Month: February 2017

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”                                                                                                    — The Wave in the Mind by Ursula Le Guin (2004, p. 220)

 

 

What would a world without oppression look like? What would a world with out gender look like? How about a world without governments, anarchism? How about a world in which women hold positions of power and political rule?

These questions, and more, have been addressed historically, and sometimes only, within the realm of science fiction. Repeatedly, we see questions of dominance, subordination, and alternative possibilities created, destroyed, worked, and rewritten in a genre that isn’t just fiction, but a fiction far removed from the realities and constraints of this world and universe. A fiction in which time travel is possible, dragons fly in space, and tribbles spell trouble.

In science fiction, we find impossibilities and, sometimes, those impossibilities eventually become tangible realities. Some of the notions below will, like science fiction, be engaging in a conversation that may at times be unimaginable for at least some of us. As such, I want to extend an invitation: if the concepts I present, the questions I ask, and the customs I question seem too absurd, then imagine that this too is a piece of science fiction. Start there, and then at the end we can try to re-imagine it once more.

When we think about grading and assessment within the US a common narrative may emerge for many folks educated within this system. As Alfie Kohn points out in “The Case Against Grades” we have a system of assessment that does a very good job at one thing; testing your ability to take a test. I frame Kohn’s paper in this manner as to gesture at the complexity of what is, and is not, tested for within this system and what is, or is not, encouraged among peers.

Pertaining to the testing, it historically is claimed to serve as a fair means of evaluation among and between different individuals; a way to figure out who is the best and most likely to be successful at x, y, or z. It tests, in other ways, how well you have learned the script that is expected of you and compares you to how well other folks have learned the script. Concerning what it encourages, with stakes on the line cheating increases, students truncate their time as to do the work required, and within this framework they are encouraged to memorize what they need to know. They are, more problematically to my thinking, encouraged to be individualistic competitors fighting over a scare resource of jobs, school, and access.

What then doesn’t it test for or encourage? Is doesn’t test resilience in applying what has been learned across disciplines or with respect to problems not included in the curricula. It doesn’t encourage collaboration, to work with and learn from one another, as the norm but rather as the exception.

When we look at goals illustrated, for example, by Donna M. Riley’s piece “We Assess What We Value: “Evidence-based” Logic and the Abandonment of “Non-assessable” Learning Outcomes” (Feb. 2016), it is clear that the assessment based system is not setting people up for success even within the system. Rather, it is setting them up for eventual failure. If, as in engineering and the sciences, elements of collaboration are important for working and living in the “post-schooling” world, what happens when a person who has been raised in an “it’s me against everyone else” world has to suddenly work with people as opposed to against them? What happens when this person is asked to be creative and work outside of the constraints in which they have been taught?

Yes, folks are forced to do group work every once in a while and, as such, may receive some education in collaboration. But note what happens when we step back and look at the interactions inter-group as opposed to intra-group: competition to be the best group. Up additional levels: competition to be the best class, cohort, college, or university. The problem I am gesturing at here is not just with individual lessons, inclusions, or exclusions. It is with the entire system.

Now, by now some readers are wondering “when is it going to go back to the science fiction stuff…that was more entertaining”. Well, I’m getting there, but I had to paint the picture of the world we are about to destroy first.

With the previous (current) world in mind: what would a world without grades and traditional assessments look like?

In keeping with what Marilyn Lombardi says in “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning,” let us imagine a world of the following sort as a first step:

• Instructors use rubrics created in tandem with those they instruct to evaluate progress and improvement concerning problems, questions, or issues as opposed to self-created (or externally dictated) metrics.
• Students work in groups on assignments and in addition to being evaluated by their instructor they evaluate one another.
• Students compile portfolios that serve as a space for reflection on the intersections, changes, and improvements in their work for a project.

 

Now, let’s add a few other points from Kohn:

• Rather than receiving grades, students receive feedback and comments on their work.
• If needed, grades are determined collaboratively with the instructor and the student.

