I was debating whether I wanted to post this, but then I saw a comment at Paragraph City:
Most of their schooling has presented them with faculty who want them so much to succeed that they take away the opportunity to fail, not realizing that this is the same as taking away the opportunity to succeed.
and I wondered if I’ve been guilty of that.
I have a student who just received the automatic F for not completing an Incomplete within a year. Which I feel a little bad about. Admittedly, she didn’t reply to my several emails saying “hey, we need to settle this”, and admittedly, my other incomplete from the same class did get the work in just in time, and admittedly, this particular student came in as a freshman from homeschooling and appears to have run into some obstacles in other classes as well.
But maybe I should have harshly enforced my original deadline of the end of summer instead of letting it drag on for a year, as it’s really hard to finish an incomplete on top of regular schoolwork. Maybe when 2 of my 26 students take incompletes, it means I worked them too hard, or set up a deadline structure that wasn’t sustainable. Maybe my high standards, clearly articulated, scared them into paralysis. Maybe I should stop allowing incompletes at all, and insist on receiving the work, even if it’s awful, or just give the zero for work that isn’t submitted by the time grades are due.
Prone to Laughter 
6 June 2008 at 8:17 pm
Or, perhaps this type of failure was the failure that the student needed? It comes in all forms ….
6 June 2008 at 8:53 pm
This is a tough question. I think that successful people know how to bounce back from failure – learn from their mistakes, improve their skills, and apply these lessons to a new venture. I think that classrooms do this best when they function as learning laboratories. I’m still thinking about how my grading policies and lesson plans will reflect these ideas. (educatorblog.wordpress.com)
6 June 2008 at 10:05 pm
I like this idea. But I wonder if giving students a chance to fail (and it’s very, very difficult with the way my courses are set up, but Ds always make up about 10% of my grade) might not be a luxury of the tenured?
7 June 2008 at 1:40 pm
I guess I did let this student fail, even if it was a year after she might have failed otherwise. For some reason I had missed that. 🙂
I hope this girl bounces back. I don’t know if she could have learned anything other than “approach the teacher asap when having problems,” but that’s a big lesson.
I think that the luxury of teaching small classes takes away the luxury of letting students fail. That is, one of the things I get paid to offer is personal attention to students, so I’m quite sure that if too many of my students failed, someone would speak to me about it, because the structure of my job suggests that I ought to be catching those students before it gets that far.
9 June 2008 at 3:59 pm
One of the biggest things that I learned from my Neil Postman-designed alternative high school was that a student could not succeed if the opportunity to fail wasn’t present. But I also learned that you could only offer that – in real terms – if the cost of failure was much lower than it is in the typical classroom. In most of education that cost of failure is so high that no reasonable student will take any chances at all. And in most of education we attack the “romance of risk” that comes so naturally to the young. Thus we enable meaningless, valueless success.
Our concept of assessment lies at the heart of this. It is antithetical to “learning.” Teachers ask me all the time why students can devote so much time and energy to learning video games and I tell them that video game designers – unlike educators – understand how humans learn. The cost of failure is extremely low. The ability to try again is ever-present. There are few prescribed “routes,” but many options. The user gets to set his own difficulty level. So perhaps the best text on teaching from the past couple of years is the South Park “World of Warcraft” episode.
10 June 2008 at 2:37 am
I’m going to be a bit of a nay-sayer in terms of #5’s comments–but I think that the cost of failure for most college students IS relatively low.
Dance gave the student an incomplete and then gave the student a year to change that grade–to turn in the missing assignment(s). She also followed up, several times, with said student through email.
Could Dance have done more? Sure. Was it her responsibility to do so? No. Do students “pay” more for smaller class sizes/personal attention? In some ways in they are in a small liberal arts school environment or if they’ve chosen a major or class that has small discussion-led classes.
But I agree with #1’s comments–I think sometimes it’s important to give students a chance to fail. I think the second part, though, is the chance for them to brush themselves off and help them get back on their feet.
If we measure failure by the simple letter grade of “F” I bet very few of us actually fail our students and when we do, I bet most of us feel a twinge or two about it–we second guess ourselves and ask what we could have done to help Student X succeed.
But if we also think back on experiences we had where we didn’t succeed (I, for one, failed my dissertation prospectus–as in, it wasn’t approved while I was in grad school–and it led me to write an even BETTER one that led me to clarify my diss thesis) we realize that it’s the brushing off and getting back on the horse that really matters.
