Outcome vs. Process: Different Incarnations of Personalization

This was written by Yong Zhao who is the author writes and speaks about education reform. He blogs here and tweets here. This post was found here.


by Yong Zhao

There are different views of personalized learning. My advocacy for personalization has been occasionally misunderstood as supporting the narrow view of personalized learning driven by big data and learning analytics with technology or online learning in general. Below is an excerpt of a chapter from a book I coauthored with a group of teachers and school leaders: World Class Learners Bundle to be published by Corwin. Hope it helps clarify my take on personalized learning.–Yong

To personalize is to design or produce something to meet individual requirements. In education, personalization is often used in the forms of “personalized learning,” “personalized education,” or “personalized instruction.” The term personalization is often used interchangeably with individualization, and sometimes with customization. The general idea is to enable individual students to have an educational experience that meets their individual needs.

Although it is has long been recognized that individual students have different needs and high-quality education cannot be “one size fits all,” personalization in education has different meanings and realizations in practice because education has many components that can be personalized, individualized, or customized. For example, personalization can happen at the pace of learning by allowing students to learn at their own speed. Personalization can also be employed to enable students to choose when and where they learn. It can also be used in ways that allow students to have a choice of work assignments in the classroom. Furthermore, personalization is a strategy that enables students to demonstrate their learning by creating a product of their own choosing.

Generally speaking, personalization can be put into two categories: process personalization and outcome personalization. Process personalization enables students to enjoy choice in the learning process, whereas outcome personalization allows students to define the end results of their learning. Process personalization is by far the most prominent version in education today because the current education paradigm has a predetermined outcome for all students. That is, no matter how one gets there, we want everyone to get to the same place: mastery of the knowledge and skills prescribed in the authoritative curriculum or standards.

Personalization of the Learning Process

Although the outcome remains the same, the journey to the destination can be personalized to accommodate different needs, abilities, learning styles, and interests of students. Some of the most common aspects of individualization or personalization that have taken place (or should take place) include pace, content, product, learning environments, and assessment.

Personalization of pace: For all sorts of reasons, students come to school with different abilities and thus will acquire the same content at different speeds. To accommodate different abilities in students, schools have been encouraged to allow students to progress at their individual pace. One of the earliest experiments for self-paced learning is programmed instruction advocated by behaviorist psychologists such as B. F. Skinner in the 1960s (Skinner, 1968). Skinner and like-minded individuals relied on technology to enable students to pace their own learning and receive feedback. With the advent of modern computer technologies, individualization of learning pace became more prominent with computer-based learning. Today, the tradition continues in the form of personalized learning with the support of Big Data and learning analytics technology. Personalization of pace can also happen in the classroom by permitting students to work at their own speed. At the school level, one form of personalization is ability grouping or tracking, which puts students into different classes that move at different paces.

Personalization of content: Content can also be personalized to meet individual needs. Although all students in the traditional educational paradigm need to master the same content as prescribed by curriculum standards, they can be exposed to different content that best suits them. For example, following the principles of differentiated instruction (Tomlinson, 2001), students can be given different tasks based on their level of understanding of the content to be covered using Bloom’s Taxonomy. To accommodate different interests and learning styles, students can also choose different genres of content. For instance, different kinds of texts, novels, or short stories can be used to meet the needs of individual students at different reading levels. The media used to present the content can also be individualized. Some may prefer reading, others listening. Some may learn best from audio, others visual, and still others physical manipulation.

Personalization of product: Students often need to produce some sort of product (e.g., papers, exhibits, or exams) to demonstrate their mastery of the intended content. To accommodate different levels and styles of learning, the type of products expected of students can be personalized. Some students may prefer to write a paper, others may choose to compose a song. Some may demonstrate their learning by constructing a product such as a poster, others may create a multimedia interactive book. Some students may choose to take a traditional test, while others may design a video game.

Personalization of the learning environment: Where and how learning occurs can also be individualized. Although the same standard and content is expected of all students in the traditional paradigm, students may choose to learn in different places, from different sources, and with different arrangements. With the wide accessibility to online resources, students do not need to learn the content from the classroom alone nor do they need to learn from the teacher only. They could also learn from field trips and extended trips. Moreover, students could choose to take courses online from other institutions. In terms of how students can learn, they could learn by themselves, or in collaboration with others. In the classroom, a teacher can create different learning environments to support personalized learning. Teachers may use different grouping strategies to accommodate student working styles and preferences or they can create different physical arrangements in the classroom for different learning purposes.

Personalization of Outcome

Personalization of the learning process has tremendous value in improving student learning. It is undoubtedly a major improvement over the traditional one-size-fits-all teaching practices. Thus, personalization has been advocated for decades as an effective approach in the traditional education paradigm to meet the needs of individual students, especially students who have disabilities or are judged to be less ready for certain school tasks. However, it is not enough for cultivating the creative and entrepreneurial talents we need in the new world, as discussed in World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (Zhao, 2012). A different level of personalization is needed: personalization of learning outcomes.

Personalization of learning outcomes takes personalization to a different level by allowing students to pursue their strengths and interests. It does not accept a prescribed curriculum or set of standards as common to all students, as in the traditional paradigm. Thus, the goal of education is not to fix students’ deficits measured by external standards. Rather, this level of personalization assumes that all talents, skills, and knowledge are of equal value and thus all learning outcomes are valuable. As a result, instead of forcing or luring all students to master the same knowledge and skills, this approach asks for personalized educational experiences that support the development of individual talent. Recent developments in technology also enable students to have access to global educational resources, hence providing opportunities for students to construct a learning environment that meets their diverse needs.

Strength-based personalization: Allowing students to personalize their outcomes is to enhance their strengths. Thus, strength-based personalization requires teachers to not focus on what the students cannot do. Instead, the teacher looks hard at what each student can do and uses that as a starting point to build an individualized pathway for the student. In other words, rather than having students follow a predetermined curriculum, schools follow students and work with them to co-create the curriculum, which is highly individualized. The curriculum emerges as student learning progresses. To do so, schools need to offer a broad range of courses or other learning activities for students to explore their strengths. In this model, the school becomes a museum of learning opportunities. Students can choose to take advantage of any of these opportunities, as museum visitors would any of the exhibits. Teachers become curators of learning opportunities and also “tour guides” for students. They do not impose but can certainly mentor, motivate, and challenge.

Passion-driven personalization: Personalization can also be driven by students’ passions, which can be different from their strengths. That is, what a student may be good at can be different what he or she is passionate about. Students’ interests should be considered as legitimate sources of motivation; what students are passionate about has intrinsic value, although it may or may not coincide with the prescribed curriculum. To support personalization driven by students’ interests and passions, schools need to develop mechanisms to identify students’ interests. Schools must treat these interests seriously once they are identified, and schools must develop courses and learning activities accordingly.

In summary, personalization of learning outcomes is not mutually exclusive with personalization of process. In fact, it requires all of the different strategies of process personalization. But it goes beyond process personalization by extending personalization beyond a predefined curriculum. Curriculum standards may still be valuable as a guide for specific subjects and domains, should students choose to master that subject or domain. However, students are not forced to learn what has been prescribed, particularly at a prescribed time, location, and pace.