 

This world is probably still imaginable so let’s get a little more heretical:

• Get rid of the instructors and replace them with facilitators whose are trained to work with and guide students in the process of investigating various problems, questions, or issues.
• Most work is now done as group work and peers are responsible for giving feedback to one another about not only their participation in the process but also the outcomes of the process.
• Facilitators give both group and individual feedback and are on hand to facilitate conversations should tensions arise within the groups.
• Progress is “evaluated” collaboratively with facilitators and students using continuously revised goals, and hopes, that the student proposed to guide their own improvement.
• The school day, for at least non-secondary education, includes portions in which older students are responsible for facilitating groups of younger students and in which students of like ages/peer groups are responsible for facilitating conversations and lessons with one another. [1]

Imagine that this is another world: Is it a possibility?

Imagine that it is this world: Is it no longer possible?

If your answer to the second question is “no” then what is it about this world that seems so unimaginable? Is it the lack of explicit authority? Is it the lack of seemingly “assessable” (and comparable) outcomes?

If it’s hard to figure out the “what” underlying the apprehension then let’s approach it through a different, and, political lens. Consider the following poem:

“I Want A President” by Zoe Leonard

In the above poem Leonard asks us to imagine imagine a person, a president, who is very different than any president we have ever seen or, plausibly, imagined before. What is it about our current world that makes imagining a president with the above histories and experiences nay impossible? Might the limitation on *that* imaginatory possibility be similar to the one that whispers “that educational system would never work”?

My reason for this roundabout approach is two fold. On the one hand, as Riley pointed out there are political elements that we cannot forget in these conversations and this is a political poem just as the question of education is a political one. On the other hand,  it can leave us with a starting point:

I want an educational system…

In writing the rest of this poem, let’s imagine the currently unfathomable and attain it.

---

[1] This approach was proposed by Dr. Naomi Zack (University of Oregon) in conversation with Dr.Matheis.

In Alfie Kohn’s article , The Case Against Grades, the author deconstructs the traditional grading system. The author opens up a big wound, pours salt in it and offers lukewarm examples as the balm. While I agree that teaching towards the grade is not the best learning strategy, I am also aware that the traditional grading system is subject to larger systems and bigger issues. For example, if the school system, as a whole, does not agree to change how we evaluate learning, then the individual teacher that elects for a “non-grade” learning environment runs the risk of being terminated or they might jeopardize their school’s position. Now, there is a larger way of being and doing that modern society participates in…and that is risk culture.

Risk culture is fueled by fear. Fear of losing one’s job, fear of failing school, fear of disappointing one’s parents, fear of lawsuits, fear of not getting into college. The list of fears is neverending, and risk culture is what drives us closer to quantifying success with a rigid grading system. So if we are going to deconstruct the grading system, we should consciously take steps to deconstruct the larger systems that will eventually undermine any advances taken at the sub-system level.

This article left me wondering what was occurring at the higher levels of society—like the school board and the college systems that review the applications of the students participating in a non-grade environment.

Questions to Ponder: What type colleges were willing to accept narrative summaries instead of grades? Did the non-grade teachers have the support of their leadership?

Assessment has always and continues to play such an integral role in education. To educate is to not only disseminate information, but to ascertain if that knowledge has been absorbed and understood. I mean…what’s the point of teaching anything if it isn’t retained and used later? The present assessment system in place is the traditional grading scale. Students are given grades based off of their ability to “jump” through academic hoops (homework, quizzes, tests, etc.). Is this system truly effective? Does it give educators a full picture of that students academic comprehension?