SO I guess in that way, I’d say that you can learn a lot by failing. And I wonder about the low cost of failure–the World of Warcraft idea that #5 mentions. Perhaps because I’m a competitive person I like the idea of assessment in some form (as long as its fair and transparent evaluation of course). Anyway, those are just my 2 cents.
10 June 2008 at 2:55 am
I think Ira’s point re risk and low-stakes failure nails something important, but I don’t see how it adds up to assessment being antithetical to learning, and I suspect that’s a red herring anyhow.
I tend to feel that discussion in class time operates as a low-risk opportunity to experiment, try things, fail, and figure them out, before being asked to write a high-risk essay. But I don’t think students use it that way, or see the connection, and I’m not sure I’ve either adequately told or shown them this (it is a paragraph in my eternal syllabus). Maybe I’ll try to make the process more visible—end each class with “outline an essay from today’s discussion” group exercise?
Similarly, this student turned in a draft for a research paper, which was not very good at all, but was a no-cost fail (as in, the quality barely affected her grade). But I’m worried my feedback, a long critique, made it more difficult for her to do the finished work. I don’t know how that plays into the risk argument. (actually, from my point of view, with my research paper, the student was able to set own difficulty level, had many options, chose own route, and had two no-cost opportunities to try again before being graded on quality, and could have taken more)
A woman from the teaching center people, likewise I suggested I use more smaller-stakes assignments (as opposed to say, 3 essays and a final of 20% each). But she also suggested I use fewer full-credit-for-a-decent-effort assignments (as opposed to my 20% on participation, just show up and say anything vaguely relevant).
10 June 2008 at 6:53 pm
When you begin to view the world through the eyes of a person who processes information differently than the prominent modes used in traditional academia, – listening, speaking, reading and writing—all of a sudden, many tasks become huge obstacles.
For instance, participating in a class discussion is not a “low-risk”opportunity for anyone who has anxiety, and/or difficulty tracking oral language quickly, and/or difficulty formulating and organizing their thoughts quickly for extemporaneous speaking.
For instance, my daughter learned quickly in primary school that she was “stupid” as reading didn’t happen as fast as other kids for her. She had a hard time focusing in a busy classroom on what the teacher said, rather than on what the other kids were wearing, saying, doing….
This spring she dropped out of the second college course she’s ever attempted. This time, instead of running out of the first class due to her anxiety, she attended about four classes, turned in the first few assignments, … then, quit after she “didn’t understand” the assignments. She even made it as far as asking the teacher to explain to her, but she still didn’t understand from his explanations. In a way, this experience is successful in that she made it further…but, most people, herself included, tend to see the “F” –
I think most classes in college are set up for high-stakes failure, especially if you don’t have the experience of succeeding in previous classes or experiences enough to be able to “pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and start over again.”
Interestingly, my daughter likes to play the games on her cell phone, which she tries to show me. Of course, I don’t get it at first – but I have the experiences of succeeding when I try again! So, even tho I can’t get it right away, I don’t feel my self-esteem is crushed! For students who don’t have that in their background, or who repeatedly experience “not understanding” the teacher when they get brave enough to ask for help, academia is not a friendly place.
The trip for academia is that we tend to label those students who fail as stupid! or incapable, or …. NOT TRUE!
But then, we have to look at what is “LEARNING” vs. what is jumping through the hoops we set up as markers for learning – ie, assessment.
10 June 2008 at 11:59 pm
Never in my life have I labeled one of my students as stupid.
I would think that focusing on assessment, which tends to go along with a specific discussion of what skills or content are actually being assessed, helps *detach* grades from value judgments about the intelligence or general capability of an individual.
Is there anywhere in the world that is a friendly place to people who fail once and are too crushed to try again, or who don’t understand multiple explanations? I can’t imagine that only creates problems in academics.
11 June 2008 at 6:32 pm
!!!
Yes- The question is how can we (teachers) make learning assessable when students INTERNALLY experience themselves as “stupid?” Or can we?
Why did the student need an incomplete? Did she understand the material? Did she have the skills to complete the assignments? What type of scaffolding or support did she need to write a research paper? Where could she find the help she needed? Does the college have a learning lab or…?
So, where did the “failure” occur?
I guess your post reminded me of many home school students that I’ve worked with who are homeschooling in part, at least, because the traditional format of classroom learning does not match how they learn best.