MYTH: Blended Learning is the Next Ed Tech Revolution - Hype, Harm and Hope

This was written by Dr. Phil McRae who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers` Association and adjunct professor within the faculty of education at the University of Alberta. Dr. Phil McRae’s Biography, Research, Writing, Scholarship and Presentations can be found at www.philmcrae.com, and you can follow him on Twitter here. This post first appeared here.

by Dr. Phil McRae

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." 

~ John F. Kennedy

Blended learning, where students’ face-to-face education is blended with Internet resources or online courses, has been gaining considerable attention in education reform circles. It has become entangled with the ambiguous notion of personalized learning and is being positioned as the new way to individualize learning in competency-based education systems.

Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and a key proponent of blended learning, claims that it is the “new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13).

To what extent is this a new model of learning in a digital age? How are private corporations employing old rhetoric to advance new avenues into public education? Most importantly, is blended learning becoming yet another overhyped myth on the crowded road of technology-as-education-reform panacea?

ORIGINS OF A MYTH

Students blending the use of technology with face-to-face instruction as a means of collaborating and extending their learning experiences is not unusual, revolutionary or foreign to the average Canadian classroom. As a concept, blended learning is now almost two decades old, having been imported into K–12 education in the late 1990s from corporate education, business training firms and the post-secondary education sector. Although the precise origin is unclear, it has been suggested that an Atlanta-based computer training business coined the term in 1999 (Friesen 2012), as it announced the release of a new generation of online courses for adults that were to be blended with live instruction.

Many blended learning practices already fit well with a vast array of hybrid face-to-face and digital experiences that students encounter in K–12 schools, including distributed learning, distance learning, or e-learning. Dr. Norm Friesen, a key academic in this area, suggests that blended learning “designates the range of possibilities presented by combining Internet and digital media with established classroom forms that require the physical co-presence of teacher and students” (Friesen 2012). As this broad definition illustrates, it would be difficult to find any use of technology in education that does not easily fit into this boundary.

Despite this fluidity of meaning, different models of blended learning have taken shape. In particular, Staker and Horn (2012) have attempted to classify blended learning environments into four models: rotation, flex, self-blend and enriched virtual. These four combinations range from those that are more connected to people and brick-and-mortar buildings (rotation, flex) to contexts in which the students are primarily self-directed through online courses or platforms that “deliver” the curriculum (self-blend and enriched virtual). In the more self-directed models, teachers or non-certificated facilitators are conditional and only scheduled for support as deemed necessary.

Although many models have been implemented over the last 20 years, there is scant evidence of the success of blended learning. Out of 46 robust research studies conducted between 1996 and 2008, only five have focused on results for students in K–12 settings (Murphy et al. 2014). As a recent article in Education Week illustrates, when looking for strong evidence of success around this strategy for K–12 students, very little “definitive evidence” or few significant results can be directly attributed to blended learning (Sparks 2015).

HYPE

The current hype around blended learning models, especially in the United States, is that they bring to life personalized learning for each and every child. Personalized learning, as promoted under a new canopy of blended learning, is neither a pedagogic theory nor a coherent set of learning approaches, regardless of the proposed models. In fact, personalized learning is an idea struggling for an identity (McRae 2014, 2010). A description of personalization that’s tightly linked to technology-mediated individualization “anywhere, anytime” is premised on archaic ideas of teaching machines imagined early in the 20th century (McRae 2013).

Some blended learning rhetoric suggests that personalization is to be achieved through individualized self-paced computer programs (known as adaptive learning systems), combined with small-group instruction for students who have the most pressing academic needs. For those looking to specifically advance blended learning in times of severe economic constraints, a certificated teacher is optional.

Software companies selling their adaptive learning products boldly state that the “best personalized learning programs will give students millions of potential pathways to follow through curricula and end up with the desired result — true comprehension” (Green 2013). This is part of the myth of blended learning and is marketed using superficial math and reading software programs (adaptive learning systems) that make dubious claims of driving up scores on high-stakes tests. Corporate attempts to “standardize personalization” in this way are both ironic and absurd.

These adaptive learning systems (the new teaching machines) do not build more resilient, creative, entrepreneurial or empathetic citizens through their individualized, standardized, linear and mechanical software algorithms. On the contrary, they diminish the many opportunities for human relationships to flourish, which is a hallmark of high-quality learning environments.

One of the blended learning examples that has received perhaps the greatest attention is the “flipped classroom.” It is so named because it inverts classroom instruction during the day, so that students watch online video of lectures at home at their own pace, perhaps communicating with peers and teachers via online discussions in the evening, and spend their days doing homework in the classroom. Think of the popular media hype and mythical cure for math challenges sold to the public by the Khan Academy. There is nothing revolutionary or deeply engaging about pure lecture as a pedagogy, yet apparently adding hours of digitally distributed video each evening to a child’s life makes it so. In fact, research suggests that the use of this type of lecture recorded technology, as a primary approach to learning, can result in students falling behind in the curriculum (Gosper et al. 2008).

Many myths, when viewed up close, provide deep reflections of ourselves and society. Technologies in particular have amplified our North American desires for choice, flexibility and individualization, so it’s easy to be seduced by a vision of blended learning environments delivering only what we want, when and how we want it customized.

The marketing mantra from corporations as diverse as media conglomerates to banks is that of services at any time, in any place or at any pace. Many governments have in turn adopted this in an eagerness to reduce costs with businesslike customization and streamlined workforce productivity, all with the expectation that a flexible and blended education system will be more efficient and (cost) effective.

In the mythical space of blended learning, class sizes apparently no longer matter and new staffing patterns begin to emerge. The amount of time students spend in schools becomes irrelevant as brick-and-mortar structures fade away. However, this myth disregards the overwhelming parental desire and societal expectation that children and youth will gather together to learn in highly relational settings with knowledgeable and mindful professionals (teachers) who understand both the art and science of learning. As John F. Kennedy (1962) so eloquently stated: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

The U.S. Department of Education (2013) has clearly articulated a commitment to making blended learning come to life through nebulous ideas of competency-based systems and personalized learning.

“Transitioning away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. By enabling students to master skills at their own pace, competency-based learning systems help to save both time and money … make better use of technology, support new staffing patterns that utilize teacher skills and interests differently … Each of these presents an opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and increase productivity.”

The cost efficiency and effectiveness rhetoric must be given special attention as part of the myth of blended learning in competency based systems.

HARM

Schools and classrooms across North America are being subjected to economic volatility and severe constraints by reduced public education funding. Blended learning can be positioned as the vehicle to bring in third-party education providers to wipe out the expectations of small class sizes and certificated teachers in traditional classrooms. This idea is gaining momentum through a variety of U.S. virtual and charter schools that are radically reducing the numbers of teachers and executing increased class sizes under the banner of blended learning. As Michael Horn states when asked to give expert advice on blended learning models, “budget cuts and teacher shortages are an opportunity, not a threat” (Horn et al. 2014).

As school jurisdictions across the U.S. turn to online learning and blended models as a way to reallocate resources, the private providers are also advocating for “eradicating rules that restrict class size and student-teacher ratios” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13). To achieve this means lifting the rules around teacher certification so that schools can replace teachers at will with para-professionals or noncertificated individual learning specialists. As Christensen and Horn (2008) suggest, “Computer-based learning on a large scale is also less expensive than the current labor intensive system and could solve the financial dilemmas facing public schools” (13).

