards and limit-bending acts of magic when all around her was the harsh scarcity of welfare and single motherhood.” That’s all very well, indeed, especially for those of us who were privileged with a good education, a good family, a good community, or something else. But what about those individuals who have none of these, because the once-strong community and family they had were trashed by an economic order that has gutted and sent overseas the industries and jobs once found in these communities?  It feels so utterly empty, so patronizing, asking them to “think big” in the face of this despair. Can’t we do better?

And Lombardi… well honestly, she kinda lost me with her invocation of Margaret Spellings as the source of an education goal we should really pay attention to. For Spellings, apparently, her model of the students is solely as an (neoliberal) economic entity that is positioning themselves to be competitive in a global marketplace. And while she doesn’t say it directly, this will “Make America Great Again.” Lombardi seems mostly silent on any larger purposes of education… such as, hypothetically of course, preparing a citizenry to recognize and challenge a political regime that is eroding if not more directly tearing apart and undermining democratic institutions.

Riley, however, is really getting at something. She is a political agent, as she recognizes that engineering education, just like any education, can never be removed from politics. She is challenging the structures, standards, and leadership that would reduce engineering education to a technical skill, and deprive this education of ethics, and its political nature. For instance, she makes an important distinction between policy and politics: “By shifting to the term policy instead of political, ABET is shrinking the intended domain of action for engineers. Understanding the political contexts that give rise to engineering projects, and analyzing potential political implications is an essential professional capacity.” Similarly, she challenges what seems to be a minor change in ethics, to something that has quite significant implications: “Removing the professional context in which engineering ethics is necessarily practiced and replacing it with the word “principles” evokes personal morality (as in, “Does one, or doesn’t one, have principles?”).” Riley doesn’t just take engineering education as something that can be isolated from its larger social and political contexts. It is something that is inherently immersed in these contexts, and a responsible and ethical engineering education must not just have ethics or political education as something added in as an extra course or two. They must be integrated into engineering education, throughout the curriculum.

Whether the existing grading system is problematic has been a debatable topic for decades. Students get scores in a specific class. No matter this score is a number (1-100) or a letter (A-F), this will be used as the sole standard to assess the student’s performance. The score will play an important role in the student’s future life, such as college/graduate school admission, job application, and even the amount of money paid for car insurance. Therefore, the score can be the only thing the students care. In another word, students take a class for getting an A more than acquiring knowledge. For example, when a teacher tells the students that the content he/she is going to say will not show up in the test, most students will not pay attention to it. This situation simply deviates from the motivation where the education system was initially designed.

More and more people have been questioning whether the existing grading system is the best for assessing a student’s performance. No doubt it is to now the most efficient way. When I was in high school, there are more than 70 students in one class. The teacher usually is in charge of two or more classes. So giving a narrative feedback to each student is almost impossible for the teachers. Meanwhile, test scores are the only standard for the college entrance exams in China. So there are no incentives for both teachers and students to develop an alternative assessment tool to the existing grading system. Even in US, it is hard to completely eliminate the grading system. Giving a narrative to a student’s assignment is definitely increases the burden of teachers compared with simply giving out scores. Besides, there are not any promising assessment tools that work even close to the grading system.

Grading system limits the free exploration of knowledge and destroy great minds. With too much energy spent on earning more scores, less energy is left for the creative thinking. Students who get high test scores may not be the most creative ones who can change the world. Many of them devastatingly to pursue the scores in subjects they are not even interested. I personally oppose to any standardized test. The time I mostly regretted to spend on is that for preparing college entrance exam and GRE. I think they are totally a waste of time. The best way for me to learn is to follow my own heart and do the things in which I feel mostly interested. Like what Dan Pink expressed in his TED talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y&feature=youtu.be), the external incentives (rewards or scores) sometimes make detrimental effects on people’s performance on jobs that call for creativity. While the intrinsic incentives (motivation to learn or solve problems) are the keys to create and make a real difference.