As teachers, we are in a system that requires grades – meant to show mastery of the content of the course. Yet often, the grades show mastery of being able to match the teacher’s learning strengths or style.
I’ve been learning through witnessing my daughter’s experiences not meshing with traditional academia. She is an intelligent person who has some differences with attention and language processing that affect how she experiences a regular classroom. Not being able to keep up automatically, even when trying, adds to and increases her anxiety, which increases her difficulties with attention and language processing.
She could be the student with the incomplete. If handed back a draft with the teacher’s critique she most likely would not be able to see that as helpful, but rather, as a reinforcement of her own internal belief that she is “stupid.” I don’t think this is anyone’s fault, this is what happens to a percentage of students in our system of education.
What does she need? She flourishes when she has a personal relationship with the teacher. She also needs extra support and instruction, possibly provided in a learning lab or tutoring situation to increase her level of confidence, as well as study and writing skills.
Interestingly, her best confidence-building experiences have been “on the job” – Praise from her boss on her ability to read other people, multi-task efficiently, pay attention to detail, and learn new tasks quickly were the first successes she’s experienced!
I don’t know how we make academia more “hand’s-on” but I know if we do, we’ll reach a lot more students a lot more deeply.
Thanks for asking the questions!
12 June 2008 at 2:59 pm
I am brought back to Ira’s point about the cost of failure, and my reality is that I rarely know how high the personal cost is that each individual student experiences, costs such as Melinda speaks of. I think that, in the aggregate, most of my students see the cost as relatively low; some of this because they tell me, some because they clearly don’t put that much work into trying to succeed.
What troubles me from this discussion are the students who apply a high, sometimes very high cost to their failure, and here I’m really talking about the failure of an individual assignment, since I expect students who pressurize the cost of failure don’t often reach the finish line of the course. They should reach it, but the weight of their failure prevents it; school just hasn’t worked for them.
Even the term, failure, is bothersome in this sort of context. We could invent a more abstract, polite term, but it would mean the same thing and it wouldn’t change the factory-like realities of the faculty: in 15 weeks students need to demonstrate a level of ability against the same final standard other students are held to. There are any number of pathways to get there — indeed, more than we usually perceive — but at semester’s end we must be able to say, to ourselves if to no one else, that we did our best to give each student a fair shot.
And yet, we can know so little about the individual struggles of our students that I wonder if this fairness we tell ourselves about is not primarily a comforting fiction.
12 June 2008 at 7:16 pm
Just a clarification – as Dale suggests – teachers in the classroom rarely understand the individual cost of failure for their students. These costs are rarely established with any individual assignment or by any but the most explicitly designed classroom atmosphere. For students in a college course the price of failure has been set by at least 13 years of regressive education, by parental pressure, by societal expectation, by culture group. Melinda’s comments give a good sense of this.
I’m not a big fan of economics theories, but microeconomics does a good job of explaining risk/reward and opportunity cost. And students come into your classroom with expectations for those.
So consider. Are there classrooms where students feel as free to express “risky” opinions as they would be among their close friends? Does the risk-taking paper really come with a low-cost of failure (even if ungraded) if you have to read through four pages of teacher comments and rewrite the whole thing? And is there a method of assessment in your classroom which does not line things up on a scale that a student would see as ranging from “bad” to “good”?
I’m not so much suggesting answers as considering questions and asking that all who teach consider the messages sent. One thing I do think – if grades matter to you, the teacher, there is really not a “low cost of failure.” Perhaps that is why the best school experiences I have had were in a secondary school and a university which did not have grades.
People still learned. Competencies were still proven. But assessment was replaced a different form of analysis.
– Ira Socol
12 June 2008 at 9:36 pm
I get the impression that my class is the first time some of my students have ever really had to face the prospect of failure. This is because they have walked through their first 18 years being told what special snowflakes they are getting ribbons and trophies for coming in 10th place and having teachers (who were taught in our schools of education) worrying much more about their little psyches than whether or not they are becoming really good at something. They have never been given a chance to learn from their mistakes because nothing they do has ever been labeled a mistake for fear of bruising their delicate egos. This has led to a generation that is long on self-esteem but short on real ability. When I tell them that I don’t really care how hard they tried, they seem genuinely puzzled.
