Alberta advertising undermining assessment

This kind of political advertising undermines the progressive assessment practices that the province of Alberta has been working on for years.

It makes little sense for teachers to work their tales of to improve their assessment practices in ways that provide children with non-graded information that they require to improve only to have the province tell parents to look for graded feedback.

To be clear, this post has nothing to do with the $6.5 billion invested in education.

It can be hard enough for parents to accept that school for their children might look and feel different than when they went to school, and it makes it really really hard to influence change when the government holds up traditions, that we are trying to change, as signals for success.

Someone reading this post might think "oh come on, Joe. Lighten up." To this I respond with: 6.5 billion is a lot of money, and the education of our children is nothing to take lightly. Many parents work so hard at their jobs and parenting their children that they don't have much time or effort in their day to think about pedagogy, so when we do try and catch their eye with advertisements like this, we better be acutely aware of what we are telling them.

In this case, we are telling them to look for something that some progressive Alberta teachers have been trying to move beyond.

For more on the research against grading:

Grading and the fear of failure

Grading and commenting

The Case Against Grades

Jose Reyes, Ryan Braun, Ted Williams and Campbell's Law

What if yesterday's National League Batting Title is metaphorical of how our obsession with numerical data and statistics is corrupting our love for baseball and learning?

Yesterday, September 28, was the last day of Major League Baseball's regular season. The pennant races proved to be full of barn-burning action, but to be honest, that's not what I found most interesting.

Today, I want to talk about Ted Williams, Jose Reyes and Ryan Braun.

First, some history.

Seventy years ago yesterday, Ted Williams went into the last day of the 1941 regular season with an epic batting average of .39955 which would have been rounded up to .400. When faced with the opportunity to not play on the last day of the season, thus ensuring his record-book average, Williams chose to play in a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics.

Williams ended up going 6 for 8 that day and raised his average to an impressive .406. Later, Williams explained that had he not played, he would not have deserved the title. At the time, this was Williams first of six batting titles, and today, he is the only player since 1925 to finish the regular season with a .400 batting average.

Going into yesterday's final day of the regular season, the 2011 National League Batting Title was a two horse race between New York's Jose Reyes who had a small lead over Milwaukee's Ryan Braun.

Reyes, however, chose a very different strategy than Ted Williams.

After laying down a first inning bunt single, Jose Reyes promptly pulled himself from the game. This strategy allowed Reyes to preserve his league leading average while simultaneously forcing Ryan Braun into a position where he would need to go 3 for 4, in order to have a chance at the title. Unfortunately for Braun, he went 0 for 4.

But here's the difference, while Reyes chose to quit before the first inning was even over, Braun chose to play the entire game. Reyes collects accolades while Braun goes home empty handed. Reyes gets remembered. Braun forgotten.

Are you as disgusted as I am?

This story epitomizes the cancerous effects of our mania for reducing the things we love, like baseball and learning, to numbers. When an obsession with our batting average actually convinces us to quit playing or a fetish for our grade-point average persuades us to quit learning, I think it's time to pause and reflect on how our use of data is sabotaging our ultimate goals.

If the point is to succeed and/or conquer others rather than to stretch one's thinking or discover new ideas and abilities, then it is completely logical and rational for Jose Reyes and students to want to do whatever is easiest. To do what ever is easiest, which sometimes includes quitting like Jose Reyes, can maximize the chances of success or minimize the odds of failure.

To be clear, this isn't a Jose Reyes or little Johnny problem. This is a systemic problem that is the result of our mania for reducing something as magnificently messy as baseball and learning to statistics and grades. Campbell's Law tells us that the more any one indicator (such as test scores or batting averages) are used for decision making, the more that indicator will suffer from corruption, therefore, bastardizing the very processes it was meant to monitor.

There is no substitute for what a teacher can see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears when observing and interacting with students while they are still learning. Because the children are always watching us, I fear they will learn the same dangerous lesson from Jose Reyes that they learn from grading; that real learning and strategically conquering others are the same thing.

Chris Wejr on The Price of Grades

Chris Wejr wrote a fantastic post where he reflected on an article that explained how Aboriginal students were being offered cash incentives for their grades.

Chris asks a number of provocative questions that challenge the conventional "common sense" behind bribing children for their academic achievement (read as grades).

Here is one of my favorite parts from his post:

I have taught grade 1 through grade 12 and as they grow older, many students seem to lose their sense of curiosity and learning – a primary student has yet to ask me, “Is this for marks?`while this is a common question in most high school classes.

