Category: Week 4 – Assessment

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?”.

I read this article once before in my former graduate school experience for a similar class with a similar structure. It is most certainly part of the philosophy with which I handle student assessment. I like Kohn’s assessment for 3 reasons: 1) He presents a clear case against a flawed institution that is severely out of date and inadequate, and has always been inadequate, for assessing performance. 2) He presents this case through a logical reversal of the incentives supposedly produced through grades. By his logic, if a student defines her success through the grading apparatus, her focus will be on the grading apparatus, on how well she’s doing, instead of what she’s doing. 3) He makes a clear distinction between assessing a student’s progress and measuring a student’s progress. The latter is clearly, although he makes no reference back to the enlightenment, a product of the rationalization of civilization. The problem is that rational systems can easily produce irrational effects.

For my class, I have them grade themselves. They can even produce they’re own metrics of how they might go about self-evaluating. Perhaps the nature of my course allows me to more easily generate an environment for this, but I do not think so. The course is called “The Creative Process,” and it is quite an open field as far as course design is concerned. We read a book and have daily discussions produced through a series of questions students must ask in response to the weekly reading; there are documentaries; there’s a group midterm project; and they present they’re individual creative projects to the class for the final. I provide feedback as best I can, but there is no real measurement I provide of the student’s success. I must admit, as I progress into my second semester teaching this course, there seems to be a lot weariness on the part of students when they encounter my attitude towards grades. Some have accused me of laziness (it is less work when I don’t grade them, and all the better for both parties). My response to that is I put more time in the feedback, a device with much more potential use than a grade, or a grade with feedback. But the students also seem equally anxious about being given almost complete free reign over what they will produce for my class. I guess my passing questions here are how do I motivate students who have never done they’re own research, who don’t know what they’re interested in, who are perplexed at the idea of generating a thing of their own, and who are so locked into the administrative side (asking question like: “what do I need to do to do well in this class?”) of education that it almost seems to destabilize their identities (as students) when I say I’m not going to grade you and you have to come up with your own research project?

Once in primary school, I got into a fight with an older kid in another class who was trying to bully my friend. Considering the fact that in my adult life, I am only 5.4 inches tall and weigh 125 pounds, much of this height and weight I gained only in the last 3 years, it wasn’t a particularly great idea to stand up to this tall kid. A little blow on the mouth was all it took to shut me up. I went home with one of my front teeth threatening to fall off any minute. My grandmother who is a strong believer in the potency of salt (she uses salt to treat all kinds of illnesses, from malaria to skin diseases to plain old cough), gave me a solution, highly concentrated with salt. My task was to fill my mouth with as much of this solution as it can contain for about fifteen minutes, spit it out and then fill my mouth again with another batch. After this, my grandmother moistened a ball of cotton wool with salt solution and then placed it on the root of the trembling tooth and asked me to hold it in place firmly with my lip. Her aim was to firm the root of the tooth so it does not fall out.

Assessment in the school system to me is like this: to check if the salt solution and cotton wool were doing their job of firming my tooth, I will take the cotton wool out and then wiggle my weak tooth to see if there was any sign of it firming up, every fifteen minutes. My grandmother kept cautioning me to stop doing that but I failed to listen until finally, the tooth fell out. Although my initial objective was to just ‘assess’ my tooth, I did more harm than good. A teacher engaged in an online debate on the importance of assessment used a different analogy of a plant being repeatedly ripped out of the soil to examine its growing status. Her argument was that, there are better ways of assessing students other than a standardized test.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that as educationists, our curriculum should be wide enough to cater for all kinds of students. As diverse as our thought processes are as humans, we should try to accommodate each other’s lines of reasoning. Having a specific rigid grading rubric where a student gets less marks depending on his or her deviation from the supposedly right answer, is not correct. Insisting that one travels a straight line in other to get to a particular destination, can be interpreted in so many ways by different students (just like this plot shows, this is for my engineer friends :)).

If teachers do their jobs well, I am of the view that there is no need for assessing the performance of the students after a lesson. If my grandmother had told me that the reason why she asked me to keep the cotton wool firmly in place with my lip was to prevent my teeth from moving and therefore allow it to be firm, I don’t think I would have found wisdom in the need to assess the firming process. If we do our jobs well, the result will definitely be positive, no need for assessment. Every teacher ought to be like my grandmother, she believes the process, and so she finds no need for assessment.

Assessment to me has a different meaning probably than to most of the people in the class.  In counseling, assessment can take much of a different interpretation.  Counselors tend to assess for mental health concerns such as diagnosis, suicidal thoughts, etc.  Thinking of grades equaling assessment takes some reframing, but it makes sense because we have to assess performance somehow!