When I tell them that asking questions in class is the best way to understand the material they nod their heads but when I start each class with, “Who has a question about what we talked about last time?”, I see dozens of mutes. Then after doing poorly on two tests, a couple will come to me and ask how it is they can do better in the class. I try to explain to them that I really meant it: that some effort on their part is very helpful. “Engage yourself in the material”, I tell them but mostly they don’t know what to do with this advice. They have been habituated into expecting everything to be given to them without thinking or without working for it. For example, it is very common for students to call a difficult question “tricky”. This is for multiple-choice questions, mind you. The answer is right there in front of them, with a 20% chance of getting it right by just guessing. This is stuff we covered in class. This is stuff in the book. Sure, the question may challenge them to think carefully about the relationships of various ideas or concepts but when they can’t do this they blame the question. It’s tricky. As if I was a magician pretending to have the right answer there in front of them and pulling it away at the last minute. They reject the very concept of difficult.
Unless you have small numbers it is quite likely that there is going to be a spectrum of performance from students in a class. When 2 out of 26 students get incompletes (and it kind of sounds like in this case they should have gotten Fs but you were too soft on them), that you pushed them too hard is one of the least likely explanations. Perhaps they just didn’t work hard enough. Perhaps they worked very hard but just didn’t get it. Perhaps 20 years of trophies without accomplishment has made it impossible for them to get.
In my department we have two kinds of bad teachers: the kind that give almost nothing but A’s and the kind that give the same bunch of students very few Bs and virtually no As. When professors give out Ds and Cs to students that really deserve Fs then they have done a disservice to both the top and the bottom of the class. The F students have been told they have abilities they really don’t have and this will not serve them in the long run and the A students’ A has been diminished as grade inflation makes it harder to recognize the truly capable.
12 June 2008 at 9:49 pm
I need to ask Comrade Snowball exactly what he/she is modelling in his/her classroom, and, exactly what kinds of observations he/she has done in secondary schools over the past dozen years. I ask because, if the experience he/she reports does indeed happen repeatedly, and no change in instructional method or philosophy ensues, it is obvious that Comrade Snowball should go find another profession. Only a fool repeats the same endeavor continuously – meets failure – and refuses to change.
But I have to say something about his/her assumptions regarding “coddled” students – put in such abusive terms. I’m old enough to have seen schools in different eras, and observant to know that pressures on primary and secondary students are much greater now than was true 20 or 30 years ago. I know that the cost of every form of adolescent “failure” – be it academic, behavioral, or whatever – has increased tremendously, and I know that this trains compliance, trains students to be mute, and trains students to fear risk in ways previous generations never experienced (no wonder they take chances online, it is the only place left that adolescence isn’t ‘illegal.’
I won’t even get into my thoughts about the kind of “professor” who would give multiple choice tests. (gotta love them scantron sheets, now teaching is no work at all!) That, to me, is simply an embarrassment – a pure statement that you are too lazy to engage the brains of your students.
– Ira Socol
13 June 2008 at 8:46 pm
on road. Can someone link profgrrl’s recent post on writing MC tests? Not so lazy.
17 June 2008 at 4:23 am
Here’s the post—it’s not multiple choice questions after all, but the post and comment discuss writing “objective” tests. It’s not really that easy.
Ira, can you offer a link describing an assignment and a method of assessment which doesn’t operate on a scale from good to bad? I do a creative writing exercise which is freestyle, ungraded, anything goes, and it’s pretty clear to me that some are better than others.
17 June 2008 at 6:40 pm
At a younger point in life I was in first art school, then architecture school. The art school was essentially ungraded – as one professor put it: “there are three possible grades – 4.0 means you did what you needed to and it seemed to work for you. 3.5 means you did what you needed to and it didn’t seem to work for. 0.0 means you didn’t do what you needed to.” But the trick was that “needed to” was what you – the student – needed to do. And “worked for you” meant you saw yourself getting where you needed to go. The architecture school was literally ungraded. You were gaining or you weren’t.
The critiques involved in those “assessment systems” suggest something to me. The “evaluation” was inherently internal, that is, the criteria for evaluation was created by the effort itself. What did you set out to do? Did you get there? Did you get somewhere? Where will you try to go next?