So what happens to this inquisitive learning nature in children? Why do some feel the need to have to resort to bribing students into doing well at school? As students move up through the system, the societal and educational focus shifts from learning to grades and from the child to the curriculum. Some of the teachers at our school have stated that they would love to just teach what is meaningful to their students but they are pressured from society and the Ministry of Education to define student learning in the form of a single letter or number. Too, they feel pressure to make sure they get through the mandated curriculum.

Why is it that as children grow up, we narrow our definition of school? I find it odd that we tend to accept the idea that very young children, even toddler's, need to develop their whole selves - and yet, when children reach school age, we suddenly forget that children have other body parts other than their heads.

This reminds me of an excerpt from Sir Ken Robinson's book The Element:

The other big influence on education has been the academic culture of universities, which has tended to push aside any sort of activity that involves the heart, the body, the senses, and a good portion of our actual brains.

The result is that school systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one-size-fits-all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way. 

I think we can probably mostly agree that school has too narrow of a definition of success. What if the kids disengagement is a message we need to listen to? What if they are trying to tell us just how alienated and marginalized traditional school has made them feel?

Even if we can agree that there is a problem, what we can't seem to agree on is how to solve it.

For example, here is a comment left by Rebekah (comment #25) on Chris Wejr's post:

I think it’s naive to say that extrinsic motivation isn’t ultimately authentic. How many of us would show up at work every day if we didn’t get paid? Without money as a motivator, our entire economic system falls apart. Given that our school district’s mission statement is “to develop responsible citizens through appropriate academic, career and social programs”, it seems that the economic aspect of motivation is valid (i.e., we want our students to grow up to contribute to society by having paying jobs). When I worked in Watts (L.A.), one of the biggest challenges we faced was students who had no hope. They gave up because of academic frustration, social fear, and economic hopelessness. Extrinsic motivators worked as a bridge for those kids. If we could give them a reason to try, we could often make them see what they were capable of, and they would begin to hope. Only then could we work on building intrinsic motivation for learning.

If our premise is to solve the problem of disengagement by manipulating and forcing engagement, we are ignoring why kids are disengaged in the first place. Arguing over the implementation of incentives to coerce children to achieve is a massive exercise in missing the point. Before asking how we can get kids engaged in the current school system, we must investigate what we are asking them to in engage in, and why we want them to do so. For example, in the case of Canada's Aboriginals, history shows us that there are some very good reasons why school has in fact been harmful.

At some point, we need to admit that the number of children who choose to vote with their feet and disengage from school is less of a problem with the kids and more of an indictment of the system. And manipulating kids to reconcile themselves to a system that may be broken or irrelevant is likely to do more harm than good.

The Student Body as Transportation Devices

A student's body is not simply a transportation device for their number two pencils.

And yet, if you speak with most people about how they measure learning or what they mean when they talk about student achievement, you'll quickly find that what they are really talking about are numbers.

While it is true that numbers may impress, they conceal more than they reveal.

What we find is largely dependent on what we are looking for and where we are willing to look for it. If our premise is to reduce learning to numbers so that we can play around with the mean, median and mode on graphs and tables that show value-added improvements that are data-informed, then we run the predictable and inevitable risk of trivializing the entire education endeavor.

Grading Nursing

Here is a guest blogpost by my lovely sister Jennifer Bower. She lives and nurses in Santa Barbara, California. She is currently taking her masters in nursing from the University of Pheonix.

Here's my sister:

It was my first nursing graduate level course. I wanted to make this time in school about me and my learning. After all, this time I was the one paying for my education, and I knew nursing truly interested me.

I wanted to learn all I could for ME and not worry about only the grades and the competition. The first few assignments I stuck with this plan; however, I soon began to slip into my old ways of thinking. “Who cares what I want to write, I need to write something that my instructor wants me to write, and write it the way he wants it so that I can get a good grade.”


The University encourages us to use one of their programs called WritePoint. This program takes the students written work and checks for grammatical errors. Here is an example.

 It can be a helpful program, but it can also be an albatross.

The errors show up in blue print to distinguish it from the rest of the student work. The student then has the option to make the changes as suggested or to leave the work as is. Because WritePoint is just a computer program, I only place so much faith in its suggestions.

I took into account what the program suggested and made the changes that I deemed appropriate to increase the professionalism of my product but to maintain the ‘me’ aspect of the work. After my first two papers were returned to me, I received feedback stating that I lost marks because I had blue areas in my paper. (The instructor took my work and he too ran it through the program)

However, he did not read (as far as I can tell) my paper to see that the items I chose not to change still made sense and had my own individual flare.

