Students

Cooperative Catalyst writes about grades and rubrics and the centrality–even the singularity–of the teacher’s voice in assessment in Students should be at the center of Authentic Assessment.

The post offers some points which immediately resonate with me.

The teacher is merely one voice in the conversation. When the student is not at the center of the assessment, then it is detached and fragmented lacking any power to lead to real authentic growth.

These two sentences made me think that perhaps having students write a reflective paper to communicate their understanding of their growth in the course would be a good idea. I immediately thought of that as an option.

Yet when I read the next sentence, the strength of that reaction dissipated almost entirely.

Students might preform [sic] well, might score well on the state test, or complete all the assignments, but the minute the voice disappears there is no motivation or resources for the child to do their own work.

The issues with this statement do not revolve around the transposed letters.

The first problem is the idea that a person who has no voice in their grades has no motivation. I have never had a spoken voice in my grades. No one ever asked me what grade I deserved on a paper. But I still had motivation. Motivation is an intrinsic force, not necessarily related to nor influenced by extrinsic forces. Anyone can be motivated, despite what is happening around them, just as anyone can refuse to be motivated, despite whatever encouragement is offered.

The second problem is a question of resources. How does letting a person choose their grades–or at least have a voice in them–automatically give them any resources they did not already have for doing their work? Students who are intrinsically motivated will do their work because they work. Students who are extrinsically motivated may quit doing their work because if they have a voice in their grades they can say, “I am doing my best” and hope for an A when really they are not doing anything.

Because of the discrepancy in logical thought, I almost quit reading the post. But I read fast and it is short and so I continued.

Another paragraph also caught my attention:

During my first year of college I was asked to write a persuasive research essay and decided to argue against grading. From the beginning grades were considered merely a tool for the institution not to help learning or the student. I am still confused and frustrated that grades and rubrics are still the main source of assessment.

What beginning is DLoitz speaking about?

The beginning of education? There were no grades on the steps of the Acropolis. Plato and Aristotle did not hand out assessments.

The beginning of K-12 in the United States, instituted as a way of dealing with the need for factory workers in the industrial age and the desire to provide care for children while their parents were working? In that case, how would grades be good for the institution? The schools existed to provide something for students to do while their parents worked. Who cares about their grades?

The beginning of assessment practices in the twentieth century when schools were attempting to prove their efficacy? Well, then, there I would agree with her. Grades were not created to serve students but to stand for the institution’s understanding of their achievements to that point.

What is wrong with that?

The reason we moved to standardized testing was that institutions were not consistent. A student who could read on a fifth grade level in the Armonk, NY school system was not equivalent to a student who could read on a fifth grade level in the Lubbock, TX school system.

While this wasn’t a problem within school systems, it was a problem for industry outside the school systems. Businesses could hire a straight-A high school graduate from Willis and discover that the person’s writing was insufficiently advanced to be able to create readable memos, much less craft reports, because the student’s grades had been given not based on classroom performance but on their 4-H performance. Hiring a B-average high school graduate from Byram Hills, on the other hand, would guarantee that the student could create relevant reports with sufficient research and citations to surpass the strictest standards.

That is why standardized testing came into existence. A single school system creates its own pool with which to compare and determine grades. School systems across the country, however, can be compared on some level based on standardized exams.

There is a reason for standardized testing. It does have to do with basic learning requirements. It does NOT have anything to do with depth or breadth of knowledge. Nor does it have anything to do with the student’s understanding or innate ability. It is simply a means of comparing apples to apples.

I am going to requote the sentence which grates on me the most from the post.

I am still confused and frustrated that grades and rubrics are still the main source of assessment.

Really? A teacher who does not understand the point of assessment? Assessment is not to say whether a student is brilliant or stupid. It is not to say whether a student is lazy or works hard. It is not to say whether a student will succeed or fail. What assessment is designed to do, all it does, and the point of it doing it, is to demonstrate whether or not the student has reached minimum competencies and to allow for a range of competencies to be compared.