To enable this in an education system, several policies must be enshrined by governments that would allow private schools, virtual cyber-charter schools or educational technology companies direct access to students outside of a protected public system. The first is to open up multiple pathways of learning, which are more flexible in terms of time and space, and designed around technology solutions that only the company can deliver.

The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries in America, is a clear backer of redefining and expanding the role of the teacher, and advocates that “teacher contracts and other regulatory constraints may also need to be addressed to provide the flexibility in a teacher’s role needed to make this dramatic shift in instruction” (Wolf 2010, 15).

On the surface, this flexibility sounds promising, as teachers and school leaders certainly recognize that the industrial model of command and control does not fit with our hyper-connected world. Yet the flexibility of any-time, any-place learning is manifesting itself in the U.S. around adaptive learning software programs or mandatory online learning courses that are being delivered by private companies. New course access legislation (as found in Wisconsin, Texas, Utah, Florida, Michigan and Minnesota) now allows anyone to teach online courses to students regardless of jurisdiction, certification or geographic location (Dwinal 2015). In other words, every course, for every student, anywhere, anytime — and now — taught by anyone. Half the teachers, but sold as twice the fun?

In the case of K12 Inc., the United States’ largest private for-profit provider of online education for grades K–12, student-teacher ratios are as high as one teacher to 275 students (Aaronson and O’Connor 2012). As the president and CEO at McGraw-Hill Education affirms: “With this new method and capability, all of a sudden you could see a teacher handling many more students ... the productivity could double or triple” (Olster 2013).

The harsh reality, however, is that private online schooling is not about new blended learning models, flexibility or choice, it is about profit through the constant cycle of enrolment and withdrawal of students known as the “churn rate” (Gibson and Clements 2013). In contrast, our current publically funded and publically delivered online schools across Alberta reinforce the important role of certificated teachers as compassionate and empathetic architects of learning who work relentlessly to reduce the drop-out rates and increase student engagement in virtual learning environments.

Rocketship Education, one of the many rapidly growing charter schools out of the U.S., has adopted a rotation model of blended learning known as the Rocketship Hybrid School Model for kindergarten to Grade 5 students. It combines online learning on campus with traditional classroom-based activities in order to save $500,000 per charter school per year in teacher salary costs (Danner 2010).

To accomplish this, Rocketship Education has cut half its teachers, changed its scope of practice and hired low-paid adults to supervise and monitor students in computer labs. The new staffing patterns within this rotation blended learning model place the schools in a one to 100-plus student/teacher ratio, with one or two low-wage computer lab monitors. These support personnel are endowed with titles like “individual learning specialists,” “coaches” or “facilitators” (Public Broadcasting Service 2012).

Without certificated teachers present, there is a need to gather data on student performance, so the children spend a great deal of time in a computer lab with an adaptive learning program monitoring their every interaction. John Danner, former CEO of Rocketship Charter Schools and a board member of DreamBox Learning Inc., promotes increased screen time during the day for children. He thinks that as the quality of software improves, “‘Rocketeers’ could spend as much as 50 per cent of the school day with computers” (Strauss 2013). How many hours of development, in the minds and bodies of children and youth, are we willing to sacrifice for more individualized computer-human interactions under the guise of blended learning?

If blended learning through the rotation model is to be defined by reducing the number of certificated teachers in schools and placing students in computer labs to spend half of their day in front of math and reading software programs, then education in the 21st century is indeed heading down an antiquated and very dangerous path. This is not historically the way blended learning has come alive in Alberta classrooms, nor should it be our preferred future.

HOPE

The growth of digital media and the Internet has led to an explosion of resources and opportunities for teachers, students and learning communities. A constant shift is occurring with different mobile apps, blogs, video podcasts, social media tools, e-learning courses, or learning management systems in schools that all promise to help teachers create and organize student work, provide (real-time) feedback or communicate more efficiently.

With the proliferation of digital tools in our lives, many K–12 students now experience learning through a blend of face-to-face and digital or online media and are able to access new ideas and resources where student attitudes and engagement towards their education can be positively supported. If blended learning is to lead to positive outcomes for students, then it must be highly relational, active and inquiry oriented (both online and offline), and commit to empowering students with digital tools.

If done right, blended learning can be used to support more equitable access to learning resources and discipline-specific expertise. It may also engage students (and teachers) in a variety of online and offline learning activities that differentiate instruction and bring greater diversity to the learning context. Improving communication between teachers, students and parents and extending relationships across boundaries and time may also be an outcome of blended learning. It may also hold value by employing certain technologies that help teachers and students to formatively assess learning.

To make this truly hopeful, school-based technology infrastructure must be robust and up-to-date, with equitable access, and the necessary resources (human and technology) must be made available to pedagogically support the blending. It is not tenable if Internet connectivity is unreliable or limited, or if there exists inequitable access to bandwidth or technology infrastructure in the school and home. Finally, if technical glitches are pervasive, or if dependable technical support is not available for students and teachers, then it is unlikely that blended learning will be a sustainable concept.

CONCLUSION

Blended learning is not a new term nor a revolutionary concept for classrooms in this second decade of the 21st century. However, the way it is being (re)interpreted could be hopeful or harmful depending on how it is implemented. It is an increasingly ambiguous and vague notion that is growing in popularity as many groups try to claim the space and establish the models, despite a lack of evidence and research. We should therefore be skeptical around the mythos of blended learning before endorsing or lauding it as the next great reform.

Blended learning has occupied a place in discourses of educational change for well over a decade, but it cannot be co-opted into a movement that displaces the human dimension of learning with an economic imperative to reduce labour costs by cutting the teaching population in half. Of particular concern in times of severe economic restraint is that high schools may become the testing ground for policymakers looking at ways to redesign by cutting certificated teachers in favour of massive online cohorts of students tutored by “facilitators” or “individual learning specialists.”

Technologies should be employed to help students become empowered citizens rather than passive consumers. Innovations are needed in education that will help to create a society where people can flourish within culturally rich, informed, democratic, digitally connected and diverse communities. We should not descend into a culture of individualism through technology where our students are fragmented by continuous partial attention.

For the vast majority of students within Alberta’s K–12 public education system, we must achieve a more nuanced balance that combines both digital technologies and the physical presence of a caring, knowledgeable and pedagogically thoughtful teacher. This is not an optional “nice to have,” but a “must have” if children and youth are to build resilience for the future. Blended learning may be (re)shaped by privatization myths, with adaptive learning systems as their voice, but in Alberta, our teachers still remain the quintessence of the human enterprise of paying it forward for our next generation. It is time for Alberta teachers to claim the space of blended learning and push back at the myths and questionable rhetoric.

Citation:
McRae, P. (2015). Myth: Blended learning is the next ed-tech revolution – hype, harm and hope. Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 4 (95). Edmonton, AB: Barnett House Press p. 19-27.


REFERENCES

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Christensen, C. M., and M.B. Horn. 2008. “How Do We Transform Our Schools?”Education Next 8, no. 3 (Summer), 13–19.

Danner, J. 2010. “Rocketship Hybrid School Model — Half The Teachers and Twice the Pay.” Donnell-Kay Foundation website. http://dkfoundation.org/news/rocketship-hybrid-school-model-half-teachers-and-twice-pay (accessed May 4, 2015).

