“The
works I have done in order to achieve a better grade never pulls my attention
back to review it later for my own endeavor ”
M, undergraduate student of University of Humanities. (2012)
Grading
and assessment has been one of the most studied areas in the field of education
studies not only throughout the world, but also in Mongolia. Mongolia has
followed Russian grading system for a century or more and has switched into
western system of percentage. People seem to have divided opinion on them. With
the social change we thought the grading system changed to match the mentality
of the new generation.
Few
days back I came across a post published by a psychology student from National
University of Mongolia. The post is the expression of frustration on the
teaching method and differences between teachers educated in socialist Mongolia
and the students of Mongolia after 1990s and their different attitudes towards
knowledge and acquisition. There he noted that teachers do not understand that
we were brought up to ask questions, we learn not by cramming but by getting
insight into the idea. The article is primarily directed to the psychology
professors of today but with a careful examination on the whole education
scenario of Mongolia the problem is common to every discipline. It says not
only about the teaching methods and the materials the students receive, the
grass root of the problem lies partially in the motivation to give grades.
Alfie
Kohn the professor of Education studies noted following in relation to the
Effects of Grading:
Most
of the criticisms of grading you’ll hear today were laid out forcefully and
eloquently anywhere from four to eight decades ago (Crooks, 1933; De Zouche,
1945; Kirschenbaum, Simon, & Napier, 1971; Linder, 1940; Marshall, 1968),
and these early essays make for eye-opening reading. They remind us just
how long it’s been clear there’s something wrong with what we’re doing as well
as just how little progress we’ve made in acting on that realization.
In
the 1980s and ‘90s, educational psychologists systematically studied the
effects of grades. As I’ve reported elsewhere (Kohn, 1999a, 1999b,
1999c), when students from elementary school to college who are led to focus on
grades are compared with those who aren’t, the results support three robust
conclusions:
*
Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be
inversely related and, as far as I can tell, every study that has ever
investigated the impact on intrinsic motivation of receiving grades (or
instructions that emphasize the importance of getting good grades) has found a
negative effect.
*
Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task. Impress
upon students that what they’re doing will count toward their grade, and their
response will likely be to avoid taking any unnecessary intellectual risks.
They’ll choose a shorter book, or a project on a familiar topic, in order to
minimize the chance of doing poorly -- not because they’re “unmotivated” but
because they’re rational. They’re responding to adults who, by telling
them the goal is to get a good mark, have sent the message that success matters
more than learning.
*
Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. They may
skim books for what they’ll “need to know.” They’re less likely to wonder, say,
“How can we be sure that’s true?” than to ask “Is this going to be on the
test?” In one experiment, students told they’d be graded on how well they
learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point
of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be
involved. Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered
fewer facts a week later (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987).
Research
on the effects of grading has slowed down in the last couple of decades, but
the studies that are still being done reinforce the earlier findings. For
example, a grade-oriented environment is associated with increased levels of
cheating (Anderman and Murdock, 2007), grades (whether or not accompanied by
comments) promote a fear of failure even in high-achieving students (Pulfrey et
al., 2011), and the elimination of grades (in favor of a pass/fail system)
produces substantial benefits with no apparent disadvantages in medical school
(White and Fantone, 2010). More important, no recent research has
contradicted the earlier “big three” findings, so those conclusions still
stand.
To
understand why research finds what it does about grades, we need to shift our
focus from educational measurement techniques to broader psychological and
pedagogical questions. The latter serve to illuminate a series of
misconceived assumptions that underlie the use of grading.
Motivation: While it’s true that many students, after a few
years of traditional schooling, could be described as motivated by grades, what
counts is the nature of their motivation. Extrinsic motivation, which
includes a desire to get better grades, is not only different from, but often
undermines, intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn
1999a). Many assessment specialists talk about motivation as though it
were a single entity -- and their recommended practices just put a finer gloss
on a system of rewards and punishments that leads students to chase marks and
become less interested in the learning itself. If nourishing their desire
to learn is a primary goal for us, then grading is problematic by its very
nature.
Achievement: Two educational psychologists pointed out that “an
overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence”
(Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 7). That unsettling conclusion -- which
holds regardless of the quality of the assessment but is particularly
applicable to the use of grades -- is based on these researchers’ own empirical
findings as well as those of many others, including Carol Dweck, Carole Ames, Ruth
Butler, and John Nicholls (for a review, see Kohn 1999b, chapter 2). In
brief: the more students are led to focus on how well they’re
doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing.
It
follows that all assessment must be done carefully and sparingly lest students
become so concerned about their achievement (how good they are at doing
something -- or, worse, how their performance compares to others’) that they’re
no longer thinking about the learning itself. Even a well-meaning teacher
may produce a roomful of children who are so busy monitoring their own reading
skills that they’re no longer excited by the stories they’re reading.