Because, well, I think about it this way. Ian McEwan gets nominated for a Booker Prize for Atonement, a book I thought was really badly written (all right, the middle part was a fine war drama but hardly original). A student handing in the Penelope chapter of Ulysses in most writing courses would be blasted on – at least – punctuation – but I think it is one of the best things ever written in English. Hand in one of the “Newsreel” portions of DosPasso’s USA Trilogy and half the profs in America would bust you for plagiarism, but its brilliant. So the question is not, “good or bad” – but does this work? and how does this work? And maybe even – because this is important as anyone moves ahead, why does this work? or not work? Who does it work for? The comparison isn’t necessary.
Comparison is not necessary – even to establish competence. The old joke, “Q: What do you call the person who graduates last in his med school class? A: Doctor.” But, in establishing competence, and I am not against establishing competence (required percent correct on the New York City Police Academy use of force exam? 100% – and rightly so), it is vital to remember what you are measuring. Again, internal validity. Can the person accomplish the task? Not, can the person do this the way I do? Not, (re: multiple choice) can the person guess the right answer or prove their testing competence?
This is an extraordinarily difficult switch to make in a nation where capitalism is the actual religion. Capitalism, of course, needs winners and losers. Without winners and losers capitalists are incapable of imagining motivation. So converting a faculty to evaluation without assessment is literally a religious conversion. You have to be able to imagine that two people could work equally hard on their own efforts even if one will not be declared the winner.
18 June 2008 at 3:59 pm
That’s still assessment, though. There’s still a linear scale from good to bad there, even if it only has two or three steps. Internal validity—did it work? did it do what you set out to do?—is a large part of my fine-grained, 100-point essay grading scale as well. And re needing a “winner”, if I read 26 essays that deserve an A, they will all get an A.
The difference here, maybe, is not about assessment but about who sets the goal/task. I have a very clear statement of what students are supposed to be aiming for when writing an essay, which I suppose is the factor lacking in art and architecture. But I don’t think even that is qualitatively different—you can’t tell me that the art/arch profs don’t have a skill in mind that they want their students to demonstrate mastery of. That their desired skills ( “provoke emotion” “build a building that doesn’t fall over” ) are broader and less specific than mine ( ” develop and prove an original thesis based on evidence learned in this class, using a coherent, easy-to-follow and engaging arrangement of words” ) doesn’t undermine what I do at all. It’s still driven by the same basic principle.
Incidentally, I am REALLY tired of people using fiction to “prove” that professors grading nonfiction writing are narrow-minded because they would have flunked James Joyce. It’s a silly argument, and it comes up a lot in various forms.
18 June 2008 at 4:42 pm
A couple of things. First, I wasn’t comparing fiction and non-fiction, I was comparing fiction and fiction. Or, put it this way, comparing narrative forms. Is Joyce “better” than Kerouac? To me, yes. Could I “grade” that? No. If I was to shift to a different kind of writing, is MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech better or worse than JFK’s Inaugural. To me, better. Could I grade that? No. Mitchell Duneier wrote, in my mind, one of the laziest, most worthless social science PhD Theses I’ve had the misfortune to read, but he ended up as a professor at Princeton and gets (bizarrely) to comment nationally on Michelle Obama’s undergraduate scholarship. “Good” and “Bad” are thus, well… what?
Because “good” architects have had buildings fall down and “good” artists have created communications which fail.
But OK. I’ve been using “evaluation” and “assessment” to suggest different things, and that is, in this situation, a communications failure. So let me put it this way: assessment is a problem for me (and I’m agreeing with Hoeg here) when it becomes a measurement along a scale based on a code of practice which lacks a universal agreement.
So, absolutely, the building falls down – that is “less successful” than the building which does not fall down. But the essay which persuades? Persuades who? Is clear? Is clear to whom? Is easy-to-follow? Is easy to follow for whom? Or, back to architecture: the building is ugly. It is quickly fully leased. It is hard to find the front door. It has fine views. It wastes energy. It maximizes floor space under zoning. How do we grade that?
What I have observed, watching academic life in a variety of schools and universities in a variety of places, is that the further you get from comparative assessment, and the rarer the use of arbitrary scales, the higher the levels of creativity, academic risk-taking, cooperative learning, and the greater the percentage of students succeeding. However, if you are not going to go that way, the British system, with absolute, consistent, fully understood standards, actually seems to do less to squelch creativity and risk-taking than the incredibly inconsistent typical American experience (“I thought The Simpsons with the “Independent Thought Alert” button on the teachers desk was a joke,” a teacher from England told me last year, “until I visited your schools.”).