Dwinal, M. 2015. “Solving the Nation's Teacher Shortage: How online leanrning can fix the broken teacher labor market.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Solving-the-nations-teacher-shortage.pdf (accessed May 4, 2015).

Friesen, N. 2012. “Defining Blended Learning.” Learning Spaces, August. http://learningspaces.org/papers/Defining_Blended_Learning_NF.pdf (accessed May 4, 2015).

Gibson, D., and J. Clements. 2013. Delivery Matters: Cyber Charter Schools and K–12 Education in Alberta. Edmonton, AB: Parkland Institute.

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McRae, P. A. 2014. “[Debate] Challenging the Promise of Personalized Learning — WISE 2014.” World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwI4oC_A0IM (accessed May 5, 2015).

Murphy, R., E. Snow, J. Mislevy, L. Gallagher, A. Krumm and X. Wei. 2014. Blended Learning Report. Austin, TX: Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

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Sparks, S. D. 2015. “Blended Learning Research Yields Limited Results.” Education Week, April 13. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/04/15/blended-learning-research-yields-limited-results.html (accessed May 5, 2015).

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Strauss, V. 2013. “Rocketship Charter Schools Revamping Signature ‘Learning Lab’.”The Answer Sheet blog, Washington Post, January 25. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/25/rocketship-charter-schools-revamping-signature-learning-lab (accessed May 5, 2025).

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Making school worse, faster

This post appeared in a series titled: The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs that answered the question: What are the biggest mistakes teachers make when integrating technology into the classroom.

“Before the computer could change school, school changed the computer.”

-Seymour Papert

I love technology, and I use it every single day. I teach with it, and I learn with it. Without technology, my teaching and learning would suffer.

However, too much of what is being sold as “Education Technology” merely shoehorns technology in a way that supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before.

Here are three mistakes schools and teachers make when integrating technology:

1. Technology is used to prove, instead of improve: Test and punish accountability regimes have convinced (and often mandated) that technology be used to mine students for spreadsheet friendly data. For too long, teachers have been lured by the efficiency of multiple-choice tests, and with the use of technology, it is easier than ever to reduce learning to tests and grades.

Psychologist Carol Dweck reminds us to ask, “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?” Proving and improving are not the same thing and if we aren’t careful, technology can be used in wonderful ways to prove the quality of our schools and teachers without improving learning.

2. Technology is used by the teacher, not the students: Interactive White Boards (Smartboards) are the definitive example of how schools can spend a lot of time, effort and money on technology that is almost exclusively used by the teacher while students sit passively, waiting to be filled with knowledge.

In his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire called this the banking concept of education where, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor”. Too much of our school’s technology demands that students simply sit and do nothing.

3. Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice: Classroom management and tracking programs like ClassDojo are used to elicit compliant behaviour and are sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really they are a tactic taken from the same behaviourist strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades.

Schools and teachers who ignore technology risk becoming irrelevant to their students, and this is unacceptable. However, it is equally wrong to use technology as a 21st century veneer on the “sit-and-get, spew-and-forget” model of learning that has dominated our schools for too long.

Teachers and schools must be mindful of their pedagogical practices, because if they are not, technology will only make things worse, faster.

Four Reasons to Worry About "Personalized Learning"

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”[1]

A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”

A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added topersonal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc. (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.

Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.

For some time, corporations have sold mass-produced commodities of questionable value and then permitted us to customize peripheral details to suit our “preferences.” In the 1970s, Burger King rolled out its “Have it your way!” campaign, announcing that we were now empowered to request a recently thawed slab of factory-produced ground meat without the usual pickle — or even with extra lettuce! In America, I can be me!

A couple of decades later, the production company that created Barney, the alarmingly friendly purple dinosaur, sold personalized videos called “My Party with Barney.” You mailed them a photo of your kid’s face and they digitally attached it to a generic animated child’s body that “plays” with Barney in the video. Your kid’s name is also inserted into the soundtrack every so often to complete the customization, with Barney enthusing: “Have a balloon … Abigail!”[2] The result may have delighted, or even fooled, some three year olds. But why in god’s name are adult educators buying the equivalent of My Party with Barney in order to boost their students’ reading scores?

*

How can we tell when the lovely idea of personal learning has been co-opted[3] and then twisted into PLI? Here are four warning signs:

1. The tasks have been personalized for kids, not created by them. With PLI, the center of gravity is outside the students (as Dewey once put it), and their choices arelimited to when — or maybe, if they’re lucky, how – they’ll master a set of skills mandated by people who have never met them. In the words of education author Will Richardson, “’Personalized’ learning is something that we do to kids; ‘personal’ learning is something they do for themselves.”[4]

Sometimes one of the corporate folks will let slip an acknowledgment of just how student-centered their programs aren’t. “In education,” a publishing executive explained to a reporter, personalization is “not about giving students what they want, it’s about a recommended learning path just for them.”[5] A term like “mass customized learning,” meanwhile, may sound Orwellian but it’s not really an oxymoron because what’s customized is mass-produced – which is to say, standardized. Authentic personal learning isn’t.[6]

2. Education is about the transmission of bits of information, not the construction of meaning. Closely related to the pseudochoice provided to students is the underlying model of learning. Behaviorism, the beast that just won’t die, lurks at the core of PLI just as it animates “competency-based progression,” “mastery learning,” and programs that tweak the “delivery of instruction.” (Hint: Unless someone is sending out for pizza at a faculty meeting, the word delivery is always troubling in the context of schooling.)

In fact, the perceived need to personalize probably comes from this way of thinking about education in the first place. If the point is to dump a load of facts into children, then it may be necessary to adjust the style and rate of dumping – and to help teachers become more efficient at it. But if the point is to help kids understand ideas from the inside out and answer their own questions about the world, then what they’re doing is already personal (and varied). It doesn’t have to be artificially personalized.

3. The main objective is just to raise test scores. This explains PLI’s constant use of instruments that resemble standardized tests. When we hear a phrase like “monitor students’ progress,” we should immediately ask, “What do you mean by progress?” That word, like achievement, often refers to nothing more than results on dreadful tests. And here’s the next logical question when something is described as a way of “personalizing” instruction: What’s the effect of this on kids’ interest in reading or math or writing – or in school itself? Personal learning tends to nourish kids’ curiosity and deepen their enthusiasm. “Personalized” or “customized” learning – not so much.

But the red light flashes here not just because of the focus on standardized tests but because of the larger preoccupation with data data data data data. Elsewhere, I’ve written about the folly of believing that everything can and should be reduced to numbers.[7] PLI shamelessly clings to this myopic and outdated worldview. One of those ads in Education Week not long ago featured a comically enthusiastic cartoon owl in a tuxedo wearing an “I [heart] Data” button. This drawing was followed by boasts about the company’s “computer-adaptive assessments and instruction” that “constantly generate data to personalize learning.” (Honest — it appeared in Ed. Week, not in The Onion.)

The assumption here is that curriculum can be broken into little pieces, that skills are acquired sequentially and can be assessed with discrete, contrived tests and reductive rubrics. Tracking kids’ “progress” with digital profiles and predictive algorithms paints a 21st-century gloss on a very-early-20th-century theory of learning. It not only assumes but perpetuates a bunch-o’-facts approach because it counts only what lends itself to being counted – namely, the number of facts and skills memorized or the percentage of coursework completed.

