In Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth, the author dedicated a chapter to debunking the phrase, “Studies show …” Kohn had been reading a book by E.D. Hirsch, best known for the What Every Nth Grader should know series, when he encountered a simple sentence with a lot of punch:
“Research has clearly shown that students learn more when grades are given.”
Five citations given in support of that statement didn’t support the claim, according to Kohn. In his earlier book—The Schools Our Children Deserve—Kohn took a close look at what was backing Hirsch. All five references were restricted to the use of pass-fail grading with college students, despite Hirsch’s book being directed toward elementary and secondary education. One was an author commentary, and another reported on a survey of instructors at a single college. Furthermore, two of the sources were unpublished work (difficult to verify) and only one was more recent than a quarter-century old. The only source with real data claimed undergraduates who took a course pass-fail would have finished with a lower grade than those who didn’t. However, the researchers also apparently concluded that “pass-fail grading might prove more beneficial if instituted earlier in the student’s career, before grade motivation becomes and obstacle.”
This illustrates the problem with maintaining a tradition in education without understanding why it is in place. Grading, while it has a merit of ease of comparison, also has been shown to increase stress, reward adherence to existing ideas over new ones, and benefit students with largely short-term gain rather than long-term education. Grades are about behavior management and compliance, not about learning incentives.
Grades are not absolutes
There is a disconnection between goals for the learning environment and implementation. Everyone wants the classroom to be a place where students are engaged. Jerome Bruner once argued that we should create an atmosphere where students can “experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information.” As theorist and feminist Nel Noddings put it: “There should be no penalty for getting things wrong.” Yet every grade inherently does just that.
Back in 1957, educator Paul Dressel described grades as “an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material.” No two graders are alike, and the sample size of what is included in even the most assignment-driven courses is too small to overcome instructor bias. The criteria for the selection of the assignment, too, reflects the subjective experience of the instructor (also the evaluator) and not some absolute knowledge. Yet the use of this information mutates grades into an absolute measure. No one looking at a C in English Literature is likely to question the bias or quality of the instruction, nor will the nature of the assignments be investigated. A C is a C is a C.
This is particularly damaging when grades are applied to homework. Even Harris Cooper, a traditional educator, noted in his 1989 book that grading homework should be kept to a minimum, as it “might provide external reasons for doing homework that detract from students’ appreciation of the intrinsic value of the exercise.” This is an important insight that is overlooked in the shadow of easy assessment. We learn more through our mistakes than our successes, and grading measures success not learning. When students resist an exercise by saying it isn’t worth their tiem, grades and incentives are placed to counter that opinion and inspire compliant behavior. This throws instructor resources at the wrong end of the problem, however. Apathy is an opportunity to explore activities the students do find worthwhile, not a broken state that needs to be corrected with a tougher stance.
In Homework Myth, Kohn advocates for ending grading as it applies to homework. In the place of grades should come student reflection on and defense of their choices in undertaking the assignment. “If there is going to be homework,” Kohn wrote, “everything about the experience […] should be designed to promote two things: high-quality learning and the desire to keep learning.”
Changing the culture of assessment
Grading is an extrinsic motivator that, while it may get the job done in the short-term completion of an assignment, it teaches the letter of the law, not the meaning. A 1984 study by Benware and Deci compared the outcome of an assignment to read a scientific article on brain functioning. One group was asked to read the article for the purpose of presenting the content to other students (active motivation), while the other was told there would be a test on the material (passive motivation):
The results indicate that subjects who learned in order to teach were more intrinsically motivated, had higher conceptual learning scores, and perceived themselves to be more actively engaged with the environment than subjects who learned in order to be examined. The two groups were equal, however, in their rote learning scores.
In other words, given the same task with the same experiences (the students were all in an introductory course, and they spent the same amount of time with the article), an end-goal of testing achieved the same recall of information but missed the conceptual level of learning that peer instruction afforded.
The absence of grades is a difficult sell, not due to a lack of merit in the idea but because of prior conditioning. Parents expect grades because, in part, they were graded. Conventional wisdom says grades are vital to college admissions and job recruitment after graduation. Politicians believe in grades because they make for easy comparison when assessing the success of schools at a distance, and administrators stress grades and standardized tests to cater to the expectations of the government. Teachers grade because they are near the end of this chain and are told grades as means for job security. In researching reading assessments, Indiana University’s Farr and Greene discovered that the public isn’t married to the idea of grades, but they haven’t been provided a convincing alternative.
Some of these assumptions are fragile, though persistent. In the college admissions process, the only grades that are on the radar are high school classes; grading in early levels of education is irrelevant. And even then, it is not the only criteria. Education Week reported in 1998 that Princeton turned down more than 75 percent of applicants with SAT scores of 750 or higher, and that elite college rejected more than two-thirds of high school valedictorians. Clearly, grades don’t guarantee success. Looking beyond the elite institutions, grades don’t seem to matter there, either. According to Kohn, about two-thirds of American colleges accept almost everyone who applies. While grades are part of the admissions process, the weight our educational system affords grading is out of proportion to reality.