Which, I suppose, suggests that the overall school environment – lifetime school experience perhaps matters most. A frustrating thought since it suggests that we have far less power, as “teachers,” than we wish we did.
18 June 2008 at 8:31 pm
You said “writing class.” I submit that the default writing class in college is composition, which is nonfiction essays, opinion pieces, etc. It is certainly not creative writing, where a Joyce-like piece would be appropriate.
But, that’s irrelevant—so your real issue is not with assessment but with stifling creativity and risk-taking. In fact, your British example suggests that the problem is *still* not with assessment but simply the way it is done in the US. I’m open to the idea that inconsistently applied standards stifle risk-taking. I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s an interesting argument.
An Independent Thought Alert button, though, doesn’t have anything to do with each teacher having their own scale.
I read your bit from Hoeg on assessment. I disagreed with it, but didn’t finish thinking it through. I don’t see how the fact that each professor may be operating on a different scale and criteria invalidates assessment—to me he made a leap there. I don’t see how me choosing and explaining to students what my criteria are for “success” in my class, having proved mastery of a set of skills I chose as important, is much different from evaluating student work on whether it does what it set out to do. I can think of many different ways to grade the building you describe, depending on what one considers a priority, and I don’t consider that richness of evaluation or the necessity for contextualization a problem.
19 June 2008 at 12:43 pm
I suppose it comes down to my experiences vs. your experiences. I’ve seen one thing – in terms of “results” and you’ve seen another. Which is all reasonable. Different things happen and people see those different things different ways. It is this very fact which explains why there is no actual “code of practice.”
Of course each person in a position of power can create their own set of arbitrary rules. That’s hardly uncommon. You work in McDonald’s or you work for a Police Department and they tell you how to dress. There is rarely a particular logic to most parts of those dress codes, other than to assure the appearance of uniformity, but they exist. They exist everywhere. And professors – teachers – instructors do the same. They set up “standards” – an arbitrary code of practice, which operates along the priority scheme of the person with the power. You say it yourself, “I can think of many different ways to grade the building you describe, depending on what one considers a priority” – and if you are grading the building, you are controlling the prioritization.
How does this limit creativity? My hypothesis is this – this system trains students to be pleasers. The goal, in any particular class, becomes to find out what the teacher wants and give it to them. This, in fact, is oft-repeated advice in everything from middle school support programs to college preparation web sites, to grad school success seminars.
Perhaps the first thing students in your class are doing is figuring out your priority list, and determining how they will best meet your criteria regarding the “bad to good” scale you have constructed. I’m not suggesting that you are not telling them other things, but perhaps the system you are using is speaking much louder.
It is why, as I often say, the most successful students typically seem to be the students most like the teachers. They are the ones most likely to fully understand the teacher’s code of practice. Which is one of the ways education operates as an engine of social reproduction.
19 June 2008 at 2:01 pm
Um, actually, I’m not arguing from my experiences. I’m trying to apply the principles and examples that *you* have laid out, to other contexts, and I’m not finding that they hold up. In fact, it’s pretty clear that what I may or may not do is totally irrelevant to these issues, which are much larger than my class. Incidentally, I was raised to be believe that conventional schooling makes bright students dull and that education classes produce worse teachers, so I’m really not hostile to your point of view. I’m just not seeing you make good arguments for it.
Anyhow, the details are all irrelevant now because you have finally managed to articulate your actual hypothesis, as opposed to broadsides against assessment or sidebars into capitalism.
My hypothesis is this – this system trains students to be pleasers. The goal, in any particular class, becomes to find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.
Fine. Totally plausible thesis—it would take some studies that cover K-16 to prove it one way or another, so I’m not going to bother arguing it here. I think it misses some nuances—for instance, I’m frequently surprised to find that other college history teachers are operating on essentially the same standards as me, and I wonder what happens to the training-pleasers effect when standards are specifically spelled out, or when those standards include creativity, but whatever. Let’s take it as a given. It’s probably true.
Question—is this really a problem? The world needs a lot of people who can do what is asked of them. I could easily argue that the ability to judge and negotiate many different contexts is as valuable a skill as risk-taking and creativity. Should encouraging risk-taking and creativity really be the top priority of our schools?
19 June 2008 at 2:50 pm
Not being a believer in social science “research” – I’m not sure we could ever actually find this out. Is it true? I’m pretty sure it is. Are there lots of exceptions? I’m pretty sure there are. What conclusions can we draw? I think we draw our own conclusions. I’m a proud relativist. It is, as you suggest at the end, all a question of what your intent is and what your priorities are.
