What is the point of a grade?

I return to this topic again and again. It is report card time at my school. So grades are on my mind.

I loathe grades. Too often, they get in the way of learning and they don't give much in the way of information. They imply an objectivity that rarely and perhaps can never  exist. Some suggest that grades serve to motivate students. In some cases that is true. However, I taught for 23 years without giving grades and my students were motivated. In the video below, Alfie Kohn explains far more eloquently than me why grades don't work.

Yet in most schools...

sadly...

we are stuck with grades. And so, I find myself keenly attuned to grading and testing practices. If we agreed that grades should be no more and no less than a shorthand "snapshot" of a student's learning, then I'd be okay with them. I wouldn't like them, but I would tolerate them. But we don't use grades that way, even if though we say we do.

For instance, I have had advisees, who not knowing tests had a second side to them, score D's on tests in which they answered correctly every question they attempted. While yes, the students should have looked to turn the page over to find more questions, the "D" tells the student, and the student's parents, and potential colleges next to nothing about the students' learning. Everyone involved, including the teacher, knows this "D" is not indicative of learning. So why give false information? 

 I also wonder about the role of extra credit. I know there are students who score 106% on tests. That is impossible! One cannot know more than all the material. It also reinforces the notion that tests are about the points, and not the learning. 

Yet, here is my real point today. I'm resigned to giving grades in my new role. What I want to know is when did we decide in American education that an average was the best way to determine student understanding?

Imagine a foreign language class.

Student A scores

80, 80, 85, 80, 84= 81.8 average

Student B scores

55, 70, 75, 90, 100 = 78

Who has learned more? Who is the more proficient student of the foreign language. Hasn't student B learned far more and by course's end,  know more? This is an unlikely example (though it is one that any long-time teacher has seen), but it does prove the point that averages can deceive. In terms of weather, the average temperature in Dublin and Philadelphia is largely the same. The average tells us nothing about the weather in Philadelphia and Dublin. I've spent a good amount of time in Dublin. It isn't like the weather in my hometown of Philadelphia, PA. 

A colleague of mine pointed out that for one's golf handicap, the highest and lowest scores are dropped. Makes sense. Outliers are just that, outliers. 

Some schools are rethinking assessment and grades. Some have dropped grades. Others have become very intentional and specific in what they say the role of grades are. 

If you give grades, please remember the point of a grade is to quickly show student learning. Do yours? And pointing the mirror back to me, do mine? 

Put Away Your Laptops!

Folks skeptical of technology like to share articles (electronically, of course) proving the limits of ed-tech. The most common critiques are the related topics of cursive handwriting and note-taking.

There are hosts of studies and articles, such as this one from NPR and this one from West Point, suggesting that laptops inhibit effective note taking and thus detract from learning. 

"The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them." (Mueller)

I concede the point. I'll also concede that students are more likely to be distracted and off task. But, I do have  a few responses:

1) When we dig deeper into the study about West Point, we read, "Permitting laptops or computers appears to reduce multiple choice and short answer scores, but has no effect on essay scores." (emphasis mine)  Is learning about thinking or recall? Essays get to thinking, multiple choice questions get to recall. 

2) Do we teach students how to take notes digitally? The study shows that students with laptops type much of the lecture whereas traditional notetakers write only essential points because they cannot write as fast as they can type. However, there are tremendously powerful note-taking apps such as Evernote and Notability. Take a look at what Alice Keeler does with Google Keep. I suggest that the metacognition involved in the process she shares here is far different than transcribing the teacher's lecture. The video to the right is a fine tutorial on keep from the I Review Anything channel. Do we teach digital note-taking? 

3) Once notes are taken, technology can help a student organize them (via Evernote, Keep, Notability and countless other apps and extensions) and search within notes more efficiently. Suppose we taught students to only listen and type down main ideas instead of transcribing the lecture and then showed them how to search within their notes? I'd like to see a study commissioned about this. 

4) Studies show that students forget what they learn after a test. So, even if students do better in the short-term when taking notes by hand, does it matter at all that students do better on tests if they are going to forget it within weeks anyway? To say that students learn more in the medium or long term via handwritten notes is fundamentally untrue. 

5) I'll admit it, the lecture has its place. Sometimes it is the easiest and most efficient way to share knowledge.  Yet, studies such as these miss the point! As I've written recently, information is ubiquitous. It is accessible from anywhere. All of the world's knowledge is several clicks away. So, why don't classrooms reflect that? Why is lecture still the primary mode of instruction, especially in High School and College?

6) Information is ever-changing and ever-increasing. We simply can't know it all. In most professions, we should encourage people to look things up and not memorize. Harvard Medical School, hardly a wishy-washy progressive haven, recognizes this and has changed its program.