4. It’s all about the tech. Two overlapping groups of educators seem particularly enamored of PLI: (1) those who are awed by anything that emanates from the private sector, including books about leadership whose examples are drawn from Fortune 500 companies and filled with declarations about the need to “leverage strategic cultures for transformational disruption”[8]; and (2) those who experience excitement that borders on sexual arousal from anything involving technology – even though much of what falls under the heading “ed tech” is, to put it charitably, of scant educational value.[9]

“Follow the money” is apt advice in many sectors of education — for example, in language arts, where millions are made selling leveled “guided reading” systems, skills-based literacy workbooks, and the like. Simpler strategies, such as having kids choose, read, and discuss real books from the library may be more effective, but, as reading expert Dick Allington asks drily, “Who promotes a research-based practice that seems an unlikely profit center? No one.”[10] Personalization is an even more disturbing example of this phenomenon because the word has come to be equated with technology – perhaps because it’s far more profitable for the purveyors that way and, at the same time, “It’s so much cheaper to buy a new computer than to pay a teacher’s salary year after year.”[10]

This version of “personalized learning” actually began 60 years ago when B.F. Skinner proposed setting each child before a teaching machine, an idea rooted in “measurability, uniformity, and control of the student,” according to Canadian educator Philip McRae. Today’s adaptive learning systems still promote the notion of the isolated individual. . .being delivered concrete and sequential content for mastery. However, the re-branding is that of personalization. . . [with a] customized technology platform delivering 21st century competencies. . . .At its most innocent, it is a renewed attempt at bringing back behaviourism and operant conditioning to make learning more efficient. At its most sinister, it establishes children as measurable commodities to be cataloged and capitalized upon by corporations.[11]

Certain forms of technology can be used to support progressive education, but meaningful (and truly personal) learning never requires technology. Therefore, if an idea like personalization is presented from the start as entailing software or a screen, we ought to be extremely skeptical about who really benefits.

One final caveat: in the best student-centered, project-based education, kids spend much of their time learning with and from one another. Thus, while making sense of ideas is surely personal, it is not exclusively individual because it involves collaboration and takes place in a community. Even proponents of personal learning may sometimes forget that fact, but it’s a fact that was never learned by supporters of personalized learning.

NOTES

1. John W. Meyer, “Myths of Socialization and of Personality,” in Reconstructing Individualism, ed. by T. C. Heller et al. (Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 211.

2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYVzRjWvalA. Recommended only for those with strong stomachs.

3. I wrote about this general phenomenon in “Progressive Labels for Regressive Practices,” blog post, January 31, 2015.

4. Will Richardson, “Personalizing Flipped Engagement,” blog post, July 2, 2012.

5. Vikram Savkar, a senior vice president at the Nature Publishing Group, is quoted in Michelle R. Davis, “Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All,” Education Week Technology Counts, March 17, 2011, pp. 10-11. This special insert was devoted to the theme of “individualized digital learning.”

6. See Maja Wilson, “Personalization: It’s Anything But Personal,” Educational Leadership, March 2014: 73-77.

7. Alfie Kohn, “Schooling Beyond Measure,” Education Week, September 19, 2012; and“Turning Children into Data,” Education Week, August 25, 2010.

8. Or is it “disrupt leveraged strategies for cultural transformation”? I may have nodded off there for a few minutes.

9. See under: “SMART Boards, dumb curriculum.” Similarly, “innovation” in some districts consists of taking the usual menu of forgettable facts, isolated skills, grades, tests, textbooks, and homework — and slapping it onto an iPad. Other educators, meanwhile, radiate self-satisfaction because they assign their students to watch online lectures at home, as if flipping the place and time in which dubious pedagogical practices take place – while continuing to make students work a second shift after they get home from school – constituted a daring pedagogical advance. For a thoughtful discussion of useful and useless uses of technology, see Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, Invent to Learn (Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2013).

10. Richard L. Allington, “Proven Programs, Profits, and Practice,” in Reading for Profit:How the Bottom Line Leaves Kids Behind, ed. by Bess Altwerger (Heinemann, 2005), p. 226.

11. Lizanne Foster, “Personalized Learning Means Kids with Computers, not Teachers,”Huffington Post, November 28, 2014.

12. Philip McRae, “Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics: This Time It’s Personal,” blog post, April 14, 2013. Italics omitted.

Classroom Technology: Nightmare or Dream?

Technological advances in our schools in the last 10 years have been remarkable, and there is no doubt that technology will continue to disrupt our schools in both helpful and harmful ways. To be clear, I love technology and use it every single day. I teach with it and learn with it. It's important to remember, however, that technology cannot be allowed to have a monopoly on innovation in our schools. If public education is to survive the next 10 years, we need to see how technology and personalization can be read as either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who is writing the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee are writing the plot, then personalization in learning is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the rich get a computer and a teacher but the poor get just a computer. Herein, technology and personalization isn't about learning – it’s about money. In this story’s final chapter technology functions as a Trojan horse, sneakily shouldering an army of economists and shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time, waiting for an in.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Pasi Sahlberg, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond, Will Richardson and Diane Ravitch are writing the plot, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, all children are given computers and teachers, even when it’s cheaper to deny some students the latter. Herein, personalization and technology is used for the purposes of universal education not subordinated to the interests of big business.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions (the dream) but it can also be about competing over profits (the nightmare). Worse still, personalization can turn into a kind of hyper-personalization, where computers are given to students with zero facilitation from real life teachers. This is akin to pilotless flying and surgeonless surgery and yet this is precisely the vision of many in power, a vision where technology uses the learner, instead of the learner using the technology. However, this can only become a reality if good people remain silent. Classroom innovators and public educators must speak out against the nightmare narrative of technological implementation (of Gates and Murdoch) so that technology and personalization can assist the dream of learning for all.

6 reasons to reject ClassDojo

“I like it because you get rewarded for your good behavior — like a dog does when it gets a treat.”

-Grade 3 student on why he likes ClassDojo

Recently an article in The New York Times took a closer look at an App called ClassDojo.

While some see ClassDojo as a revolutionary new way to teach and manage a classroom, I see it as more of the same primitive behaviourist practices that should be abandoned. The philosophy and pedagogy behind ClassDojo is nothing new. Carrots, sticks, rewards, punishments, bribes and threats have been around for a long time. ClassDojo simply takes adult imposed manipulation and tracks it with mindless efficiency.

ClassDojo reminds me of Gerald Bracey who said:

"There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all."

Bracey was speaking of standardized testing, but I think the spirit of his words can be applied more generally:

Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice

Here are 6 reasons to reject ClassDojo:

• ClassDojo gets character education wrong. Children's psychiatrist Ross Greene reminds us that when a situation demands a child's lagging skills, we get unsolved problems. Because we know that misbehaviour is a symptom of much more complex and interesting problems, we need to see these unsolved problems as teachable moments. ClassDojo reduces children to punitive measures where the misbehaviour is seen as nothing more than an inconvenience to the teacher that needs to be snuffed out. ClassDojo judges and labels students by ranking and sorting them and distracts even well-intentioned adults from providing children with the feedback and the guidance they need to learn.

• ClassDojo gets motivation wrong. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.