So yes, the world needs people who will follow instructions (and be able to discern not-so-obvious instructions). And I think the world needs people who will create. I’m not so sure that one educational structure can encourage both well. At least I have not seen it. For example, most social science PhDs I meet are very good at following instructions. This is a result of extensive training by the educational process. Very, very few are good at creating or challenging systems. I think, with this group, different training regimes could have produced many individuals better suited to challenge and creation than to somewhat blindly following protocols. Not all. Just as not all trained by creativity encouraging regimes would do well/be comfortable with that. But I think the percentages would change if innovation, creativity, and challenge were more systemically valued than path following.
So, my question is, what do you want your students to do? And the follow-up is, how to decide who gets what?
20 June 2008 at 1:26 pm
Oh, okay. So you have moved from a blanket opposition to assessment to arguing that we need a multiplicity of educational systems. No argument there.
But then you also seem to suggest that innovation should be built into all education as a criteria. In my class, it is. But you are discussing a systemic problem—my one class isn’t going to reverse anything, so it doesn’t really matter what I want my students to do.
I’m not sure what you mean by “how to decide who gets what?”
20 June 2008 at 3:09 pm
Actually, I’m one of those people who thinks the education system is so terrible K-PhD, that most students would be better off without it. I’ve never thought it had any actual value outside of being a “safe place” away from parents, where students might interact and gain from having time to explore. But the evidence I’ve gathered over the years suggests that school is rarely a “safe place.”
Within that belief system, I do have a blanket opposition to assessment. Within the structure of what might be possible within our society, I’ll compromise while trying to separate as many students as possible from the things I find most destructive in the system.
I’d guess this is along the lines of what you are doing. You are having whatever effect you can within a flawed system. This is what we do. Few of us have the requisite bravery for real revolution – logically – because few revolutions succeed.
But, “who gets what?” If we had (or have) a multiplicity of educational systems, how do students find the educational structures they need. Almost all schools lie about their intents and their pedagogy. And faculty either doesn’t disclose or discloses in language students can not understand. And schools surely do not train students in this kind of decision making. Nor are theses options universally available.
Not every student can choose College of the Atlantic or St. John’s in Annapolis. Not every student can choose a Montessori primary education. Availability is an issue. Knowledge and information are issues. The skills needed to make informed choices is an issue.
So, if a student at your university needs to take “this” course, how do they know what each section is like? whether it fits with their needs? Who offers that information? Who suggests alternatives upon registration?
20 June 2008 at 3:34 pm
Re how do students know—knowledge, availability, informed choices are all fixable issues that do not require destroying the system. At the college level, I’m a strong believer in real course descriptions and complete syllabi that ought to communicate those things to the students early enough to make a decision.
Okay, you’re against all assessment. Hypothetical experiment. I require that students write a 4-5 page essay, based on primary sources read in the class. This demands that they develop a thesis that connects small details to their broader implications, logically breakdown that complex thesis into smaller, more digestible building blocks, and express those blocks in writing in a coherent fashion.
Explain to me how students learn to improve their skills at this task without assessment, in your ideal system. Do my written comments and scribbles on the essay count as assessment? Either accept as premise that “This Works vs. Rewrite” is still assessment (my belief), or explain why the difference between getting “this works” and “rewrite” on two essays, and getting a 90 and a 70 on two essays, is meaningful to the student.
20 June 2008 at 3:34 pm
Side note: This article by William Deresiewicz discusses the teacher-pleaser idea.
20 June 2008 at 5:33 pm
Thanks for the article link, and, because I haven’t said this before, thanks for the conversation.
Your thoughts on letting students know are really important. At one university I attended the math department refused to put faculty names with the course sections. “Students would pick the best profs if we did that,” I was told.
But all right. You are looking for proof of a specific skill development (this is true whether you are teaching a specific form of writing or what makes that building stand up). In both cases you have defined a very specific code of conduct. (“You have communicated this to me in the way I requested” in the case of the essay. “The mathematical models suggest your building will not fall down” in the case of the building.) In this situation – specific skill demonstration – is there any answer between “yes” and “no”? I ask this because my architectural structures prof was fond of saying, “No one leaves my class knowing 95% of what makes a building stand up.” So, what does 70 mean, or 90? The implication in both cases is that the specific skill requested was not demonstrated successfully.