7) Technology allows us to significantly change the way we teach. These studies bemoaning tech use in the classroom are always in traditionally formatted classes. In some ways, these studies are all missing the point. 

There's a place for traditional note-taking. I concede that.

There's a place for lecturing and direct instruction. I concede that too.

For once, though, I'd like to see critics of ed-tech in school ask themselves some bigger questions about the point of schooling and learning and what we actually want students to be able to do. 

Ubiquitous

TedTalks have become clichéd. But I still watch them because once in a while, I come across one that profoundly moves me.  Dr, Zimbardo's talk on the psychology of evil was one such talk. Watch it if you have the time. He explains what a powerful class experiment taught him about the nature of evil.

Recently, I've run across another. Michael Wesch, like Zimbardo, is a college professor. He posits that in a world in which there ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication about everything from everywhere at unlimited speed on all kinds of devices we need to shift our education goals from making students "knowledgeable" to "knowledge-able". That might seem too cute a first glance. But it really struck me. I had a light bulb moment. I've articulated thoughts like this in this blog more than a few times. But I've not heard it put so perfectly or pithily. Anyway, watch and enjoy.  

Most Likely to Succeed

Last night at +Holy Child Academy Drexel Hill,  I saw the third of what to my mind is a trio of education movies, all of which highlight High Tech High School in San Diego. This film, Most Likely to Succeed, is largely persuasive in pointing out the futility of the traditional "factory"  model of education. It rightly points out that our model started a 125 years ago when the Committee of Ten pushed for a standardized learning system. I'd argue against the movie's point that the committee wanted to create compliant factory workers, indeed the factory model of education was in part supplanted by the Committee's suggestions of sorting learning into disciplines and separating students by age.  However, I agree with the film's larger point that the Committee's model now no longer works.
    This brings me to my other problem with the movie's premise. It still posits school's goal is to

create "successful" people. It still equates learning with "work" and success. It is a larger, socio-economic and political truth that wages no longer keep up with productivity. It explains the anger that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are channeling.  The skills traditional education teaches students no longer helps them "compete" in the modern economy. I agree. The film instead suggests that "soft' skills such as creative thinking will let kids succeed in the new economy. I don't buy it. Yes, it will work for a few. Yet, how many creative jobs will there really be? If we define success as wealth accumulated as an adult, the vast majority of our students will not be successful whether they come from a traditional school or a school like High Tech High. How many visionary, creative CEO type jobs exist? Not nearly enough.  What we are going to do with a now idle workforce is something society is going to have to figure out. It is a problem that needs a solution bigger than anything schools can provide.
    The film is most successful when it challenges basic tenets of traditional education. To people who argue  that kids need to know content, it devastates that position by pointing to studies that prove that students-across academic disciplines-forget 90% of content within 3 weeks of taking the test. Truly, what is the point of testing for mastery of facts? Why do we give final exams in June based on the mass recall of facts when these facts will be forgotten by July?
    The film is also effective in showing the power of metacognition and that students learn through self-reflection. I like that the very model of High Tech High makes this type of thinking central to what students to there. It also effectively argues that this education is more "sticky" than the fact-based model. Students at High Tech High do better on standardized tests than do the kids who go to schools which explicitly prepare their students for standardized tests. Perhaps progressive educators can have their cake and eat it too.
    I appreciated the film's honesty in saying that whether schools like High Tech High actually work better than traditional schools, at least according to traditional measures, is unknown.  We don't have long term longitudinal studies.
    Go see the movie.
Click here to view trailer

On Progressive Education

     I've written before about how much I enjoy Jordan Shapiro's twitterfeed (@jordosh) and blogposts. His most recent blogpost in Fortune, entitled, We've Had 100 Years Of Progressive Education And The World's Getting Worse, raises some terrific points. I disagree however with a part of his premise, for I really do not believe progressive education has been tried in any significant way in the USA. He writes, "...We don’t need to consider, for example, the possibility that a century of well-intentioned progressive trends in education may have cultivated a generation of entitled I-me-mine individualist “winners” who can all too easily stomach the idea that their success is deserved even while their neighbors are suffering." I just don't buy it. 

"Education, therefore, is a process of living
 and not a preparation for future living." John Dewey
     

     How does progressive thought in education from Dewey down through Alfie Kohn lead to such thinking?  More importantly, when have we really ever tried progressive education on a massive scale in the USA. Okay, okay, some old-time teachers might point to New Math. But that's from the 70s. From Sputnik to a Nation at Risk to the business led education reforms of the past 20 years, we have not promoted progressive education in the USA. So, I'd appreciate it if Shapiro made the connection.
    This statement, though, is right on target:"But when we promote 21st century skills over 20th century skills, we’re just arguing for a different kind of factory. It shows a lack of imagination."

   Read the whole article. I'd love for some conversation about it.