Dr. Nelson was talking in class about how grades are varying, originally designed for objects and later people.  I’ve been amazed to see how different the same class can be from one semester to another, one professor to another, and especially one university to another.  One class that comes to mind is a class about Counseling Theories that I have taken several times in various forms and actually co-taught last semester.  I’ve found the lack of consistency to be somewhat frustrating in the past because I thought that there are certain standards in place that keep classes consistent from one place to another.  However, I’m starting to question that after looking at some of these readings and videos this week.  Maybe it is better that each class is a bit different.  Learning shouldn’t be about forming everyone around one way of taking in information but instead tailoring learning to each individual.  The grades may turn out different from one class to another based on students’ various strengths, but maybe that isn’t a bad thing.  The variability from one class to another that I was thinking was a limitation, I am now seeing as a strength.

I’ve always thought of this from the framework that standards are to keep professors from missing what is important to be taught in the Counseling Theories class.  But now I have changed my thinking that having too strict of standards and/or assessments for this class would take away from the intrinsic motivation that each of the professors was able to instill in the students.  After seeing the videos from Dan Pink, I recognize that a class like this is a mental challenge, not just a mechanical task in which students just follow the rules.  The “rules” of counseling are not straightforward because interacting with people is never the same from one instance to another.  So for that matter, why should counseling classes be the exact same from one school to another?  Counseling requires cognitive skills that Dan Pink refers to actually makes rewards work backwards.  People perform worse when an increased reward is offered (i.e. a grade).  For that matter, making grades the reward (in theory) should actually reduce performance.  So what I’ve noticed about the professors from these classes, was that grades were just sort of a byproduct of doing the work for class.  It wasn’t about how well students performed on tests but that they engaged with each other and the learning process.  As the Dan Pink video specifies, what is important for motivating people for these types of tasks are: Autonomy, Mastery, and purpose.  Learning to be a counselor requires a lot of autonomy, striving for mastery in the field, and a sense of purpose seems to practically always bring people to work in the mental health field.  You know we don’t do it for the money!  So a lack of consistency from class to class was something that frustrated me in the past, but to quote a few other people’s blogs, “Aha!”  I have found a whole new appreciation for the variety because just like in counseling, the work has to be tailored to the clients (or students in this instance).  Creating an environment where learning comes first (by allowing greater reliance on autonomy, mastery, and purpose) and grades come as an afterthought allows students to develop into counseling professionals.

I think back to my undergrad experience, and the main motivator was grades.  By the time I graduated, I had the system pegged!  I did the work, earned the grade, and moved onto the next class.  Granted there was a sense of purpose that I wanted to work in the mental health field, but “purpose” is not what looks good on a college transcript.  But that system I had in undergrad didn’t really work once I hit graduate school.  Doing the work was just part of the experience I came for, and memorizing facts to regurgitate on a test no longer worked.  I’m not sure how other fields of graduate study work, but my experience of graduate education was that I was motivated primarily by autonomy, mastery, and purpose to learn from my professors and peers in order to make a difference in the counseling field.  Grades slipped gently into the background and came more as a byproduct of learning than as the motivator for pursuing education.  I hope to use my experience to be one of those professors that brings out that intrinsic motivation in students, as many have done for me so far.

So that is my Aha moment for the week!

“[did thing] Check! [did thing] Check! [did thing] Check! [did thing] Check!…”

As an instructor of record at Virginia Tech, I am “forced” into using letter grades to assess my students. This is the exact same framework that affects my own graduate studies. Virginia Tech goes beyond the standard “A-D and F” grading scale and adds further qualifiers through the use of “pluses” and “minuses.” I cannot count the number of emails I have received from students towards the end of the semester in which they are requesting any possible way to receive tenths of a point in order to move them from an A- to an A or a B to a B+. This perception of an education and its impact on life often leads to viewing every day as a routine series of checklists and compartmentalization. It becomes a question of “Yes or No?” not “Why or How?” This is because they fear that their GPA will be affected and in turn, their GPA affects the quality of job they will receive after graduation.”Grades don’t prepare children for the ‘real world’ — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant” (Kohn).