• The public nature of ClassDojo is inappropriate. Making this kind of information for all to see is nothing more than a way of publicly naming and shaming children. I know very few adults who would put up with this kind of treatment at their workplace, so then why would we ever subject children to this? A doctor would never post their patients' health records publicly, and an accountant would not post their clients' tax records publicly. A lawyer would not post their clients' billing information publicly, nor would a teacher post their students' Individual Program Plans for all to see. So why would a teacher ever think that it would be appropriate to share ClassDojo publicly? To do so would be unprofessional and malpractice.

• ClassDojo pits adults and children against each other. Teachers who use ClassDojo spend a great deal of their day catching kids being good and catching kids being bad. Point systems, like token economies, pit children and adults against each other and ultimately rupture relationships through power struggles. With ClassDojo, children come too see their teachers less as safe and caring allies and more as judges-in-waiting whom they learn to keep their distance. 

• ClassDojo can only ever be experienced as coercive and manipulative. Like Alfie Kohn says, rewards and punishments are not opposites -- rather they are two sides of the same coin, and they don't buy us very much other than short-term compliance. ClassDojo is by definition a way to do things to kids when we should be working with them. And for those who use ClassDojo only for the positives and the rewards, remember that with-holding a reward or removing a privilege can only ever be experienced as a punishment. The best teachers understand what Jerome Bruner meant when he said, "Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment, but as information."

• ClassDojo prepares children to be ruled by others. School already places a premium on blind obedience and mindless compliance, and an App like ClassDojo that implicitly and explicitly makes following the rules the primary goal of school prepares children to be ruled by others. When we allow operant conditioning to infect the classroom, we see children less as active, free thinkers and more as passive, conditional objects. Under these conditions, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is less likely to be a problem than Compliant Acquiescent Disorder (CAD). It's important to remember that mindless compliance is responsible for far more of the atrocities against human kind than needless disobedience.

In Japan, a dojo is considered a special place that is well cared for by its users, so it is customary that shoes be left at the door. Similarly, I propose that schools be considered a special place that should be well cared for physically and pedagogically, so it should be customary that before entering schools Apps like ClassDojo be left where they belong -- at the door.

5 ways to better support Principals

A national study on The Future of the Principalship in Canada takes a thoughtful look at what is happening to principals across Canada.

The study identifies five ways forward for principals to overcome the challenges they face and move toward their ultimate goals for their schools and students.

Way Forward 1: Teach and Learn for Diversity

“Diversity” encompasses an enormous array of cultural backgrounds, needs, interests and opportunity structures for Canadian students. Schools work to recognize and meet the needs of all kinds of diversity, and three key “ways forward” emerged from the comments of school leaders:

• Support new Canadian families, particularly in English language learning 

• Strategically engage and teach First Nations, Métis, and Inuit (FNMI) students and develop better partnerships with families 

• Strategically address growing mental health issues in children and young adults 

Way Forward 2: Collaborate and Build Professional Capacities in School Staff

Although some principals in this study discussed the importance of collaboration in their schools, many more appeared to carry the leadership burden alone. Participants noted the following strategies related to collaboration:

• Implement mentorship programs

• Foster leadership development to encourage school principals to draw on the strengths and talents of their teaching staff, moving toward distributive leadership models 

Way Forward 3: Build Family and Community Relationships

School principals and teachers need new ways to connect with parents and communities. There are both short-term and long-term “ways forward” to foster family and community relationships:

• In the short term, support professional development that will help school leaders with negotiations, dispute resolutions, and boundary-setting 

• In the long run, work to build community-level partnerships 

• Advocate for integrated service models that house an array of family services in the school to benefit students and families directly, as well as to strengthen relationships in the community 

Way Forward 4: Use Technology for Creative Learning and Good Citizenship

School principals and teachers see both opportunities and social costs in the growth of information and communications technologies. In society and mass media, technology is largely taken up in an uncritical manner. This inspires the following “ways forward”:

• Recognize and assume a significant leadership role in teaching children and young people to use technology responsibly and thoughtfully 

• Continue professional development for school leaders and staff regarding technology in the classroom 

• Balance technical skills with sensitivity to the pedagogical and social consequences of technology for students’ learning, social development, and well-being 

Way Forward 5: Promote Continuous Leadership Learning

Participants mentioned the need for more reflection and more collaboration with colleagues and clearly desired opportunities to work with their teachers to improve practices. Despite this, a specific vision for leadership development was not evident in these findings. Nonetheless, researchers drew the following “ways forward” from the participants’ responses:

• Continue articulating leadership frameworks and competencies for school principals 

• Advocate for conditions that will not crowd out leadership learning with managerial competencies

Blogging with my grade 8 students

I created a new blog to use with my grade 8 social studies classes.

Here's the post I used to explain how and why we will be using our blogs this year:

The purpose of your blog is to make your learning visible. This will include:

• improving your thinking and writing skills
• learning new things and re-thinking the things you already know
• sharing your blog with others so that others can learn from you and you can learn from others

Sometimes I will provide you with something to write about and other times you will choose the topic of your blog posts. Sometimes you will pick when to write a blog post and other times I will pick.

Sometimes we will use the school's computers and sometimes you will use your own devices. There are lots of apps you can download that will allow you to blog on your device, and if you want to, you can access your blogs from home.

Sometimes we won't have access to computers or the Internet, so sometimes we will first write our blog posts on paper and then later put them online.

Your blog posts will often include:

• thinking and writing
• pictures
• video
• links to other websites and blogs

Here's a blog post that I wrote that shows how I used a video, excerpts from books, links to other websites and a picture to help support my own thinking and writing.

Bring Your Own Device: It's awesome except for the inequity

It's the end of my first week at my new school and it has been awesome!

I'm teaching six classes. Two grade 6 social studies, two grade 6 language arts and two grade 8 social studies. 

For grade 6, I am teaching two classes language arts and social studies, so I told them to just call our class humanities -- that way they never need to ask me if we are doing language arts or social studies because we are usually doing both.

As we start up the school year, we discussed what we will and won't be doing in our classroom. Some of this included the physical space, which I blogged about here. 

One of the big topics of discussion was electronic devices. 

My school has a free guest wifi network that has no password, and the school rule is that students may use their devices in class if they have their teachers permission. I told my students that if they are using their phone appropriately then they have my permission -- even if they didn't officially ask -- but if they are using it inappropriately, then they do not have my permission, even if they did ask.

This led to a discussion about texting. Here's what we came up with.

If they are using their device in class and they receive a text or a notification, we agreed that it only takes 2 seconds to read it, so reading it is ok. But we agreed that they would not reply to the text or the notification unless it was an emergency. If it's an emergency, they are to come and speak with me and then together we would decide on whether an immediate reply is appropriate.

I told my students that I can't be looking over their shoulders to make sure they follow through with this. I told them that I trust them, which I do. I'm prepared to trust kids until I am provided with evidence that suggests that I can't. I also said unlike when they are holding an actual book or paper, I can't easily identify what they are doing, so they may need to show me their screen and explain to me what they are up to.

It's been two days. Here's what I've seen.

During silent, free reading not every student that had a device used it, but some did:

• Jackson went to Wikipedia to read about small engines and how they work
• Brayden researched the history of books and how they were made and printed
• Lots of students are using an App called WattPad to read free stuff. I downloaded the App and started playing around with it. Looks like its free and offers tons of different genres for students to read. Lots of potential here.