Do grades say how much a student has learned? No. Do grades help a student figure out how to learn better? No. Do grades tell whether a student is smart? No. Do grades tell whether a student is lazy? No. Do grades tell whether a student is honest? No. Do grades tell whether a student has integrity? No. Do grades tell whether a student has intrinsic or extrinsic forces acting upon them? No. Do grades tell whether a person will succeed or fail in their next venture? No.

But none of that matters.

Grades are simply a way to compare apples to apples.

If you want oranges, you have to assess oranges.

Why is IQ higher in some places than others? The answer, according to some researchers, is that infectious diseases hurt folks. Those places with lower infectious disease rates have higher IQ.

Yet another reason to encourage healthy practices.

I have read (citation needed) that students who are in their professors’ offices are likely to do better in their classes. So I decided to require my freshmen to show up in my office this week.

Also having students come in to your office increases credibility. Since that can be an issue on campus, apparently, it helps me to have them come in.

It does, apparently, matter how messy your office is. Hmm. Maybe I should have put the extra chair together before I had the students in.

Unfortunately for my students (and their grades) I don’t have office hours on Friday. 75%, at least, had not been in nor had they contacted me. I agreed to come in this morning for three hours. I had students in line from 7:30 till 10. I will count off for my having to come in, since they did not make other arrangements, but they won’t have a zero on a quiz grade.

They’ve all been in my office now. Hopefully that means when they need help, the office won’t seem so scary.

Today I was listening to the audio book of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind.

Left-brain Outsourced:
The premise of the book is that left-brain thinking, predominate in Western history (as is evident in our left to right reading), is on its way to being outsourced permanently in developed countries. Logical, sequential, knowledge that is emphasized in schools is left brain. Folks who are left-brain dominant are what Peter Drucker called “knowledge workers.” They have the ability to acquire and apply information.

Right-brain, the Brain of Tomorrow:
The right-brain thinking, which includes taking the long view, is more intuitive and non-linear, looks at things simultaneously, and concentrates on context, is going to be, according to Pink, the thinking which is successful in developed countries.

Right-brain thinking is all about:
forging relationships
synthesizing the big picture
invention

Despite the idea that work will be outsourced at an increasing level, and my disagreement with his understanding of the computer science field (My husband is a programmer.), Pink’s ideas about right-brain thinking are actually encouraging to me.

Why?

If Pink is right, then my teaching freshman composition is actually MORE important now than it was in the “information age.” And the graduate students in our English program, despite the lack of tenure-track positions for MAs, is actually preparing our graduates for the workplace of the future.

Pink declares that we are in or going into the Conceptual Age. He argues that there are six elements needed for this new time in history.

The six elements of the Conceptual Age:
design (and the engagement of the senses)
symphony (the big picture, not just a focus on the details)
empathy (the engagement of emotions)
narrative/story (not just argument)
play (humor and light-heartedness)
meaning (purpose and meaning, transcendence, spirituality)

These are things I can teach my students. These are things that they can learn, integrate, and use in their college careers and afterwards. These are things which will make them better people and more enjoyable friends.

What does this mean for my classroom?
For one thing, I am going to reframe the essay as “communicative works of art.” If the students think of what they are doing as art, hopefully the design elements will more readily be integrated. Also, if they think of them as communicative, that foregrounds the purpose. And, hopefully, describing them as works will indicate that effort is required to produce them.

Many of our students have been stifled in creativity through the rote memorization, excessive regurgitation, and emphasis on objective multiple-choice exams. That doesn’t even include the students whose creativity has been squashed by teacher attitudes, the need for practice, or because of comparison with some (known or unknown) “better” artist.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks at TED. “Schools kill creativity.

For another, it means I am going to concentrate on document design in my freshman composition classes in focused ways that I have not previously used outside of my own scholarship and my business and professional writing courses.

I have already begun to focus on document design in my own work. When I presented at a writer’s conference this summer, I worked very hard on the design aspects of my PowerPoint. Colors, images, and words were all carefully balanced.

I also focused on design in the QEP I handed in to my CC this spring. I knew that the dean was not interested in my topic, despite faculty support. So I decided that I would do something with my QEP that could be used even if my topic were not. The first thing I did was make my QEP beautiful. I chose colors, images, and graphics that spoke for what I was trying to say, representing and presenting it in an artistic way. Thus, my QEP, though originally about critical thinking, was really about design.