What do we do in other fields? We usually keep practicing no matter what. You made 9 out of 10 foul shots in a basketball game, do you not practice foul shots the next day? The book you wrote won the Booker, do you not try to make the next one better? But we do not necessarily say, “play that game again because you only made 7 of 10 shots,” or “rewrite that book because it did not win the Booker.”
But what if there is no specific code of practice? What if the goal of your assignment is to write persuasively to an audience? Then, who assesses? What is the scale that is used? Or do we teach a personally progressive feedback loop?
It is the idea of the scale that troubles me. In cases where you can measure, the measurement is really either/or – 99% is failing, as my structures prof said, as the New York City Police Academy says when it tests cadets regarding the use of force. In other cases the measurement is so subjective as to be worthless beyond the notion of personal opinion.
20 June 2008 at 6:10 pm
Thank you so much for that article. Amazing, it does say it all. And it reminded me of Terry Eagleton on Edward Said:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2004/03/terry-eagleton-on-edward-said.html
Especially the difference between academics and intellectuals.
20 June 2008 at 11:33 pm
I actually disagree with that Deresiewicz article in quite a few places. 🙂 I may blog on it myself, but currently my comments and others’ critique are at Easily Distracted, who brought it to my attention.
You are welcome for the conversation.
Re assessing an essay—indeed, there are lots of answers between Yes and No. I am not testing one single skill or task (neither is the architect, but unlike buildings, an essay *can* stand up 95% of the way). The number signifies how close to largely flawless the student came. I am quite sure that the person who made 7 of 10 foul shots spends more time practicing them than the person who made 9 of 10.
As an example, any number in the 80-range signifies: “all the right ingredients are there, but not in the right places” (paraphrased from my criteria sheet). The student has mastered the skill of developing an idea and assembling appropriate evidence, but not the skill of communicating it. The second-story fell off a solid foundation.
The idea of a scale doesn’t bother me *at all.* I talk more about my scale here.
Absolutely, my judgments are subjective. I don’t equate subjectivity with worthless. Subjectivity contextualizes, but doesn’t necessarily invalidate.
First, I am arrogant enough to believe that *my* subjective judgment of writing is worth more than, say, the student’s mother, because I have experience writing a lot, and reading a lot of student papers, and because many people have told me that my own natural instincts about writing produce good writing.
Second, as I mentioned upthread, I generally find that other professors and I are largely in agreement about the essential elements of a work. That is, given the same essay, we would all write similar feedback. For instance, last year I read 17 honors BA/BS theses from departments across the university, and discussed grading them on a 4 point scale with two other professors. I was consistently surprised by how often we saw the same flaws and strengths, even coming from different fields.
Now, I see much more difference in how we translate that feedback into grades. We assign different weights to those flaws and strengths. Yet, since we are all aiming for and preaching the same ideal (recently I found two professor webpages, one lit, one history, that say almost exactly what I say about writing), I don’t see that slight differences in weighting should undermine student learning.
21 June 2008 at 5:04 am
I think this quote indicates how differing experiences bring us to different places. You say, “I am quite sure that the person who made 7 of 10 foul shots spends more time practicing them than the person who made 9 of 10.” And I find that, from every athletic experience I have ever had, and just about every “skill” experience I have ever had, to be the absolute opposite of what I have observed.
That is, the people who were the best at these things consistently worked and practiced the hardest, the longest, the most extensively.
Which indicates to me that schools operate on a very different incentive and assessment system than the rest of the world.
As for your skill measurements, I would suggest that really what you are doing is mixing a whole bunch of “yes/no” skill practices and assessment scales. That’s neither good nor bad, of course, but what you are saying is – “all the elements are there” = Yes. “The order is wrong” = No. Then you are creating a kind of “average” out of those two facts.
21 June 2008 at 3:19 pm
Re the foul shots, depends on the context. I was thinking of “practice between that game and the next game”, not “practice over a lifetime”, since “what the student does after getting that paper back” is what I’m interested in. I might try to encourage lifetime habits, but I can’t really have any direct effect on them. I read a lot of basketball articles, and there’s frequently mentions of “shot atrociously, extra hours shooting in the gym the next day.”
Correct—when assigning a grade, I am creating a kind of average out of a number of assessments, more than I just described. I am still waiting to be made to understand why that is a problem.