Have we reached a world where interest and quality of thinking are unimportant? Today’s current political climate, the disavowing of science, and and the use of “alternative facts” by those in power would surely suggest this. It almost seems that I refer to a quote from Sir Isaac Asimov on almost a daily basis. The quote I reference is from a January 21, 1980 Newsweek article he wrote titled “A Cult of Ignorance” where he says, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” Has the university become an extension of trade and vocational schools? I personally hope that this is not the case. I am hopeful that students realize the necessity of gaining a diversity of knowledge and what we might perceive as skills usually taught in trade and vocational schools are in fact examples of experiential learning.”Employers complain that many college graduates are not prepared for the workplace and lack the new set of skills necessary for successful employment and continuous career development” (Lombardi). These skills are not just knowing the mechanics of the student’s chosen trade or discipline but how to problem solve, how to do group work, how to not operate in a silo and work between disciplines. These skills can be found in experiential learning. My experience with experiential learning as a student was a positive experience. In my undergraduate program, I was required to have a semester long internship in order to graduate. That internship eventually turned into a job after I graduated. I was also involved in National Model United Nations (NMUN) in New York City. NMUN taught me daily skills used by diplomats, such as negotiation with others, writing position papers, and writing resolutions to solve global problems that are difficult to learn in the classroom at times. However, as an instructor, I have implemented this type of experiential learning with limited success. In a course here at Virginia Tech, titled Multilateral Diplomacy Workshop, some students felt the use of National Model United Nations in the classroom was too nebulous and that there should have been more lectures and direct applications to what they would have to do in their future jobs. Their work indicated a lack of creativity as they relied on current real world solutions to solve the issues presented to them. Instead, they should have come to the realization that we still have constant discussions about the same real world problems and that the current answers might not work. Therefore, they should primarily ask what is not working within the current structures and then creatively think about solutions involving those structures or invent new solutions.

Eric Liu and Scott Noppe-Brandon, in Imagination First, propose that the United States has created a society that stifles ideas; creativity; imagination; and deep thinking. The use of grades, metrics, rubrics, and teaching to the test are the root cause of the educational society we have created and we must innovatively disrupt this if we are to progress our educational system. This is supported via a point offered  by Kohn, “…the absence of grades is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for promoting deep thinking and a desire to engage in it.”

(Side note: Since I am a New Orleanian, I am inordinately appreciative of Liu and Noppe-Brandon’s acknowledgement of the Lower Ninth Ward that was decimated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and remains an area of New Orleans that, even 10 1/2 years later, has not completely recovered.)

References

Asimov, Isaac. “A Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek. January 21, 1980.

Kohn, Alfie. “The Case Against Grades.” Educational Leadership. November 2011.

Liu, Eric and Scott Noppe-Brandon. Imagination First. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco. 2009.

Lombardi, Marilyn M. “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning.” Educause Learning Initiative. January 2008.

Sometimes when I grade assignments,  I really struggle with grading open-ended questions. In order to keep consistency and fairness, I often refer back to the instructor manual to decide the scores and put them into the rubric. In general, the closer the answer to that in the manual, the higher score I give. However, I feel this way to of grading discourages creative thinking.  It is a tragedy if 130 students have the same idea or similar answers for a question, even though the answer may be a common sense to most people. Therefore, I also try to be open to alternative answers and give students some encouragements on doing this. But another problem occurring is that the assessment becomes kind of subjective and depends on my personal preference. For example, how to decide this one is a creative answer, and that one is wrong or irrelevant to the question? Since my judgment cannot be correct all the time, I think grading can be a big challenge in this case.

After reading Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning, I understand that “students consider what is important as what is being assessed”. My challenge also affects their learning process, so I have to think about how to improve the assessment procedure. According to this article, a good strategy may be combining peer assessment with my assessment, and the total score can be a weighted average of these two parts.

A reflection on my experience and the reading suggests that educators should be more willing to think about “what if” cases in teaching, writing the learning materials and grading. As maintained in Imagination First, our adults have too much to defense and often prefer consistency instead of surprise. To improve students’ creativity, we should first work on creativity of educators, because their judgments in the assessment affect student behaviors. Another thing comes to my mind is the fact that current assessment often provides little incentive for creative solutions. Suppose a student knows the standard answer and also thinks of an alternative, she might be more likely to use the standard one in an exam because it is safer. As time goes by, this tendency of risk aversion may kills that student’s creativity.  To improve imagination and innovation, we should add bonus points to their creative minds and “risk-taking” behavior in the assessment.

Source: http://www.frsd.k12.nj.us/Page/3671

References

1. Lombardi, Marilyn M. “Making the grade: The role of assessment in authentic learning.” EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (2008).
2. Liu, Eric, and Scott Noppe-Brandon. Imagination first: Unlocking the power of possibility. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.