When Grades Get In The Way Of Learning

From Forbes.com

It’s the oldest problem in education; how do we make an external record of what is going on internally in students? It’s a problem we’ve solved imperfectly. In their book Off The Mark, educators Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt describe a situation depressingly familiar to most classroom teachers. Call it the tokenization of education.

In the eyes of students education often has value only because it can be traded for something else—namely social and economic advantage. The badges and honors of school, students have been taught, will gain them access to good colleges, good jobs, and good lives.

The message that the necessary badges must be collected to attain a good life surrounds students. It’s in reports of increased parent pressure to get those badges. Policy makers and researchers have pushed the idea that if students collect more badges (i.e. higher standardized test scores) the whole nation’s economy will improve. What was the point of transforming kindergarten into the new first grade if not to get children earning those badges sooner.

We are now more than two decades into a system of accountability based on a single standardized math and reading test which yields a simple numerical judgment of student learning, and now, as the authors put it “virtually the entirety of our discourse about student learning has been collapsed into these two data points.” Never mind the complex nuances of education; which badges did the students in your building earn? The prominence of the ACT and SAT further cement the idea that school is “fundamentally about testing.”

For students, school becomes a sort of job, where they work to earn tokens in the form of grades. And students, being humans, unsurprisingly often choose to work smarter, not harder. As Schneider told me, “Students triage effort, because they’re really smart.” If the end goal to is get those grade tokens, how one gets there, whether through doing the learning or finding ways to cut corners, is a secondary concern. Designing assessments can often feel like a battle of wits with the students, a struggle to devise an assessment in which the simplest option for students will be to actually do the learning.

Read the full post here.