Grades and the fear of failure

In a study that appeared in the Journal of Educational Psychology (August 2011), Caroline Pulfrey et al., took Swiss students who were in their upper teens and mid twenties from an English as a foreign language class and asked them to do assignments that involved listening and comprehending.

There were 3 experiments.

In the first experiment, one group of students were told that they would receive a grade for their learning while the other group was told they would not receive a grade. In the second experiment, on a single assignment students either received only a grade, only a comment, or a grade and a comment. The third experiment was similar to the second experiment, but this time the students received their respective feedback and completed a second assignment.

Together these three experiments revealed that the anticipation of a grade, as opposed to no feedback or a comment, increases performance avoidance, a fear of failure and a loss of interest. It's important to note that this was true of both high and low achieving students. While conventional wisdom might tell us that grading should inspire learners to do their best, this is not what the research is telling us.

Common sense might also convince us to adopt a "more the merrier" kind of attitude towards providing students with both a comment and a grade, but again, research shows that the presence of a grade (with or without a comment) is responsible for lower levels of motivation, a loss of interest for learning, and a preference for easier tasks. Unfortunately, the positive benefits of a formative comment is overshadowed by the negative effects of the grade. 

All this supports Ruth Butler's (1988) research from twenty years ago that grades and grades with a comment are responsible for lower levels of intrinsic motivation for learning.

If you are looking to increase a child's anxiety, desire to escape and fear of failure, or decrease their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy then it makes perfect sense to grade students.

However, if you are interested in helping children learn, you might want to consider leaving the grade out and only providing them with the formative comments they need to improve.

If the idea of abolishing grading incites a cold case of cognitive dissonance, the Grading Moratorium is a group of teachers you can collaborate with and join.

For more anecdotal evidence on why we should abolish grading, check out my Abolish Grading page. For more on the scientific research on why we should abolish grading, check out Alfie Kohn's articles The Case Against Grades, From Degrading to De-grading, and Grading: The Issue is not How but Why,

Tests get high marks for preparing kids to... take more tests.

I was reading an article from the Globe and Mail titled Tests get high marks as a learning tool, and I found myself thinking that the article should have been titled Tests get high marks for preparing kids to... take more tests.

Look at the first sentence of the entire article:

At the start of term, Karl Szpunar’s students sigh or groan when he tells them there will be a quiz at the end of every class. Two or three usually drop his course.

Are you as disturbed as I am?

If the premise behind tests getting high marks as a learning tool wears drop-out rates as a badge of honor, I'm getting off this cheap carnival ride. 

I won't have any part of it.

If we define learning simply as higher test scores then one of the best ways to achieve such a goal is to ensure an inflated attrition rate. 

Drop the duds and watch the scores rise. Want proof? Ask KIPP.

I also have a problem with the sighs and groaning that are predictably elicited from the students when the teacher dictates the inevitability of the quiz. Why is it that so many parents and educators subscribe to the Listerine Theory of education? You know - if it's distasteful, or even painful, it must be good for you. If we really want to make school a better place for kids, we have to stop asking them to show what they know by doing things they hate.

But hang on, the article gets better: 

What is it about retrieving information, whether in a pop quiz, flashcards or even a classroom game of Jeopardy, that is so effective at creating long-term memories? Why is it better than rereading a chapter or reviewing notes?

Yeah, that's right, our two choices are flash cards and Jeopardy or rereading chapters and reviewing notes...

...really?

Is there nothing more authentic the kids could be doing to construct their understanding? 

If you want to make science or social studies a glorified vocabulary lesson where kids simply respond "what is a manipulating variable" or "what is the municipal government", then by all means Jeopardy is the way to go. But if Jeopardy is our flagship for good teaching and real learning then we need to pull the plug on Alex Trebek or me right now because the classroom isn't big enough for the two of us. 