I would say that I was highly motivated by grades throughout my middle school and high school career. My mom would always “jokingly” say that she never had to push me to do my work or make sure that I was doing well in my classes because I always put more pressure on myself than she ever would. I think my main drive to get good grades came from the belief that a good GPA would help me to get into college. This is why I was devastated when I got a B in pre-calculus my junior year of high school. This grade sticks out to me not just because it was the first time I didn’t receive an A but because of how close I was to the A. I remember I had a 93.4 something in the class and to get an A I needed a 93.5, if I had just done slightly better on one assignment or gotten one more answer correct on a test I would not be typing this story today. I feel like I learned all the concepts that I needed to learn in the course and was still able to be successful in my calculus class the next year, but that grade will always stick out to me because I felt it didn’t reflect the effort that I put into the class. While this grade did not prevent me from getting into the college I wanted to get into, it did seem like the end of the world at the time. This is one of the many reasons that I feel that grading students on a letter grade scale is not the best way to measure their knowledge and does not create the best environments for students to learn.

As an undergrad I was still extremely concerned about my grades. I had an excel sheet for each course, where I could calculate what grade I needed to get on my test in order to get an A. My need for an A got so bad that during tests I wasn’t feeling confident about, I spent an unnecessary amount of time calculating how many questions I needed to get right to get enough points to maintain my grade. Time that would have been better spent working through the questions themselves. Looking back at this now it seems ridiculous, but at the time I was so focused on my grades that I couldn’t see the bigger picture.

One of the first things I was told when I started graduate school was that “grades don’t matter anymore,” and while I do agree that grades aren’t the most important aspect of my education, they do still matter. I still need to keep a certain GPA to have good academic standing and to keep my assistantship. So while I was slightly relieved to hear that “grades don’t matter anymore” when it comes down to it, I think I stress about my grades just as much now as I did in undergrad. I still have my excel sheets with all the possible grades that I need for each assignment/test, but now I sometimes am just striving for a B rather than an A.

Alfie Kohn mentioned a study that found that “the elimination of grades (in favor of a pass/fail system) produces substantial benefits with no apparent disadvantages in medical school (White and Fantone, 2010).” After reading this I thought that maybe this could work in any graduate program, because there are enough other aspect of learning that classroom grades really aren’t as important. After discussing this with my sister I am not so sure that this would actually work…

Why I originally thought this pass/fail system would be good:

I just completed my qualifying exam which I felt was a great way to test my knowledge and critical thinking skills. For this exam we had to choose one of two articles given to us and write a critique within one week and then do an oral presentation to defend the critique. After the oral presentation the committee asked questions about concepts from courses that I have taken that were also related to the article. This exam was pass/fail and I felt it was a great way to determine if I comprehended what I learned in graduate school so far.

 

Why I am now questioning this system:

After I told my sister (who is also a grad student) that I though a pass/fail system would work, her response was: “well then I would just do the minimum amount of work necessary to pass.” I guess this just shows the difference in our work ethic and really highlights that there really isn’t one system that can work for everyone. For me if a pass/fail system was implemented I would want to do the best that I could to ensure that I passes but would (hopefully) not be quite as stressed. For her it would mean not needing to do as much work because it would only matter if you passed or failed not how well you passed.

James H. McMillan and Jessica Hearn defined student self-assessment as a process by which (1) students themselves monitor and judge the quality of their own performance and their learning habits. Also (2) students themselves identify gaps in their understanding and skills and propose ways to fill those gaps. If doing properly, student self-assessment is important not only in an assessment process but also in a learning process. Why is that?

• Students know best about their own weakness and their knowledge and skill gaps.
• Students know best about their capability to set up realistic goals.
• Students know best about their learning style and habit, therefore they can best manage their time, speed, and method to complete their targets.
• Students can best track their learning progress.

Fig.1 of James H. McMillan and Jessica Hearn showed the cycle of student self-assessment process. They are more responsible for setting their learning targets, working to achieve the targets, monitoring their progress, modifying their strategies, and finally adjusting their original targets or setting up new targets.