Assessment consultants worry that grades may not accurately reflect student
performance; educational psychologists worry because grades fix students’
attention on their performance.
Quantification: When people ask me, a bit defensively, if it isn’t
important to measure how well students are learning (or teachers are teaching),
I invite them to rethink their choice of verb. There is certainly value
in assessing the quality of learning and teaching, but that doesn’t mean
it’s always necessary, or even possible, to measure those things -- that
is, to turn them into numbers. Indeed, “measurable outcomes may be the
least significant results of learning” (McNeil, 1986, p. xviii) -- a
realization that offers a refreshing counterpoint to today’s corporate-style
“school reform” and its preoccupation with data.
To
talk about what happens in classrooms, let alone in children’s heads, as moving
forward or backward in specifiable degrees, is not only simplistic because it
fails to capture much of what is going on, but also destructive because it may
change what is going on for the worse. Once we’re compelled to focus only
on what can be reduced to numbers, such as how many grammatical errors are
present in a composition or how many mathematical algorithms have been
committed to memory, thinking has been severely compromised. And that is
exactly what happens when we try to fit learning into a four- or five- or
(heaven help us) 100-point scale.
Curriculum: “One can have the best assessment imaginable,”
Howard Gardner (1991, p. 254) observed, “but unless the accompanying curriculum
is of quality, the assessment has no use.” Some people in the field are
candid about their relativism, offering to help align your assessment to
whatever your goals or curriculum may be. The result is that teachers may
become more adept at measuring how well students have mastered a collection of
facts and skills whose value is questionable -- and never questioned. “If
it’s not worth teaching, it’s not worth teaching well,” as Eliot Eisner (2001,
p. 370) likes to say. Nor, we might add, is it worth assessing
accurately.
Portfolios,
for example, can be constructive if they replace grades rather than being used
to yield them. They offer a way to thoughtfully gather a variety
of meaningful examples of learning for the students to review. But what’s
the point, “if instruction is dominated by worksheets so that every portfolio
looks the same”? (Neill et al. 1995, p. 4). Conversely, one sometimes
finds a mismatch between more thoughtful forms of pedagogy -- say, a workshop
approach to teaching writing -- and a depressingly standardized assessment tool
like rubrics (Wilson, 2006).
Much
of what is prescribed in the name of “assessing for learning” (and, for that
matter, “formative assessment”) leaves me uneasy: The recommended
practices often seem prefabricated and mechanistic; the imperatives of data
collection seem to upstage the children themselves and the goal of helping them
become more enthusiastic about what they’re doing. Still, if it’s done
only occasionally and with humility, I think it’s possible to assess for
learning. But grading for learning is, to paraphrase a 1960’s-era
slogan, rather like bombing for peace. Rating and ranking students (and
their efforts to figure things out) is inherently counterproductive.
If
I’m right -- more to the point, if all the research to which I’ve referred is
taken seriously -- then the absence of grades is a necessary, though not
sufficient, condition for promoting deep thinking and a desire to engage in
it. It’s worth lingering on this proposition in light of a variety of
efforts to sell us formulas to improve our grading techniques, none of which
address the problems of grading, per se.
*
It’s not enough to replace letters or numbers with labels (“exceeds
expectations,” “meets expectations,” and so on). If you’re sorting
students into four or five piles, you’re still grading them. Rubrics
typically include numbers as well as labels, which is only one of several
reasons they merit our skepticism (Wilson, 2006; Kohn, 2006).
*
It’s not enough to tell students in advance exactly what’s expected of
them. “When school is seen as a test, rather than an adventure in ideas,”
teachers may persuade themselves they’re being fair “if they specify, in
listlike fashion, exactly what must be learned to gain a satisfactory
grade…[but] such schooling is unfair in the wider sense that it prepares
students to pass other people’s tests without strengthening their capacity to
set their own assignments in collaboration with their fellows” (Nicholls and
Hazzard, 1993, p. 77).
*
It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently -- for example, by
posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald
Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we
shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting
grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience
of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
*
It’s not enough to add narrative reports. “When comments and grades
coexist, the comments are written to justify the grade” (Wilson, 2009, p.
60). Teachers report that students, for their part, often just turn to
the grade and ignore the comment, but “when there’s only a comment, they read
it,” says high school English teacher Jim Drier. Moreover, research
suggests that the harmful impact of grades on creativity is no less (and
possibly even more) potent when a narrative accompanies them. Narratives
are helpful only in the absence of grades (Butler, 1988; Pulfrey et al., 2011).