If you want to make math an exercise in mindless mimicry, then by all means flashcards are the way to go. I've seen too many kids come to define themselves mathematical failures only because they couldn't think fast enough. I have a student in my class this year who sees himself as a failure in math only because he can't do flashcards fast enough - and yet, if you stop to actually talk with him, rather than bark questions at him, you will find that his logico-mathematical knowledge is growing nicely.

As I continued to read this article, I was left wondering how these researchers were defining a quiz. What does it actually look like? Are we talking about more kids filling in more bubbles? Early on they made it clear that these quizzes were not simply more standardized tests- so what do these quizzes actually look like? Then I read this:

What matters is that children are asked to retrieve the information they have been taught.

Believe it or not, I actually object to this seemingly benign statement. What is wrong with retrieving information students have been taught? 

I'm glad you asked!

First of all, the emphasis here is on what they are taught when it should be on what they have learned. Good enough teachers focus on teaching, but excellent educators know that good teaching cannot be differentiated from learning. Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

What we do doesn't matter nearly as much as how kids experience what we do.

If quizzes are just another way to perpetuate the banking model of education then we ought to not waste our time.

As if this article couldn't get sketchy enough, it has to go and say this:

Many elementary teachers already do these sorts of activities, he says, including practice tests before the real spelling test, or “mad minutes," where students have 60 seconds to answer as many multiplication questions as they can.

The real reason to get kids to do tests and quizzes is so that they can get good at doing more tests and quizzes. Education's obsessive focus on testing is a very slippery slope. If we are not careful, we run the risk of bastardizing the power of formative assessment in the name of improving summative test scores. 

Education Week ran a very good article that warned how formative assessment has the potential for being perverted into nothing more than a set of tools or "mini-summative" tests:

Referring to a body of work that sought to define formative assessment during the past two decades, including the influential 1998 article, “Inside the Black Box,” by Paul Black and Dylan William, she said formative assessment is not a series of quizzes or a “more frequent, finer-grained” interim assessment, but a continuous process embedded in adults’ teaching and students’ learning.

Teachers use formative assessment to guide instruction when they clearly define what students should know, periodically gauge their understanding, and give them descriptive feedback—not simply a test score or a grade—to help them reach those goals, Ms. Heritage said. Students engage in the process by understanding how their work must evolve and developing self-assessment and peer-assessment strategies to help them get there, she said.

There's a reason why Albert Einstein once said:

It's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

If you, like Albert, can see that formal education is in need of a reformation, then I hope you can also see that  by simply adding more quizzes is a great way of trying to improve school by changing nothing.

Real learning is found in children not data

Anything that's worth learning is worth doing in a context and for a purpose.

This takes time because learning is messy and real learning is really messy, and yet today's test and punish accountability is squeezing this kind of learning out. Ironically, it is the skill & drill kinds of learning that standardized test measure that are taking precedent over real learning. This is exactly why parents need to be concerned when they see rising test scores.

Many teachers feel compelled to teach to the test in fear of the threats or because they're enticed by the bribes. What's sad is high test scores may give teachers their merit pay and politicians their ever rising scores while giving the students nothing they really need.

How do we derail this bastardized kind of education reform?

We have to abandon our mania for reducing everything to numbers. Yes we need measures for learning, but they don't have to be reductionist or competitive in nature. 

So if grades and test scores are not the answer to "How do we measure learning?", then what is? 

The answer: Real learning is found in the children, not the data. If you want to know if your child is attending an excellent school and is receiving an exemplary education, watch them when they are not in school. 

Do they come home excited about what they did that day? Not only can they read, but do they want to read? Do they talk your ear off about the discussions they had with their peers? Are they rifling through the garage or kitchen seeking out materials for their very own science experiments? Do they relish the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and rethink their perceptions and understandings? Can they take what they learned and apply it to solve new problems?