In Alfie Kohn’s The Case Against Grades, the argument is made that grading is inherently problematic. Rather than motivating students to learn, it tends to have the opposite effect and can be rather discouraging. Kohn furthur argues that grading accurately quantify the quality of a student’s learning, nor does it reflect their true ability to achieve. To some extent, I agree with this. Not all students are the same, and the educational methods used to teach them aren’t equally effective for everyone. Some students will naturally do worse than other, which will be reflected in their grading assessment. Receiving a bad grade can prove very discouraging to students, especially for those whom this becomes a “norm”. However, a poor grade should not be treated as a point of shame. Rather, it can be a useful tool serving as a signal to educators that their teaching methods aren’t reaching particular students; educators can then reassess their approach and attempt to reach the student. Additionally, I will agree that grades are not reflective of achievement. Plenty of students are intelligent enough and capable of learning, but often that isn’t reflected by their grades. I recently went through a battery of tests to substantiate my ADHD diagnosis, and many of them were designed to assess my ability to achieve in certain areas (math, reading & language comprehension, writing, etc.). These tests revealed I was more than capable of achieving well in these areas, but by actual performance ability didn’t always match up.  I believe grades are the same way, a useful measurement of performance but a poor reflection of  achievement.

I want to go back to discussing  the topic of motivation. I loved the animated video The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink and how it illustrated motivation. The part I found most fascinating from this video was the depiction of the traditional motivational system- the tiered system where the largest rewards go to the top performers and the the lowest performers are not or minimally rewarded. Though studies have shown this system works when solely mechanical skills were involved in performance, it had the exact opposite effect when rudimentary cognitive skills were involved. Academic performance consists of the combination of mechanical and cognitive abilities. Based off Pink’s logic, a traditional tiered motivational system where the highest performers are rewarded and the lowest are not (i.e. grading) is not a wholly effective motivational system for student academic performance. Academic performance is not a simple straight-forward task; it’s incredibly complex and high-stakes rewards don’t effectively motivate the highest level of performance.

Now, do I have an answer on how to best motivate students to perform better academically? No, I do not. Will there ever be a conclusive answer to my previous question? I highly doubt it. What can we do to better assess academic performance and motivation to learn? My best guess would be to constantly investigation and  reassess motivation as it evolves with the evolution of studentkind.

Alfie Kohn’s article The Case Against Grades reminded me of a moment from about a decade ago, when I received one of the loudest “wake-up” calls in my life from my then-10-year-old daughter. At the time, I had been an absentee parent for six years due to work responsibilities, and was getting “re-acquainted” with the responsibilities of parenthood – including monitoring how my kid is doing at school.

Like most parents, I am particularly fond and very proud of my daughter. Even as a little girl, I found her to be sharp and articulate, and she could certainly hold her own even when engaging in conversations with adults. In short, I firmly believed that my daughter is one of the most intelligent kids in the world (don’t we all?). So I was very surprised when, after my first parent-teacher meeting, I found out that she was behind in Math and Science. I sat there in disbelief for quite some time that it overshadowed the fact that her teacher also told me that she was capable of handling more advanced course work in English and Literature.

I am an engineer. While I did not particularly care for Math and Science (wait, so why am I an engineer? That’s a whole other post in itself), I had always done pretty well in these courses, and I expected my daughter to do the same. When we got home, silly me launched into a tirade that began with “When I was your age… I could do this, and this, and this…” (I was not yet teaching at this point, so maybe I did not know any better?) After I finished my “speech,” my daughter looked me and said: “But Mama, childhood is a journey, not a race.”

Boom. I had no comeback. Granting that the phrase she just told me is the mantra that her school believed in (she’s smart, but no, she did not come up with that on her own), hearing it from her got me thinking about my own experience with school and learning, and whether that was really the kind of learning experience that I would also like her to have. Did it really matter whether my 10-year-old could do exactly what 10-year-old me could do?

Growing up, my most memorable things about school were the “accolades” that were up for grabs at the end of the school year. I always made sure I got a hefty slice of that pie, which my parents dutifully enshrined on a wall in our house for everyone to admire. I picked up a number of things along the way, sure (such as rattling off the multiplication table at the drop of a hat), but at the time they did not seem as important as the shiny things with my name on them hanging on the wall. During the academic year, I fixated on being able to get certain things and maintain certain grades, so much so that when I am unable to achieve a goal or two, the frustration can overshadow everything else.