When we were designing our portfolios (plain manilla folder), many students searched for things they wanted to draw. They placed their device on their table so they could look at the image and draw it on their portfolio:

• Mike found the NHL logo
• Ty found some Native art
• Maggy found some cartoon eyes
• Tim found the Vans logo

At lunch time, a couple students took turns Airplaying songs from their Apple devices to the Apple TV.

This was all very cool. I can't afford, and neither can the school, to buy all of the books that interest my students. I can't afford to have Wikipedia on my bookshelf, so I love it that they can access all this great stuff via their device. 

It's also important to note that some of these students are prone to misbehave because they might not know how or what to draw. I felt like the devices set my students up for success.

Even though things have gone well so far, I have two concerns:

1. I'm not naive enough to think that students will always use their devices appropriately -- and when it happens, I will see it as a teachable moment (not a punishable moment) and work with the students to learn how to use their device appropriately.

2. There are huge inequities with bringing your own device. I have students that have no devices and unless I provide them with access to a device, they might go the entire school year without. Because great schools are built on equity for all (not excellence or elitism for a few), this is a problem that must be addressed.

For now, my classroom will be a hybrid between Bring Your Own Device and school supplied devices.

Now, I'm off to the library to see how many school devices are available so that I can make my classroom more equitable. 

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Algorithms marking essays? That diploma idea deserves a failing grade

This was written by Paula Simons who is a columnist with the Edmonton Journal. Simons tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Paula Simons

The word “essay” comes from a Latin root, meaning to put something on trial, to put something to the test. That’s why we ask students sitting Grade 12 diploma exams in Language Arts and Social Studies to write timed essays as part of their test. Composing an essay doesn’t just test your ability to use correct English. It tests your ability to think critically. It tests your ability to make an argument, supported with facts. It tests your ability to critique conventional wisdom and articulate original insights.

Learning to write a cogent essay in an hour isn’t just excellent training for would-be newspaper columnists. Not every graduate will need to do trigonometry or balance a chemical equation in adult life. But we all need to know how to marshal facts to advance a convincing argument, whether we’re fighting a traffic ticket, negotiating a raise, or convincing skeptical friends to try a new restaurant.

Nonetheless, Alberta Education is apparently giving serious consideration to contracting out the marking of diploma essays to an American computer program that uses complex algorithms to predict and assign student grades. A number of American states are already using such programs to assess “high stakes” essay tests.

In January, LightSide, a company founded by graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, presented a research report to Alberta Education. The confidential report, obtained by the Journal’s Andrea Sands, claims its software was 20 per cent more reliable than Alberta’s human markers.

LightSide’s system doesn’t detect grammatical errors. It has no capacity to fact-check, nor to analyze critical thinking.

“We cannot evaluate whether the points made in a series of claims lead naturally from one to another,” reads the study, written by LightSide CEO Elijah Mayfield. As well, says Mayfield, “on-topic responses that fail to address subtle factual nuances, misinterpret a particular relationship between ideas, or other factual errors will likely be scored highly if they are otherwise well-written.”

How does the computer know if something is well-written? It compares the essay it's evaluating to the hundreds of “training samples” in its memory.

“Computers can’t read a student’s essay, but they’re excellent at making lists — compiling, for a given essay, all of the words, phrases, parts of speech, and other features that characterize a student’s work,” says LightSide’s website. “Our software compares the differences in the features of a weak essay and a strong essay — as evaluated by a human reader. It then identifies the small things that might only appear in the strongest essays — vocabulary keywords, structural patterns of sentences, use of transition sentences ... If the writer has all of the little things right, just like the previously high-scoring example essays, they probably should receive the same score.”

In other words, if the essay’s style, vocabulary and syntax pattern match those of sample essays that earned high grades from human markers, the software will award similar grades, even if an essay is ungrammatical, illogical, or full of factual errors.

It’s quite fascinating, linguistically speaking. Certainly, we shouldn’t romanticize human markers, who bring their own biases, incompetencies, and idiosyncrasies to the grading process. A tired or frustrated or overwhelmed marker may not give consistent scores. Over thousands and thousands of student essays, machine marking may indeed offer statistical superiority.

But writing for a human marker, however flawed, is different than writing for a soulless algorithm. Writing is an intimate act of communication. When you write an essay, you write for an audience. You write to be understood, to entertain, to provoke, to connect, to share your insights and passions. Young essayists deserve the dignity of writing for sentient readers. Even if we accept the premise that machine marking yields more “accurate” results, it robs students of the relationship between writer and reader, of the right to be heard and understood.

How serious is Alberta Education about this? It depends on whom you ask — and when. Premier Dave Hancock praised the notion in the legislature last month, lambasted it at an Edmonton Journal editorial board Wednesday, then gave it guarded approval in an interview Thursday. Given the current Sturm und Drang in the Education portfolio it would seem madness for Hancock and beleaguered Education Minister Jeff Johnston to start another fight with Alberta teachers right now. But who knows what a new premier (or new education minister) might decide next fall?

If diploma exams need more consistent scoring, perhaps Alberta Education should invest in better marker recruitment, training and compensation. If we expect Alberta students to take diploma exams seriously, we should all do the same.

Computers 'dramatically more reliable' than teachers in marking Alberta diploma-exam essays: study

This was written by Andrea Sands who is a journalist with the Edmonton Journal. Sands tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Andrea Sands

Phil McRae with the ATA.
Photo by John Lucas, Edmonton Journal

A computer could do a better job than a teacher in marking Grade 12 diploma exam essays, a government-commissioned study says.

Last fall, Alberta Education sent two 2013 diploma-exam questions along with nearly 1,900 student essay answers that had been graded by teachers to LightSide, a Pennsylvania company that develops computer software to score student essays.

LightSide’s automated algorithms outperformed human reliability in the Alberta study by about 20 per cent, said the company’s January 2014 report to the government.

“We are certain that LightSide is able to reproduce scoring behaviour at least as reliably as human graders, and in many cases we believe that our automated performance would be dramatically more reliable than human grading,” the report said.

The study indicated Alberta Education’s human scoring was quite unreliable, below the threshold LightSide recommends for high-stakes testing.

Alberta should consider investing in “a more stringent training process for human graders,” the report said. “It is somewhat alarming to see human reliability so low.”

The $5,000 study suggests LightSide’s marking program is more reliable than a single human marker, but Alberta uses a double-marking system, said Neil Fenske, Alberta Education’s executive director for assessment.

At least two teachers grade each diploma-exam essay and, if the grades differ, it goes to a third marker.

“So we’ve built a system that is highly reliable ... but it’s very labour-intensive as well,” Fenske said.

Alberta Education commissioned two previous studies — one three years ago and one 15 years ago — to see if computerized essay marking could work, Fenske said.

Further study is needed because LightSide examined a very small sample, Fenske said.

However, the report does show automated technology has evolved enough that it could be useful, if Alberta combined the marking power of people with the speed and reliability of machines, he said. That could mean one person marks an essay, then it’s run through a computer for grading, and sent to another person if there’s a discrepancy.

The province will also soon need diploma exams marked more often than before. Last year, the department announced Grade 12 diploma exams will be offered more often and digitally, part of efforts under Inspiring Education to make the school system more flexible.