Perhaps John Dewey makes the best case for learning in a context and for a purpose in his book Experience and Education:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

The good news is that kids tell us all the time when school loses its relevance: "When am I ever going to use this?" or "Does this count on the report card?" or "Will this be on the test?" These statements indicate the kids are lost, and rather than blaming the kids for saying it, we need to be thankful they are giving us the heads up - we need to take this feedback and reconnect the kids to their learning. Until we do so, nothing else will mean much.

The most important attitude we can instill in children is the desire to go on learning. When we fail to make learning relevant, in a context and for a purpose, we fail kids more than they could ever fail us.

Assessment vs Measurment

The other day I wrote a post on how assessment is a sabateur of learning. My point was that too many teachers may be prone to avoiding really cool projects or assignments simply because they are difficult to assess. Sometimes the coolest kinds of learning are nearly impossible to measure summatively.

Rob Mc left a comment that struck me as a fantastic way to rethink the summitive assessment trap that teachers have fallen into:

Whenever I'm in a meeting and I hear the mantra that all educational goals must me "measurable", I worry a bit. This kind of thinking can get reductionistic very quickly. BUT we can also re-think (reclaim?) the word assessment a bit in this context? What if we think about the question "That's a neat idea, but how do you assess it?" not as "how do you measure it?" but instead in the context of assessment as feedback. Sue Brookhart (great assessment writer) says: "Everything students do in the classroom should be assessed - very little of it should be graded." So I'd like to change the question from: "That's a neat idea, but how do you assess it?" to "That's a neat idea - what kinds of feedback would be involved in that idea for students and the teacher, and how would the feedback be used?"

Rather than worrying about summative assessment, we can save ourselves and our students' learning by refocusing on formative assessment. We must concern ourselves far less with the judgement of students and refocus our attention on actually helping them to improve.

Assessment Malpractice

Assessment is a hot topic in the teaching world, and I have noticed a real imbalance between the two different kinds of assessment. First, here are the two kinds:

Summative Assessment: This kind of assessment is done to assess a student's skills and knowledge after the learning has taken place. This is a judgement that traditionally takes place in the form of a grade or mark.

Formative Assessment: This kind of assessment is done while students are still learning. The teacher observes and interacts with students to (1) modify and adapt their instruction to better teach them and (2) provide information for students so that they may take that information and improve on their skills and knowledge.

Current trends in teacher professional development are tearing teachers in two different directions. Here's what I mean: When it comes to actually teaching students, teachers are encouraged to differentiate their instruction. Basically differentiate means that a teacher understands that no two children learn the same way and so the teacher will create mulitple paths for a student to take as they learn.

I have little to no problem with this current trend. The more teachers differentiate their instruction, the more students are likely to learn. Formative assessment flourishes with differentiated instruction. That's a good thing!

Here's the problem: teachers are also under more pressure than ever to show results on high-stakes standardized tests - and these tests are more than likely multiple choice.

Do you see the problem?

Teachers are being asked to differentiate their instruction but then forced to show high test scores on undifferentiated assessments.

Summative assessment can be done better, but we have to get away from our misguided obsession with standardization. We have to get away from our our perverted need for data that can be easily bar graphed or pie-charted. Children are more than data and learning is far too messy to try and average.

If we:

• use a multiple choice assessment to assess a student
• have student tests out with a lower proficiency than they actually possess
• use that assessment to report on their learning
• know the gross limitations involved with multiple choice assessments (which we do)

-this is a kind of educational malpractice-

Here's how this plays out in real life:

Little Johnny takes the test and scores poorly. The teacher sees Johnny's test score and says "wow, that's weird. I know Johnny gets this stuff better than that!" The teacher than proceeds to knowingly use an inaccurate assessment to report on Johnny's learning.

It's weird. The teacher knows better but has become a slave to the test and feels compelled to use a summative assessment that is masquerading as an accurate, objective depiction of Johnny's learning. This is sad.

In my classroom, I use formative assessment 99.9% of the time. I provide students with both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment. Rather than my students learning the way I teach, I teach the way my students learn. And equally important - rather than forcing my students to fit my assessment needs, my assessments fit my students needs.