*
It’s not enough to use “standards-based” grading. That phrase may suggest
any number of things -- for example, more consistency, or a reliance on more
elaborate formulas, in determining grades; greater specificity about what each
grade signifies; or an increase in the number of tasks or skills that are
graded. At best, these prescriptions do nothing to address the fundamental
problems with grading. At worst, they exacerbate those problems. In
addition to the simplistic premise that it’s always good to have more data, we
find a penchant shared by the behaviorists of yesteryear that learning can and
should be broken down into its components, each to be evaluated
separately. And more frequent temperature-taking produces exactly the
kind of disproportionate attention to performance (at the expense of learning)
that researchers have found to be so counterproductive.
The
term “standards-based” is sometimes intended just to mean that grading is
aligned with a given set of objectives, in which case our first response should
be to inquire into the value of those objectives (as well as the extent to
which students were invited to help formulate them). If grades are based
on state standards, there’s particular reason to be concerned since those
standards are often too specific, age-inappropriate, superficial, and
standardized by definition. In my experience, the best teachers
tend to be skeptical about aligning their teaching to a list imposed by distant
authorities, or using that list as a basis for assessing how well their
students are thinking.
Finally,
“standards-based” may refer to something similar to criterion-based testing,
where the idea is to avoid grading students on a curve. (Even some teachers who
don’t do so explicitly nevertheless act as though grades ought to fall into
something close to a normal distribution, with only a few students receiving
As. But this pattern is not a fact of life, nor is it a sign of admirable
“rigor” on the teacher’s part. Rather, “it is a symbol of failure
-- failure to teach well, failure to test well, and failure to have any
influence at all on the intellectual lives of students" [Milton, Pollio,
& Eison, 1986].) This surely represents an improvement over a system in
which the number of top marks is made artificially scarce and students are set
against one another. But here we’ve peeled back the outer skin of the
onion (competition) only to reveal more noxious layers beneath: extrinsic
motivation, numerical ratings, the tendency to promote achievement at the
expense of learning.
If
we begin with a desire to assess more often, or to produce more data, or to
improve the consistency of our grading, then certain prescriptions will
follow. If, however, our point of departure isn’t mostly about the
grading, but about our desire for students to understand ideas from the inside
out, or to get a kick out of playing with words and numbers, or to be in charge
of their own learning, then we will likely end up elsewhere. We may come
to see grading as a huge, noisy, fuel-guzzling, smoke-belching machine that
constantly requires repairs and new parts, when what we should be doing is
pulling the plug.
Deleting
-- or at Least Diluting -- Grades
“Like
it or not, grading is here to stay” is a statement no responsible educator
would ever offer as an excuse for inaction. What matters is whether a
given practice is in the best interest of students. If it isn’t, then our
obligation is to work for its elimination and, in the meantime, do what we can
to minimize its impact.
Replacing
letter and number grades with narrative assessments or conferences --
qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a
conversation -- is not a utopian fantasy. It has already been done
successfully in many elementary and middle schools and even in some high
schools, both public and private (Kohn, 1999c). It’s important not only
to realize that such schools exist but to investigate why they’ve
eliminated grades, how they’ve managed to do so (hint: the process can be
gradual), and what benefits they have realized.
Naturally
objections will be raised to this -- or any -- significant policy change, but
once students and their parents have been shown the relevant research,
reassured about their concerns, and invited to participate in constructing
alternative forms of assessment, the abolition of grades proves to be not only
realistic but an enormous improvement over the status quo. Sometimes it’s
only after grading has ended that we realize just how harmful it’s been.
To
address one common fear, the graduates of grade-free high schools are indeed
accepted by selective private colleges and large public universities -- on the
basis of narrative reports and detailed descriptions of the curriculum (as well
as recommendations, essays, and interviews), which collectively offer a fuller
picture of the applicant than does a grade-point average. Moreover, these
schools point out that their students are often more motivated and proficient
learners, thus better prepared for college, than their counterparts at
traditional schools who have been preoccupied with grades.
In
any case, college admission is surely no bar to eliminating grades in
elementary and middle schools because colleges are largely indifferent to what
students have done before high school. The claim here is that we should do
unpleasant and unnecessary things to children now in order to prepare them for
the fact that just such things will be done to them later. This
justification is exactly as absurd as it sounds, yet it continues to drive
education policy.
Even
when administrators aren’t ready to abandon traditional report cards,
individual teachers can help to rescue learning in their own classrooms with a
two-pronged strategy to “neuter grades,” as one teacher described it.
