WHY 'GRADES' ARE A USELESS FORM OF FEEDBACK (AND DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD)

So, ‘smart’ kids are no happier than others. Besides, why does society value academia so highly anyway? School systems think standardised testing will somehow improve learning and that assigning grades and report cards will somehow improve learning, but a large body of research suggests quite the opposite. Kids need feedback that will help them improve. But what do we actually want students to get out of their education? What are we trying to achieve?

A teacher’s take on why schools should scrap ‘grades’, in favour for giving students real ‘feedback’…

Grades are a useless form of feedback, and do more harm than good

Alfie Kohn outlines here some of his arguments against ‘grades’:
• Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself
• Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks
• Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking
• Grades aren’t valid, reliable, or objective
• Grades distort the curriculum
• Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning
• Grades encourage cheating
• Grades spoil teachers’ relationships with students
• Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other

In this article, educator Chris Crouch gives his three key reasons for his anti-grades stance and why they’re not only potentially harmful to learning, but plain useless and unreliable:
• Grades are inflated
• Grades remove intrinsic motivation
• Grades are poor communicators of student learning

What are we trying to measure, and how do we measure it?

I read yesterday that the world’s 'smartest' kids are also the 'saddest'. Yikes. That goes against the age-old, ‘go to school, get a good education, become smart, get a great job, have a great life’ model that is drilled into us from when we’re young. It got me thinking about our push for “results, results, results” in schools, which then got me thinking about how we define and measure “results”.

Of course we want our students to get “results”, but how do we measure the success of education? And besides, what are we actually trying to achieve? I’ve blogged previously about Ken Robinson's ideas about education and suggestions that we focus too heavily on the ‘academic’. I quoted him as saying “The whole point of education is to get people to learn. If there’s no learning going on, there’s no education going on.” He says that the role of teachers is “to facilitate learning”, to “mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage”. I’ve searched Victoria’s education department website as well as Victoria’s curriculum website and Australia’s National Curriculum website and Australian government’s education department website. Surely, as the four key organisations that determine what my students learn, I will have been able to figure out what I’m expected to be doing when I teach. I couldn’t actually find anything of any use, other than “High quality school education supports productivity and improves the educational outcomes of children, increasing the likelihood that they will attain skills and be in employment” (http://education.gov.au/school-education). My reaction – what the heck does that mean? Let me get this straight… If my students get a job when they finish school, then their education has been a success? Can other people see how ridiculous that sounds? Well, I’m no closer to learning what kind of ‘results’ I’m looking for, other than the specifics listed in curriculum documents. Perhaps that is actually what we’re hoping for? Children that develop a long list of skills and understandings that will lead to them getting a job? In America, don’t the Common Core Standards aim to develop “college and career readiness”? I’m starting to see a pattern.

Kindergarten prepares kids for Primary School,
which prepares kids for High School,
which prepares teenagers for Tertiary Education and work.
Is this honestly what our education system is/does?   

Above I listed lots of reasons given by Crouch and Kohn as to why grades are not only useless, but damaging to learning. Even if we ignored that for a moment, how can teachers grade a student’s learning if we don’t actually know what we or they are hoping to achieve, let alone how to measure it?

So what feedback will improve student learning?

I’m not arguing for a kumbaya, sit-around-the-campfire and sing all kids praises regardless of effort. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t measure success or attempt to measure a learning program’s effectiveness. Some argue that these days, we’re overly politically correct, praise kids too often and are setting our future generations up for failure but taking away things such as competition and opportunities to build resilience. I’m not suggesting we scrap ‘grades’ and reports and replace them with gold stars for all. I do believe, however, that teachers need to actively give their students real feedback – Feedback that report grades or exam scores do not provide.  

Many ‘pro-graders’ argue that grades do give ‘feedback’ to teachers, students, parents, schools and systems are about how kids are going with their learning. I suppose they do somewhat, however as Ken Robinson has mentioned, we assess learner success “across a very narrow spectrum of achievement”. Curriculum documents essentially provide teachers with a whole repertoire of skills and understandings that their students are expected to master. That’s what we assess against. That’s what we use to assign grades. That’s the feedback we give.

 I’ve mentioned John Hattie in a previous blog post, in regards to his work on “effect sizes” in relation to “feedback”. Long story short, I don’t see reports/grades anywhere on his list of factors which improve student learning outcomes. A few factors are sort of related, such as “Student Self-Reported Grades” which states that a student’s expectations of their own learning and the push for them to exceed those expectations, “Formative Evaluation” which basically refers to the assessment used to inform teaching and learning, and “Feedback” information for teacher and more importantly, the student, on where they’re going, how they’re going and where to next. Note that this last factor does not mean feedback given to a parent about what their kid has done at school for the last six months! Here, Hattie says that feedback (not grades!) “leads to increased effort, motivation or engagement to reduce the discrepancy between current status and the goal, it can lead to alternative strategies to understand the material, it confirm to the student that they are correct or incorrect, it can indicate that more information is available or needed, it can point to directions that the students could pursue, and it can lead to restructuring understandings” (*pp2-3).