In contrast, my daughter did not need to concern herself with such matters. When she was 7 years old, I was temporarily assigned to Phoenix, Arizona, and she spent part of that academic year with me. Since the academic year in the Philippines followed a different schedule, she was unable to enroll in the same school that I went to as a child upon our return, as they had strict guidelines regarding admission and she had missed so much. Instead, my parents found a small school that could accommodate her. This school had a “non-traditional” philosophy and approach to education; instruction and assessment were carried out differently. Even their classrooms did not look like the stereotypical classroom with rows of armchairs; children sat in round tables that allowed them to interact and work together. At the end of the school year, there was no program to honor a select few who achieved certain feats over others, but a general celebration of what each student has found meaningful to them. They did not show off the shiny things with their names on them that parents pinned on shirts (and that I loved so much growing up), but portfolios of the work that they have done and what these meant to them.

Over the years (after that first wake-up call ten years ago) my narrative for “When I was your age…” changed. Interestingly enough, they aligned with some of Kohn’s conclusions about grades. I saw that my daughter was truly passionate and interested in learning certain things (Math, unfortunately, was always a hopeless case and was not pursued with the same passion as Theater and Literature). When I was her age, I, on the other hand, worked so hard on making sure that I got excellent grades in everything that I had no time to really focus on what I loved and was interested in. She was more attuned to her strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and exercised a higher level of discernment in making decisions, such as those she made when she prepared for college. In contrast, my decision-making process mostly consisted of the prestige that I could get. In college, that meant reveling in the admiration of those who held my courage and persistence as the only female electrical engineering student in my class in high regard.

I do realize, though, that the question of grades and assessment is more complicated than “to grade, or not to grade,” and that not everyone who shared my experience went through life and made decisions the way I did. I do not trivialize the significance of grading and assessment and the roles that these can play in education. While there are a number of things that made my daughter’s learning experience more meaningful than mine, there are also pitfalls that I will not get into now, or this post will never get done. There are many things to consider, complexities that need to be navigated around. For me, though, an important step to take is to consider learning as a journey – one that is to be taken at a pace that makes sense to one’s unique circumstances, and to be enjoyed to the fullest extent that it can be, allowing for the development of passions, exploration of interests, and even committing mistakes that can be turned into valuable opportunities for growth. It should not be a race that one competes in against peers, or standards, or those who came before you (a.k.a. your mom). Because at the end of the day, what do these letters and numbers mean? Can these really define who we are as individuals, serve as evidence of how much we know and how competent we are, and how valuable our contributions to society can be?

It has been said that “kids say the darndest things.” Mine told me to chill-ax and let her learn and grow up in her own way, at her own time. With that one statement, she inadvertently encouraged me to look beyond letters and numbers and report cards, and appreciate who she is through way she carries herself and relates to others, and how she handles the joys and challenges that she encounters. She will be 21 in a few months, and I have to say, I am glad she stood up for herself and journeyed through life, not harried through it. It might not work the same way for everyone, but at least in our case – I’m glad I listened.

As an Instructor of Research and Writing in International Studies, I am more concerned about the overall progress of my students in class rather than their grades. Grades, beyond a method of “quantifying” the performance of students in a set of assignments, are criticized by authors like Alfie Kohn for three main reasons. First, grading tends to diminish students’ interest in whatever they are learning. Students are therefore more concerned and motivated about grades than the process of learning. Second, Grades create a preference for the easiest task. Students become concerned about choosing the most straightforward task in order to maximize their chances of getting a good grade. The latter hinders their motivation to take up new challenges because the message they understand is that success matters more than learning. Last but not least, Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking because they sustain the rote culture that consists of relying heavily on memorization without engaging in critical thinking. While I don’t think that the grading system can be completely amended, I believe that professors can change the way they think about grading and therefore help their students approach them differently as well. From my experience teaching, I find it very useful to expose my students to my grading philosophy from the very first days of teaching. As a new instructor, I tell my students that I care much more about their progress and learning curve than their grades. However, I understand that the reality of the system imposes me to give them grades and that the majority of them perceive grades to be important. The following suggestions demonstrate how I implement my grading philosophy:

• I emphasize the importance of comments rather than merely the grade. I also usually write lengthy feedback on each of my student’s assignments to explain where they are at and how they can improve in the future.
• I dedicate some sessions to peer-review so that they do not solely have my feedback, but they can also provide feedback to their peers and vice versa.
• I also have my students grade some of their own work. While they are very surprised at the beginning, this helps them demystify the process of grading and be critical of their work, without relying on another person to do so.
• After half of the semester, I open my office hours for students who would like to discuss their learning progress and identify their strengths and challenges.

Through the following, I challenge the way my students think about their grade, in a way that it does not become their priority in my class. I want my students to realize that nobody will remember their GPAs in the future (not even themselves). However, what is there to last are their efforts to become better writers and researchers. Grades should never be the end goal of learning. To conclude, I genuinely think that Grades as a system of assessment are not necessarily the problem, the problem prevails in how we think about grades, including how the educational system shapes students perception of grading.

So after reading through these articles and watching the YouTube videos for this week it made me really think about grades and assessments. Is there really something wrong with using an A-F scale? Do teachers need to move away from giving grades and instead just give feedback and comments? Is focusing on removing grades a mask for addressing what the real issue is?

Did Craig just ask if discussion about the grading method may be masking a different issue? Yes, yes I did. I think that grades wouldn’t be such an issue if teachers were able to focus more on teaching to educate rather than teaching to get a score on an exam. Students have gotten into the habit of studying for only what is on an exam in hopes of getting the grade they want. If you take the testing mentality out of the curriculum and base grades on how much a student actually learns then I think grades wouldn’t be as big of an issue.

A second thing that I feel needs to be changed is the mentality of what grades mean. If students weren’t graded on how well they took an exam or two, but instead on how well they mastered a subject I think this notion of a C or lower is essentially failing could disappear. Instead think about grading as if  it was karate (I’m hoping I don’t butcher this analogy since I’ve never done karate in my life). In karate when the master feels you proven yourself and mastered something he gives you a different belt and this process repeats and repeats until you get a belt you desire. If you lose track or give up then you will be stuck with whatever color you’ve achieved so far, but if you stick with it and dig dip then maybe you will achieve the highest honor and get that black belt. Now imagine if grades were done the same way. By showing mastery in certain topics you get higher and higher and if you give up then you get whatever grade you are currently at. But, if you stick with it and really work than you can get that holy grail of grades, the A.

The reason I pose this method is because grades are an easy way for assessing, throughout a semester and after a course is complete, how well a student actually knows the information that was taught in the class. In addition, grades are useful for illustrating to people how well the student knows a subject without having to make sure a person writing a letter of recommendation mentions it.

Grades are an easy way for assessing how well a student actually knows the information that was taught in the class. In addition, grades are useful for illustrating to people how well you know a subject without needing a teach or a professor to write a letter of recommendation. Grades don’t come without their flaws, but I think if the mentality students have towards grades can be changed and teachers can focus on teaching to education students rather than teaching to an exam then I think the A-F scale continue to work.

When we started to talk about the next topic “Assessment” in class, we watched video, called “Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, created by Dan Pink. The unique last name “Pink” suddenly caught my attention, related to his lecture’s topic, I finally realized a interesting fact that my past experience about a special class activity, called “Pink time”, in my research methodology class, should have something to do with this person. After I watched his video of TED talk, “The puzzle of motivation”, I was pretty sure that my special class activity came from his thoughts. So I decided to share a real Pink Time experience.

Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/explore/achieving-goals/

Pink Time activity I went through came from a research methodology course taught by Dr. David Kniola from Educational research and evaluation program, VT. He told everyone at the first day of class that he would have a Pink Time this semester. Everyone would get the same week off to do anything they would like to do, he called it “Pink Time”. The only rule was people need to share about what they did and what they learnt from that one week later. The surprising part came next that he announced that students didn’t need to worry about the score part, since the score would be self-judgement, that students should just told he how much points they would like to give to themselves out of 10 full points, and the reason of the certain self-judgement.