Once in college, grades matter primarily for one reason: staying there. There are minimal grade point requirements to keep from getting kicked out of the program, and grades are one of the filtering criteria for graduate admissions. Truly deserving students won’t necessarily be denied a college education for poor GPA, but they might not get an initial look from the admissions committee if the grades aren’t good enough to make the primary piles of applications. Of course, as with seeking employment after graduation—grades and coursework seldom come up in job interviews—it is the ability to network, communicate personal philosophy, and demonstrate proficiency in a relevant skill that wins the hearts of administrators.
Portfolios
An alternative to traditional grades is the performance assessment. This is when students show proficiency through doing something of relevance to the topic being taught. One version of performance assessment that is particularly appealing—as well as reflective of the kind of professional communication skills needed to land a career as an educated adult—is the portfolio.
The value in building a portfolio is not just what goes into it, but also what the student decides to keep out of it. Over the course of a semester, work is collected by the student without judgment from the instructor. Judgment, typically grading, is differentiated from critique, which is constructive feedback and reflection on perceived strengths and weaknesses of the work. There must be plenty of critique when building a portfolio, both from experienced professionals (such as the teacher) and from peers. At the end of the class, the student arranges the contents of her portfolio to emphasize the activities of most interest, presenting those pieces to either the class or a smaller review panel as a way of demonstrating what was learned. The students therefore participate in their own assessment.
The portfolio assessment concept is also impacting the profession currently being taught traditional methods of grading: teachers. Research is starting to investigate the nuances of how to go about evaluating teacher portfolios as a tool for continuing education, as much as job skills. One of the biggest criticisms surfacing is when non-educators are the ones assessing the quality of the portfolio, rather than peers. The same is true in student portfolio assessment, where the input from classmates is necessary
To give support to the notion of portfolios as an effective student assessment vehicle, the way we go about researching its effectiveness also needs to reform. A recent study by the Centre for Research on Teaching and Training in Belgium took a look at how different end-of-course assessments—portfolio, case-based, peer assessment, and multiple choice evaluation—impacted student performance. The results showed a difference in the choice of assessment, but they were also limited to the short-term gains of the life of the course. It is a difficult task to isolate the factors that go into knowledge as one is distanced from the moment of learning, but the quality of the lesson is probably best measured in terms of retention and use of concepts in the quest to understand other ideas.
Empowering students to own their own educations is an important but frightening paradigm shift. Mano Singham, director of the Case Western Reserve University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education, recently wrote an article—Death to the syllabus!—that appeared in the Fall issue of Liberal Education. In it, Singham describes his metamorphosis from using a syllabus as a binding contract to on in which he co-creates the goals and constraints with the class:
I abandoned the controlling syllabus. I now go to the first class with only a tentative timeline of readings and writing assignments. A few weeks into the semester, when students have a better sense of what kind of person I am and what the course is about, we discuss what might be the best way of assigning meaningful grades. We collectively decide what goes into a good paper or talk, what good participation means, and together create rubrics to assess them. While I make the judgments about performance, I give the students maximum flexibility and choice in what we do and how we do it-within the broad constraint that the course has to have integrity and coherence and that the grades have to be good measures of the level of student performance in the course.
Singham discovered that the more power he shares with his students in co-creating the class, the more discretion they grant him in assessment.
A portfolio course is likely more work for the teacher, in managing the constraints that are set, having constant dialogues with each student about the subject matter and portfolio content, and also in communicating student progress to other faculty and administrators outside the classroom. The outcome, though, might be a higher quality learning experience for the people teachers are meant to serve.
References:
- Benware, C.A., and Deci, E.L. (1984). Quality of learning with an active versus passive motivational set. American Educational Research Journal, 21(4), pp. 755-65.
- Bruner, J. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, pp. 21-32.
- Cooper, H. (1989). Homework. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman.
- Dressel, P. (1957). Facts and fancy in assigning grades. Basic College Quarterly, 2, pp. 6-12.
- Farr, R., and Greene, B. (1993). Improving reading assessments: Understanding the social and political agenda for testing. Educational Horizons, 72(1), pp. 20-27.
- Kohn, A. (1999). The schools our children deserve: Moving beyond traditional classrooms and “tougher standards.” Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Kohn, A. (2006). The homework myth: Why our kids get too much of a bad thing. USA: Da Capo Press.
- Mitchell, J.S. (1998). SATs don’t get you in. Education Week, May 27, p. 33.
- Noddings, N. (2003). Happiness and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Pecheone, R.L., Pigg, M.J., Chung, R.R., and Souviney, R.J. (2005). Performance assessment and electronic portfolios: Their effect on teacher learning and education. The Clearing House, 78(4), pp. 164-176.
- Singham, M. (2007). Death to the syllabus! Liberal Education, 93(4).
- Struyven, K., Dochy, F., Janssens, S., Schelfhout, W., and Gielen, S. (2006). The overall effects of end-of-course assessment on student performance: A comparison between multiple choice testing, peer assessment, case-based assessment and portfolio assessment. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 32, pp. 202-222.