This research has shown that “descriptive feedback, which conveys information on how one performs the task and details ways to overcome difficulties, was far more effective than evaluative feedback, which simply informed students about how well they did and, consequently, carried a connotation of social comparison without giving any guidelines on how to improve” (^p32). Further, “receiving a grade was also generally associated with lower self-efficacy and more negative affect” (^p33).

Although they’ve been around since the 1700s, it might be time to give grades the flick! In fact, the fact that they’ve been around for so long is probably even more of a reason to get rid of them! If anyone is able to give me some arguments for grades that out-way the downsides I’ve discussed, I’m more than happy to hear your side!

This has been my longest post to date, so thankyou for sticking with it - If you stayed until the end! J

Teachling <Wordpress> <Tumblr> < Twitter>

Some good links relating to this topic:

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-crouch/grades-do-more-harm-than-_b_4190907.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003&ir=Education
• http://danhaesler.com/2014/01/20/are-the-smartest-kids-also-the-saddest/
• http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
• http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcag.htm
•http://education.qld.gov.au/staff/development/performance/resources/readings/power-feedback.pdf
•(*)http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/webdav/site/education/shared/hattie/docs/formative-and-summative-assessment-(2003).pdf
•(^)http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RR-08-30.pdf

Image source:

http://hardik.practutor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BadGradeClipArt.jpg

What is education, anyway? Pt.3

A teacher’s take on rethinking education…

So, following my last two posts – the first in response Ken Robinson’s Ted Talk on 'how schools kill creativity', the second regarding his 'new' model of education – I’ve been pondering what exactly this means for me, as a teacher, and what it means for my students. Ideas are spinning around in my head such as providing an education based on diversity as all kids are completely different. Why do we focus so greatly on academic talent and celebrate academic achievement? There is a clear ‘hierarchy’ of subjects in schools in which literacy, mathematics and science are on top with the humanities, physical education and visual and performing arts at the bottom. Are we actually discouraging childrens’ natural creative abilities? If education was designed to meet the need of industrialism, why has it changed so little in the last hundred or so years?

I know that I personally am always hoping to provide an education which considers these factors. An education which sees children truly engaged, rather than simply compliant. However, given  that I, as a teacher, have so little control over curriculum (what I teach ), my good intentions will only get me so far. I have slightly more control over pedagogy (how I teach) and as such I am able to try to shake things up somewhat, but at the end of the day if my school/system/state/community ‘demands’ that I teacher certain things, as hard as I try, those same old principles will still come through.

Regarding the compliance vs engagement idea I touched on previously, a blog post I read titled 'What we learn with pleasure, we never forget' made some excellent points that make me feel a bit better about all this. “Why do we assume that learning only occurs when kids are serious and quiet?... The belief remains strong that learning can only take place when kids are quiet and the work laborious, that any activities where engaged kids seem to be enjoying themselves must be superfluous, and that teachers who make learning fun run the risk of being declared unprofessional. This thinking is having an adverse effect on what kids learn and how they are taught.” So perhaps, at the very least, even if teachers must work with curriculum that is uninspired, outdated (despite constant re-writes) and academia-heavy, we can teach it in a way that is engaging, personalised, and provides opportunities for creativity and learning through a child’s unique talents.

Think about all of the great work that teachers and schools do despite the current dominant model of education… Now think about how fantastic education would be if we were to rethink, not just pedagogy, but curriculum too (and no, I don’t mean the kind of ‘curriculum revolution’ that governments all around the world push particularly at election time, which always ends up being essentially  a very expensive re-formatting of the same old content)!

Will we ever see a true revolution in the education?

Teachling <Wordpress> <Tumblr> < Twitter>

Read a great blog post on this topic here, that Norah Colvin directed me to.

More on this topic from Teachling:

Ken Robinson's take on how we should be viewing education...
Ken Robinson's take on schools, and how they kill creativity...
A teacher's take on "How Children Learn"...

What is education, anyway? Pt.2

Let’s face it, children are basically all the same and should be taught in the same, tried and tested, chalk and talk, fashion. Teachers in schools should focus purely on the 3R’s – Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic – and leave that creative ‘fluff’ for kids to pursue in their own time. Children should be viewed as empty vessels and a teacher’s role is to fill them with enough knowledge to pass the test. Some kids are just lazy, hyperactive or incapable of learning, so teachers should let them be whilst focussing on the other kids that can and want to learn. Wait… What? Was there actually a time when people thought this way about education? I do hope that the opinions above are not felt by any person on this earth. My opinions are much more aligned with those articulated in Ken Robinson’s Ted Talk, "How to escape education's death valley" (2013). So let me quote some of the highlights…

Ken Robinson’s take on how we should be viewing education…

What’s wrong with the current model of education?