This should take off the pressure since the assessment of the assignment was always the focus of a lot of students. However, that wasn’t the case. People were panic after he explained this Pink Time activity. I still remember the the most common question that day, “You mean anything can be done in that Pink Time? Anything? Do we need to do something related to research or methodology?” He smiled and said, “Anything. There is no limitation.” Actually, at that time, I was a little bit confused too.

It took me weeks to finally decide that I would like to do interior design for my new apartment I would move in soon. That was something I always want to do and I didn’t really have time to actually do it. After I made the decision, I was very excited about it, I took the week he gave us to view examples of different designers, research on how human use spaces, figure out my needs of the functions, and analyze my new place. I even spent all my spare time that week to finish my design drawings.

At the sharing week, I brought my hand drawings of design, and intention pictures to share with the class, and I was so confident and happy to talk about my design, and the knowledge I learnt about interior design and furniture arrangements. That was the same case for most of the other students, especially the ones did something creative and unique. What impressed me the most was a student showing how he tried to make his own wine. And at the end of that semester, he actually brought the wine he made at the Pink Time to share with everyone. I also actually carried out my Pink Time design at my new place after I moved in at the summer break.

I felt so inspired and cheered by Pink Time. Just as Dan Pink said in the TED talk, it was a FeDex Day that we knew we had to deliver something over certain time. At the same time, we tend to achieve more under self-direction. I was so engaged in the Pink Time that I forgot I was in the middle of a special assignment. Here, I really want to thank Dr. Kniola to give me the chance to discover the fun of self-direction and creativity.

Dr. Kniola didn’t show us the talk from Dan Pink right away when he announced the Pink Time. I guess he didn’t want the purposeful talk form Dan Pink influence us when we carried out Pink Time. He would like to see the real situation if that fitted into Dan’s theory.

I think it was a successful experiment. Now, after I read and watched Dan’s talk, I start to look back at the Pink Time, and think more. First, it was sad that us, students were panic and confused when we got autonomy of our time. The doubt of what could we do was the result of the mind set trained by modern education. We always wait for instructions when we are carrying out the mission of learning. We always know there are a lot of limitations, and we tend to think less, especially about what we want to do and what we can do.  Second, Pink Time was a good activity to test “autonomy, mastery, purpose” in educational settings, I think when I start to teach on my own, I would like to carry out Pink Time with my students. I would like to help them see the value of self-direction and the potential of themselves.

I feel like most of my blog posts are going to be repetitive. “It depends.” “What’s the context?” and “How about balance?” are a few phrases I can see routinely popping up.

Grades are awful; we know. They stifle creativity and smother self-worth; we know. That’s why some things are pass/fail, or the requirements for getting that coveted “A” are diverse or flexible.  Some classes may not even need to be pass/fail. Maybe all some classes need are for the instructors to see improvement in their students. Or maybe having a ridged standard is important, such as nursing where ignorance and incompetence could be fatal.

All I needed in second grade art class was a smiley-face sticker, and all I need in my small grad classes is the knowledge that I’m understanding the material and applying it correctly. But getting that “D” in Spelling in the sixth grade (true story) was important and a good kick-in-the-butt just as much as that “A” in my first undergraduate Comm class (my major) gave me the confidence that I was on the right track.

Grades don’t work for every person or every class, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their place or usefulness. Getting rid of grades altogether would be a colossal mistake, but evolving them for certain kinds of students or classes would maybe bring some of the creativity and self-worth back into the classroom.

He is us. Not grades. Sorry, Mr. Kohn. Your essay conflates grades and measurement with a culture which focuses on grades and measurement. You come to three conclusions about grades after citing studies that compare students “who are led to focus on grades” to “those who aren’t.”  In other words, the problem is not necessarily that we measure and report what children do in school, but that we consider that measure to be the most salient indicator of school success. We live in a town where many well-meaning parents can tell you their children’s GPAs and test scores. Some can even tell you other children’s stats. It is no wonder that children sense that grades are more important than learning. I contend that the mere presence of grades does not need to be a deterrent to learning. There is something much deeper than the practice of grading student work that is responsible for the state of our students.