First, they can stop putting letter or number grades on individual assignments
and instead offer only qualitative feedback. Report cards are bad enough,
but the destructive effects reported by researchers (on interest in learning,
preference for challenge, and quality of thinking) are compounded when students
are rated on what they do in school day after day. Teachers can mitigate
considerable harm by replacing grades with authentic assessments; moreover, as
we’ve seen, any feedback they may already offer becomes much more useful in the
absence of letter or number ratings.
Second,
although teachers may be required to submit a final grade, there’s no
requirement for them to decide unilaterally what that grade will be.
Thus, students can be invited to participate in that process either as a
negotiation (such that the teacher has the final say) or by simply permitting
students to grade themselves. If people find that idea alarming, it’s
probably because they realize it creates a more democratic classroom, one in
which teachers must create a pedagogy and a curriculum that will truly engage
students rather than allow teachers to coerce them into doing whatever they’re
told. In fact, negative reactions to this proposal (“It’s unrealistic!”)
point up how grades function as a mechanism for controlling students rather
than as a necessary or constructive way to report information about their performance.
Without
grades, “I think my relationships with students are better,” Drier an American
school teacher says. “Their writing improves more quickly and the things
they learn stay with them longer. I’ve had lots of kids tell me it’s
changed their attitude about coming to school.” He expected resistance
from parents but says that in three years only one parent has objected, and it
may help that he sends a letter home to explain exactly what he’s doing and
why. Now two of his colleagues are joining him in eliminating grades.
Drier’s
final grades are based on students’ written self-assessments, which, in turn,
are based on their review of items in their portfolios. He meets with
about three-quarters of them twice a term, in most cases briefly, to assess
their performance and, if necessary (although it rarely happens) to discuss a
concern about the grade they’ve suggested. Asked how he manages without a
grade book full of letters or numbers, Drier replies, “If I spend 18 weeks with
them, I have a pretty good idea what their writing and reasoning ability is.”
A
key element of authentic assessment for these and other teachers is the
opportunity for students to help design the assessment and reflect on its
purposes -- individually and as a class. Notice how different this is
from the more common variant of self-assessment in which students merely
monitor their progress toward the teacher’s (or legislature’s) goals and in
which they must reduce their learning to numerical ratings with grade-like
rubrics.
Points
of overlap as well as divergence emerge from the testimonies of such teachers,
some of which have been collected by Joe Bower (n.d.), an educator in Red Deer,
Alberta. Some teachers, for example, evaluate their students’
performance (in qualitative terms, of course), but others believe it's more
constructive to offer only feedback -- which is to say,
information. On the latter view, “the alternative to grades is
description” and “the starting point for description is a plain sheet of paper,
not a form which leads and homogenizes description” (Marshall, 1968, pp. 131,
143).
Teachers
also report a variety of reactions to de-grading not only from colleagues and
administrators but also from the students themselves. John Spencer
(2010), an Arizona middle school teacher, concedes that “many of the ‘high
performing’ students were angry at first. They saw it as unfair.
They viewed school as work and their peers as competitors....Yet, over
time they switch and they calm down. They end up learning more once they
aren’t feeling the pressure” from grades.
Indeed,
research suggests that the common tendency of students to focus on grades
doesn’t reflect an innate predilection or a “learning style” to be
accommodated; rather, it’s due to having been led for years to work for
grades. In one study (Butler, 1992), some students were encouraged to
think about how well they performed at a creative task while others were just
invited to be imaginative. Each student was then taken to a room that
contained a pile of pictures that other people had drawn in response to the
same instructions. It also contained some information that told them how
to figure out their “creativity score.” Sure enough, the children who were told
to think about their performance now wanted to know how they had done relative
to their peers; those who had been allowed to become immersed in the task were
more interested in seeing what their peers had done.
Grades
don’t prepare children for the “real world” -- unless one has in mind a world
where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant. Nor
are grades a necessary part of schooling, any more than paddling or taking
extended dictation could be described that way. Still, it takes courage
to do right by kids in an era when the quantitative matters more than the
qualitative, when meeting (someone else’s) standards counts for more than
exploring ideas, and when anything “rigorous” is automatically assumed to be
valuable. We have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which
in this case means asking not how to improve grades but how to jettison them
once and for all.
Finally
I, myself started introducing the invisible grading system of teaching to my
Behavior studies students from this semester at University of Humanities. I
have not done sizeable quantitative study on the effect of the new system but have
observed increase in the number of students willing to submit their work. In
the recent focus group study, 90% of the students preferred to
receive verbal comments on their work and receive grades on the basis of the
mutual analysis of the overall performance. One of the students even said that
the works I have done in order to achieve a better grade never pulls my
attention back to review it later for my own endeavor.
Myagmarjargal Purev
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