• “I will make you a bet, and I’m confident I will win the bet. If you’ve got two children or more, I bet you, they are completely different from each other, aren’t they?”

• However, “education… is based on, not diversity, but conformity”

• “[We assess] what kids can do, across a very narrow spectrum of achievement.”

• They say there’s an ‘ADHD epidemic’, but “If you sit kids down hour after hour, doing low grade clerical work, don’t be surprised if they start to fidget.”

• “In place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance” in schools… and a “culture of standardization.”

How should we be viewing education? What needs to happen?

• “Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents; not just a small range of them.”

• As well as literacy, science and maths, “a real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education.”

• “The whole point of education is to get people to learn. If there’s no learning going on, there’s no education going on”

•  The role of teachers is “to facilitate learning”… to “mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage”.

 It seems pretty obvious when Robinson observes that education ‘happens’ in classrooms in schools, and that the people who ‘do’ education are the teachers and the students. “If you remove their discretion, it stops working”. Why then, is virtually every aspect of what goes on in education dictated by politicians, administrators, businesses and organisations, and even parents? It must be said that great teaching and learning happens in spite of the current model. “It’s like people are sailing into a head wind all the time.”

 

It’s all well and good to whine and moan about education and the fact that teachers are dictated to and that the current model of education is so outdated it is beyond ridiculous. But why don’t we stop the complaining and actually do something about it?

In this article, a veteran teacher, frustrated with the current state of affairs in schools, notes that “no one ever asks the teachers, those who are up to their necks in the trenches each day, or if they do, it is in a patronizing way and our suggestions are readily discarded. Decisions about classrooms should be made in classrooms. Teachers are the most qualified individuals to determine what is needed for their own students.”

I wonder what education would ‘look like’ if we handed control to teachers and students?

Teachling <Wordpress> <Tumblr> < Twitter>

What is education, anyway? Pt.1

Ken Robinson's take on schools, and how they kill creativity...

 

What is education, anyway? Pt.1

Ken Robinson’s take on schools, and how they kill creativity…

You’re likely one of the 20,738,467 viewers of Ken Robinson’s “Schools Kill Creativity” 2006 TED Talk, but just in case, here’s the link.

Robinson’s assertion, and general gist of the talk, is that “All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them; pretty ruthlessly”. The “we”, we can infer from the rest of his talk, are schools.

Let me pick out some key points:

·         “My contention is that creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
·         “We are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
·         “Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects… At the top are Mathematics and Languages, then the Humanities and at the bottom are the Arts… And in pretty much every education system there’s a hierarchy within the Arts. Art and Music are normally given a higher status in schools that Drama and Dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches Dance every day to children, the way we teach them Mathematics. Why? Why not?”
·         “Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.”
·         (On why schools are so focussed on academia) “Education systems were designed to meet the needs of industrialism… The subjects given the highest status were those that were most useful subjects for work… Kids were, and still are, steered away from subjects you like on the proviso that you won’t find work doing that, such as music, art and so on.”

To finish:

·         “We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”
·         “Our task is to educate their whole being”

I believe we’d struggle to find many teachers that would whole-heartedly disagree with what Robinson has to say. I believe that most teachers do what we do in spite of those “fundamental principles”. I believe many teachers would feel that – as well as their students’ innate talents and creativity being snuffed – their own talents and creativity don’t get much of a look-in. I believe most teachers are very restricted in terms of what they teach as well as how they teach it. Naturally, as a teacher, I’m bound to get defensive when schools are under fire, but in this case I believe that Ken Robinson is correct. However, I also know that there’s very little teachers can do about it.

It’s the administrators and politicians that should take Robinson’s advice. It’s also the perceptions of a majority of parents that would need to vastly change if any rethinking of fundamental principles were to occur. So many administrators, politicians and parents are so conditioned by their own school experiences (in many cases this was decades ago!), that makes me feel that Ken Robinson’s ideas are, sadly, a pipedream.

On school change and educational reform, Richard Elmore (2007) noted that “complex systems are built to do what they have always done, not to engage in fundamental transformations.” So, wouldn’t many argue that the ‘product’ that schools create is great? Lots of young people are popping out at the end of the school machine, ready for either work or further study. Wouldn’t many argue then, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?

What do you think?

Teachling <Wordpress>

References

Elmore, R. (2007) Educational Improvement in Victoria. Harvard University
Robinson, K. (2006) Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. TED Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html