My beliefs have been heavily influenced by my teaching experience. When I retired from Salem High School a year and a half ago, the school-wide practice was to not grade homework (or any practice work) and to not penalize work for being late. Our principal spent many faculty meetings having us discuss the importance of grading for mastery. In other words, a grade should reflect what a student knows and can do at the time the grade is given. There is an implicit recognition that grades occur at artificial deadlines and an official policy that final grades need not be the average of two 9-weeks grades or two semester grades. Getting to this point as a school was not an easy journey and there are still teachers who do not follow the policy exactly at times. A positive effect is that students have learned the language of assessment for learning. They ask what they can do to show they have learned material instead of what they can do for extra credit. On the negative side, the underlying motivation when they ask is still grades because they and their parents often believe that only students with all or mostly A’s get into good universities and have happy lives. Change happens slowly.

 

Merely doing away with grades will not stop parents from comparing children and children from comparing themselves. If we don’t rank children with grades, then we will rank them in some other way. How else to decide who will be granted access to university programs or internship opportunities? Hampshire College has stopped using test scores for admission, and uses grades (not just GPA) instead. The important things to remember are that these numbers are only one piece of information and that they are snapshots of one point in time. The numbers are likely to change over time and with learning. While grades and test scores are not perfect measures, neither are recommendation letters or portfolios. I believe that using grades and test scores as time- and place-based measures of student learning is appropriate and useful. And I believe that the culture surrounding grades can change. In the hands of reflective instructors, grades can be one useful tool for learning.

 

 

I was caught by the title of the title of one this week’s reading “We assess what we value”. It really is a striking and concise title, but unfortunately, I don’t think that it entirely accurate.

For many of us starting out, and perhaps for many seasoned educators as well, we grade on what we are told is important or what standards exist for our fields.  For early educators, we are even given courses with established syllabi, and in some cases, canned assignments and their grading schemes, with little to no room for improvisation or customization.

they wont even let me customize my grade book! #Bedazzled4Life

One such course for me was one that was designed by an instructor, fired for having low teaching evaluations, which was then resurrected by a new more research-oriented faculty member at the behest of the department as a time saving “this material already exists, use that” gesture. It was passed on to another course director, who was retiring, before ultimately being passed on to a set of graduate instructors.

Zombie lesson plans, leading students to follow suit

I was the first person to ask any questions as to why we did things the way we did and surprisingly, ran into little resistance. Most course directors had little attachment to the material unless it was their own, and were surprised that I wanted to increase my workload and delve deeper into assessing the students’ aptitudes of their learning. Some welcomed my input, and others didn’t like my meddling, but allowed me to continue customizing my courses given that I still tested on the same criteria, making anything I did, an extra add on for me.

my mantra, apparently

Some of my compatriots as well as the junior faculty that I spoke with however, have “discretionary” grades they can give out based on authenticity of knowledge not covered by the strict rubric based grading system. This 10-15 points per semester is supposed to guarantee that those who aren’t ‘book smart’ or ‘good at taking tests’ but demonstrate aptitude and understanding of the material can still get a good grade. However, in the large classes, the onus is on the student to develop rapport with the teach in office hours or interact with the teacher in class enough to show that understanding, making the system flawed as face time can be limited and some students prefer not to engage.

Good morning class, this semester, I’d like to get to know all 3500 of you on a one-on-one basis

But back to my original question, do we really assess what we value? OR at least at the higher-ed level, are we merely doing the bare minimum for assessment? Because anecdotally, I’ve seen many professors, even the ones who appeared to care, still following the more traditional assessment methods, where “body of knowledge” and “how” learning are emphasized.  This tends to leave students asking, “How can I get the maximum grade, and what set of facts can I know that will get me there?”.