I think the self-assessment method gives students all factors (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) according to Dan Pink leading to better performance and personal satisfaction.

In order to facilitate self-assessment in an effective way, teachers play an important role. In particular, teachers should set up clear expectations, provide assessment criteria, show students how to judge their performance based on provided criteria, provide them feedbacks, and give them the chance to practice self-assessment.

By doing it properly, student self-assessment can enhance student motivation and achievement. More important, it is a critical skill that students can use beyond the classroom scale as a life-long learner.

Reference:

McMillan, J.H. and J. Hearn. (2008). Student self-assessment: the key to stronger student motivation and higher achievement. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ815370.pdf.

I was also unaware of the changes proposed by ABET on their accreditation assessments of engineering programs. The essay titled “We Assess What We Value” successfully captures, in my opinion, the detrimental consequences that such changes would undoubtedly bring to the educational experience of engineers. If anything, I always thought that requirements that included a “global and social context, engineering ethics, and lifelong learning” as part of the engineering curriculum needed to be strengthened. Actually as I write this I’m thinking maybe not always thought because I don’t recall feeling this strongly about it when I was an undergraduate student myself but certainly during my time in graduate school and the more I contemplate the subject.

There is definitely a pervasive thinking that the more ‘technical’ a degree’s curriculum is, the farther removed it is to people and the less attention needs to be given to the ‘human’ element in all its forms. This trend can be seen even within the different branches of engineering where more emphasis on “ethics” as established coursework is assigned for the biomedical field (where it is easy for most people to see a direct connection between their work and its impact on humans) than some of the other engineering disciplines.

Another negative result that can be attributed to this “outcome-based education” system that focuses on quantifying and rewarding accordingly, is the information overload in the scientific literature. It seems that academia is currently working in a system that rewards quantity over quality. Scientists are graded (by colleagues, peers, and superiors) by the number of citations they have under their name which–much like individuals attribute their ‘value’ or ‘relevance’ based on the number of ‘likes’ they get on any social media platform–can be unfairly skewed based on the size of the audience it reaches and the nature of these relationships. This assessment method can drive a system that undercuts the quality and depth of research in exchange for fast results that increase the number of publications, and might encourage other forms of unethical behavior. And similarly to the effect it has on students’ satisfaction and intrinsic motivation to learn, they can result in loss of enjoyment for the profession.

When I read this from Marilyn M. Lombardi, “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning”:

“If we want learners to engage with ambiguous and complex problems, including those drawn from real life, then we need new forms of assessment that document the higher-order thinking and problem solving that students demonstrate.”

I just want to say: “RIGHT!” As a student, I am really tired of those standardized tests and meaningless exams. With the flood of new knowledge and technology, we do need new forms of assessment that can reflect our students’ authentic learning and mastery. Memorization and repetition turn out to severely impede students’ desire of deep and extensive learning. Most of the students are able to repeat/recite what they have learned when they at school. However, when they graduated, what else can they remember and for how much can those memories be useful. I heard a lot that graduated students are complaining about the sophisticated education system and how badly they realize that what they’ve learned and tested are, in fact, made little use for their future career.  When working as newcomers, they are panicked as they seem to be used to follow instructions for routine tasks and have no idea how to address real-life unknown challenges. Such a tragedy of education.

If we want students to fully involved into the learning environment and actively push themselves to master and develop the innovative knowledge, we need to appropriately incentivize them both extrinsically and intrinsically.  Traditional assessment of student performance is apparently outdated from the contemporary learning environment. It is still important, though, as a supplementary tool for assessing students’ mastery of course required knowledge. Part of the reason for me to reconsider the importance of traditional assessment is that, it is a fairly standardized tool to give the lecturers a peer-evaluation of students’ performance compared with others. However, more creative assessment in inquiry-based learning is, without no doubt, increasingly pivotal to be called for the contemporary education system. We have spent lots of time discussing how to incentivize students for creative and critical thinking. But if we are fail to process authentic assessment in their authentic learning achievements, the revolution of education can never reach its ultimate goal.