A third thing, I believe, is the focus on invention–a focus which was indicated to me as a higher priority eighteen months ago when Parlor Press’ call for papers brought out so many invention papers that the second CFP specifically delimited invention. I need to help my students begin to think of themselves as not just repositories or receptors of knowledge, but as folks involved in the creation of knowledge. That may be a bit harder than I envision.

Students who earn a college degree attend their classes and study at least 20 hours a week, writes Scott Swail of Educational Policy Institute on College Puzzle. They ask for tutoring help and use the academic support center to learn time management and study skills. During breaks and holidays, they read and work ahead. Finally, they make friends.

Our successful students made friends with other students. They would hang out with them, study with them, and yes, even party with them. They joined clubs, volunteered, and played in intramural sports and academic challenge groups.

Go-it-alone students who skimp on studying and cut classes usually don’t make it to a degree.

While this quote is from Community College Spotlight, it refers to all students.

This is something our students need to see when they are freshmen (if not when they are in high school).

Found at Community College Spotlight, but the graphic is originally from Schools.com.

If you read as much as I do, or even if you only read this blog, you may have begun to wonder if a college degree is worth the effort and the cost. I have begun to wonder that and I have a PhD and teach folks getting a college degree.

I can certainly argue that my CC students, who are from inner city schools and historically and actually underprivileged in both education and experience, will gain a significant boost from a college degree. But what about the rest of students? What about children of the wealthy who grew up in homes with hundreds of books and who attended elite schools?

According to one blog post, a college degree helps them too.

Those with a college degree are in significantly better shape than their peers, with 88 percent of college graduates employed in 2010. And, in addition to having a better chance of finding a job, they are making more money. The average weekly earnings of those with a college degree was almost double the earnings of those with only a high school diploma, at $581 versus $305.

Update: This makes me feel better about encouraging college for everyone AND having a job that is dependent on people going to college.

And, while I was thinking about other things and looking for something else, I found a graphic that showed which degrees paid more. So, just in case your students ask or you wanted to know, here it is again.

An LATimes opinion piece by the authors of Academically Adrift says:

We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week.

Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.

Any of my students have more than 20 pages of writing and a lot of reading, though perhaps not 40 pages a week. I do wonder if my students realize they have written 20 pages, though, since this comes across an entire semester of essays, even for the literature students.

In much of higher education, the problem is in part that undergraduate education is no longer a top priority.

I agree with this in general. Excluding teaching SLACs and CCs, most of higher education focuses on graduate students or research. Teaching at all and certainly teaching of undergraduate students is underrated, both by the administration and by the faculty.

[T]hrough their professional advancement and tenure policies, schools encouraged faculty to focus more on research rather than teaching. When teaching was considered as part of the equation, student course assessments tended to be the method used to evaluate teaching, which tends to incentivize lenient grading and entertaining forms of instruction.

Yes. Exactly.

How do we support/reward teaching? That is a legitimate question that is too often ignored.

Amanda Krauss has this to say about industry versus higher education:

You have no idea how much it pains me to say this, but speaking from experience I now believe that private industry is doing a better job of communicating, persuading, innovating, of everything the university has stopped doing. I do not take this as indicator of how well capitalism works, I take it as an indicator of how badly universities have failed, while still somehow aping the worst aspects of corporate capitalism. (And no, I sure as hell wouldn’t bail them out.)

She advocates leaving higher education.

I think I would be more likely to be willing to do this had I not just accepted a tenure-track position. Or maybe not. My non-tt position was teaching the students who most needed to know/understand written English. They were folks trying to get out of poverty.

I do wonder what my new university is going to say if I start having my students read the CHE fora and check the job postings. For undergrads, they will probably be fine. If I do it with graduate students, though, I’ll be talking myself out of a job.

I need to think through the best way to get the idea across that an MA or a PhD are not going to pay in security or even a job for most of the graduates. We really need to give our students an idea of what else they can do.