“Because marking means teachers out of the classroom, one of the things we have to take a look at is, is there a way that we can build a better marking system that’s better for students but maybe also keeps more teachers in the classrooms?” Fenske said.

Alberta Education has had trouble this year recruiting enough teachers to grade diploma exams, which are worth 50 per cent of a student’s final mark.

Around the same time the LightSide report was commissioned, Education Minister Jeff Johnson cut a grading honorarium in half — from $200 to $100 — for teachers who volunteer to mark diploma exams on a regular workday. Fewer teachers volunteered to do the marking this year, and it’s taking longer as a result.

Johnson and Premier Dave Hancock said this week the honorarium cut should be re-examined.

Asked about the LightSide report at a Journal editorial board meeting this week, Hancock said he hasn’t yet read the study, but is not interested in having machines grade diploma-exam essays.

“I think that’s an absolute disastrous way to go,” Hancock said. “There are things that teachers bring to the process that are very important.”

Teachers also benefit from professional development when they mark the exams, meeting with colleagues from across the province and discussing education standards, Hancock said.

“At this time, there are no plans to institute digital scoring systems in provincially graded essays like diploma exams,” Johnson said in a statement.

Last weekend, Alberta Teachers’ Association delegates voted unanimously at their annual meeting in Calgary to opposed machine scoring of essay questions.

The ATA was never told about the LightSide study, but machine-marking has sparked heated debate in the United States, said Phil McRae, ATA executive staff officer and adjunct education professor with the U of A.

Standardized testing in the U.S. is growing, prompting governments and school districts to look to computer scoring to keep grading costs down, said McRae, who researches technology in education.

“It’s about reducing costs, whether it’s development of the items for the tests, administration or scoring.”

Move to digital testing platforms raising questions

This was written by Phil McRae who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Dr. Phil McRae’s Biography, Research, Writing, Scholarship and Presentations can be found at www.philmcrae.com, and you can follow him on Twitter here. This post first appeared here.

by Phil McRae

When Alberta Education announced it was moving away from provincial achievement tests (PATs) and toward digital student learning assessments (SLAs), many educators, parents and students cheered.

PATs did little to help teachers diagnose and respond to student learning needs, but they did much to create stress for students and to encourage school ranking. But will the new digital SLAs—to be administered at the beginning of each school year in Grades 3, 6 and 9—provide teachers with useful information? While the Association remains committed to working with government on the new grade 3 SLAs, important long-term questions need to be addressed.

PATs will be phased out over the next three years as the new digital SLAs are phased in, by 2016/17. Grade 3 PATs will be phased out first, with the new digital SLAs being administered to incoming Grade 3 students as early as September 2014. The aim of the digital SLAs is to support teacher assessments in literacy and numeracy benchmarks through the digital platform offered by Alberta Education. The proposed SLAs in Grade 3 will include both machine-scored short-response digital items and performance assessments marked by the teacher.

Although this form of assessment sounds promising, a few things should be considered. The current focus is on objectively scored digital assessment items, but examples are emerging of automated essay scoring of student-produced writing tasks. Alberta Education is piloting the machine scoring of student essays. Although details of the pilot have not been articulated, Alberta Education has contracted with LightSide Labs (www.lightsidelabs.com), based in Pittsburgh, to provide an “exploratory” pilot using student data. LightSide Labs claims its educational writing assessments “matched human reliability faster and at a fraction of the cost.”

The use of computer technologies (from word processors to on-screen testing programs) to assess student work is called e-assessment and includes computer-based testing, computerized adaptive testing, computer-based assessment and digital assessment.

Computer-based testing has three essential elements:

1. Test item development: Hundreds or thousands of digital items can be generated in seconds by a single computer program.

2. Test administration: Tests are administered online, thus eliminating or reducing the costs associated with exam delivery and security. However, the final access costs to e-assessments are borne by the end users (personal device, institution bandwidth or school computers).

3. Test scoring, analytics and reporting: Test reporting is fully automated and instantly reported.

The world of e-assessments is growing rapidly, as evidenced by a $1.4 million Canada Research Chair award in educational measurement to Professor Mark Gierl at the University of Alberta. Gierl, an international leader in the field, will research approaches to producing a large number of test items that university educators will require for the transition to computerized educational testing, also known as automatic item generation.

Gierl argues that the following four principles should account for adopting e-assessments:

1. There should be a shift from infrequent summative assessments (for example, two midterms and one final) to more frequent formative assessment (for example, 8–10 exams or more per term).

2. Testing on demand is required where students can write exams at any time and at any location.

3. Assessments should be scored immediately and students should receive both instant and detailed feedback on their overall performance as well as their problem-solving strengths and weaknesses.

4. There should be much less time and effort spent implementing these principles in large classes compared to the amount of time currently spent on assessment-related activities.

Proponents of e-assessments point to benefits such as cost-cutting, expediency of data transfer and an efficient and effective 21st-century learning system.

The move toward e-assessments is fundamentally about reducing costs associated with humans involved in the testing process, with a view to increasing efficiencies within the system. The e-assessment movement argues that paper-based testing is dead and it claims that computer-based testing will either eliminate or automate two-thirds of the testing activities that teachers currently do manually (for example, item generation, administration, scoring, analyzing and reporting).

E-assessment advocates assert that 16,000 essays can be graded every 20–40 seconds, as compared to the current six-week window for marking and returning tests to students. But additional challenges arise when writing tasks are coupled with machine scoring. Machine scoring is currently limited in its ability to handle the semantics of complex written responses. For example, where does the student’s writing in the margins or brainstorming work get accounted for in the e-assessment? Is process lost, while only the final product is assessed? How can a machine assess a student on critical thinking and effective communication in a personal essay? Although e-assessment can detect spelling and grammar errors, will it detect irony, subtlety, truth, emotion and depth in the writing? Will clichés and witty barbs go unnoticed (or misinterpreted)? In short, a machine cannot engage meaningfully with a person on an intellectual, creative or emotional level.

While Alberta Education maintains that the rollout of the SLAs in Grades 3, 6 and 9 will include classroom-based, teacher-driven assessments, there are indications that the government is committing resources to digital testing platforms with very limited resources to support comprehensive professional development for teachers. With the shift of the delivery of diploma examinations to a digital platform, the same problems persist: the excessively high weighting of the examinations and the refusal to give teachers access to the examinations following their administration.

In the end, it is important to remember that while technology has a place in education assessment, its mechanized and standardized valuations are no replacement for the sound judgment and ability to interpret context and meaning that teachers bring to the equation. If the new provincial assessment initiatives are to succeed, the government needs to invest in building the assessment capacity of teachers rather than what sometimes appears to be an almost single-minded focus on investing in digital technologies.  ❚

More about e-assessment
“Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, or What’s Really Up With Automated Essay Scoring,” by Todd Farley, author of Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry
—www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-farley/lies-damn-lies-and-statis_b_1574711.html
“Computer Grading Will Destroy Our Schools,” by Benjamin Winterhalter
—www.salon.com/2013/09/30/computer_grading_will
_destroy_our _schools
Alberta Education
A presentation on the government’s move to digital assessments is available from Alberta Education
—http://prezi.com/dgr4tn_gn9g7/jtc-nov-2013/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

How much Internet is too much Internet?

I'm going to use this to start a discussion with my students about being mindful of the amount of time we spend on the Internet.