I caught on to how he was grading the papers after my second attempt, so for my third paper, I changed every item that was blue, even if the paper now made less sense.

I knew that my grade would be better.

Once again, my assignments had become about pleasing someone else’s criteria and not about my own personal satisfaction.  In regards to my professors grading practices, my suspicions came to realization when I received my paper back the next day. Dozens of us handed in papers Monday, only to have them returned and 'graded' in less than 24 hours.

I again had marks deducted for having blue on my paper; however, the instructor failed to note that the only blue on my paper came from direct quotations. My paper's grade suffered because the quotes I chose to include did not fit the grammatical requirements of a computer program!

My grade was better for the third paper, but if you ask me (not that anyone did or will) it was the worst of the bunch.

Again, despite my best efforts, I am left disillusioned with my position in the education system.

Whose Agenda do you follow?

When I speak to educators about assessment, we inevitably discuss grading. I experience a number of different responses, but I am pleased to say that most educators I speak to recognize the short-comings of grades. They understand that reducing real learning to a symbol like a number or grade rarely if ever provides an accurate, authentic depiction of that real learning.

And yet, I am very saddened to say that these same teachers share with me that they feel like they have to grade. Typically, they point to their administrators, or school district, or government as the external force that is placing pressure on them to grade.

Seth Godin speaks quite strongly about this kind of situation in his book Linchpin:

If your agenda is set by someone else and it doesn't lead you where you want to go, why is it your agenda?

I am disheartened by the idea that the teaching profession feels like we must accept this necessary evil. There is something very immoral and unethical about believing any evil to be necessary.

If grading is not your agenda, and you feel like it is not leading you where you or your students want to go, why are you doing it?

The obvious answer is that teachers want to remain employed.

Fair enough.

I agree that you can make more of a difference by remaining inside the system, rather than from the outside looking in; however, what are you doing to make a difference? What are you doing to be subversive towards grading?

Are you sure you need to grade as much as you do? Even if you have to give a grade on a report card, where does it say you have to have a collection of grades to come up with a grade? And if it does say this some where, are you grading as little as necessary?

Do you have to give a final exam? Where does it say you have to count it on the report card? If it's a provincial or state-wide standardized test, where does it say you have to count it on the report card, or that you have to grade it at all?

Do you have to average averages to come up with an average?

How often do you talk about grades? Is it only on report card day? Why is it more than that?

If no one is saying you have to do these things you feel uncomfortable doing, then why are you doing them?

And if someone is saying you have to do these things, then what are you doing to make change? Before you answer, ask yourself two things - if not you, then who? and if not now, then when?

Grading Effort: Unintended Consequences

There are so many issues with grading. A teacher's entire slate of professional developlment could be spent discussing and investigating how to properly tinker with their grading practices. Inevitably, teachers end up talking at some point about effort, and whether we should be grading effort, and if so, how do we grade effort (notice the question is never should we be grading at all).

I have some serious issues with grading at all, but if you do feel the need to grade, it is important to remember the unintended consequences of grading a student's effort.

Think about these situations:

Johnny works his tail off on a social studies project, but in the end, his project really wasn't that good. Despite the lack of a final product, Johnny actually ended up learning a lot from his mistakes, but not soon enough, as the due date demanded he turn his project in. The teacher ends up failing Johnny on the content portions of the scoring rubric, but recognizes Johnny's effort and gives him a very high grade for his effort.

The teacher does this because we think it will bode well for the future. We want Johnny to keep working hard because we believe that his perseverance will pay off. However, what if that isn't the message he receives? He might say:

Even when I try really hard, I'm still dumb.

This situation may be more serious than you first comprehend. I've written about Bernard Weiner's research before on how important it is that children value their effort as an important factor in their intelligence. A child who is graded highly for their effort but poorly on their intelligence and skills may ultimately come to see external factors as being more influential on their learning. We don't want this.

Carol lollygags her way through another math assignment, placing little to no effort in her learning. Despite her lack of effort, Carol follows the instructions and produces what the teacher wants. The teacher marks Carol very well on her content and (wrongly) assumes she must have placed a ton of effort into doing so well on this project.

My fear here is that Carol knows far better than her teacher how little effort she truly put into her learning, and that Carol recieves a message that sounds something like this:

I can do really well even when I don't try.

Grading effort is a precarious endeavor that teachers need to think long and hard about before passing judgement on something so intangible. We would be wise to remember that we may have more to lose than we have to gain when it comes to grading effort.