A Thought Experiment: Why grade? Why test? What if?
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s assume we live in a culture where all forms of educational achievement tests have been banned and no one is allowed to assign a letter or numerical grade for anything. How would we evaluate what students are learning? How would we decide which teachers were doing their job effectively or how they could be more effective? Would there be objective (i.e. impartial, unbiased) ways of determining who was the smartest student and who needed help? And why would we want or need to know that? Without testing, would being the best be a useful question? Or, as a mathematician would ask, would that question be an interesting one (one that could yield an answer that wasn’t simply a circular restating of the question)? How would the content and methods of education change if assessment by means of testing and grading was banned?
One uses the method of a thought experiment, or gedanken experiment, when one wants to challenge a paradigm that is so foundational and so entwined with current assumptions that you need to move outside the realm of the experimental, experiential, and the plausible even to see it. Much of modern physics, going back at least to Galileo, is founded on thought experiments, often subsequently demonstrated empirically (as in dropping objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate new theories of gravitation). A thought experiment is the only way to unravel the current state of thinking from all of the baggage that, over time, becomes not only associated with that mode of thinking but becomes foundational to it. Reform rarely leads to a paradigm shift since it builds upon these interwoven histories. You use a thought experiment when you want to change not just a way of measuring the world but how we see it.
We need to resort to a thought experiment before we can even consider the idea of education-without-grading because the evolution of the modern educational system over the last 130 years has been the evolution of “assessment.” More to the point, the idea of assessment has been bound up, in ways large and small, innocent and heinous, with implicit ideas of who is or is not superior, who does or does not contribute to a standard of excellence, and who (metaphorically and statistically) either raises or lowers the national curve, either biologically or culturally speaking. Powerful ideas—some would say prejudices—about correlations between income, race, or gender are bound up with the history of testing, going back to the very beginning of grading and the field of modern statistics itself.
All of these rose together in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and simultaneous with the field of “management studies” dedicated to efficiencies in the industrial workplace. In the U.S., national educational policies were explicitly advocated as a way to train efficient and productive future workers. Implicit in the early discussions were ideas that some people—notably immigrants and the rural poor flocking in to U.S. cities in the last part of the nineteenth century—were inferior. They were not measuring up.
That assumption of who did or did not “measure up” is embedded in testing and in quantitative metrics for assessment from the very beginning. So here’s another factor to throw into our thought experiment. How could we imagine assessment apart from comparative scales of superiority and inferiority? It is important to recall that key features of modern statistics such as correlation and standard deviation were devised by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s and proponent of Social Darwinism. Galton advocated for statistical, objective measures that would prove the inherited intellectual superiority of the British upperclass and the inherited lower-level mental skills of the working poor. He advocated for government sterilization of the poor and subsidies to aristocrats who bore children because he saw the entire human inheritance pool being “weakened” by the poor having too many children. Needless to say, most people who use statistical methods for correlation or standard deviation are not eugenicist, but it is curious how often the history of methods purported to be quantitative, objective assessment methods have been used for ideological purposes justified by those metrics.
I’m not going to pose any answers in this brief post, but pose this thought experiment to push us to think not of reform but of whole-sale rebuilding of an educational system for the digital age. What would that mean? What would we come up with if we could start over, from scratch? Of course, home schoolers have to think about these issues all the time, but what if entire schools and school systems were reimagined in this way? What would that look like? I don’t have the answer, but I’d love to try the experiment.
Image Credit: Pete Ashton http://www.britannica.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/21st-century_credit_pete_ashton.JPG
Comments
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Coincident with this post, an extremely thoughtful conversation on Assessments, as part of the Department of Education's $350 Million Race to the Top initiative is happening on the MacArthur Spotlight Blog. I highly recommend that anyone interested in assessment visit the blog, leave a comment, share the blog with your friends and colleagues. Pass it On. Here's the url and a teaser:
http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/measuring_classroom_progress_21st_century_assessment_project_input/'
From the MacArthur Foundation Spotlight Blog:
Measuring Classroom Progress: 21st Century Assessment Project Wants Your Input
Filed by Daniel Hickey and Brian Nelson at 9:59 am on February 8, 2010 in Assessment, Policy, Schools • 5 comments
Guest authors Daniel Hickey and Brian Nelson argue that the opportunity to institute true reform in assessment practices is now, and the Race to the Top Assessment Initiative should think more broadly about how we measure progress in the classroom. They welcome comments on findings from the MacArthur 21st Century Assessment Project.
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Photo by Extra Ketchup
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has set aside up to $350 million of Race to the Top funds for the potential purpose of supporting states in developing a next generation of assessments of student learning.
The competitive grant program is called Race to the Top-Assessment (RTT-Assessment). Members of the MacArthur Foundation’s 21st Century Assessment Project are scrutinizing this initiative. Our investigation reflects the project’s continuing analysis of assessment practices that reveal the reasoning, communication and learning needed for economic, social, creative and civic success in a networked 21st century world. We encourage feedback on our findings.
http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/measuring_classroom_progress_21st_century_assessment_project_input/
It is gratifying to see people willing to imagine a world without the kind of measuring that became ubiquitous in society and education in the last century or so.
But - just to let you know - there are schools that have abandoned grading and standardized tests as way to see who measures up. And there are schools that never adopted grading to begin with. (And our students get into college and - shock, horror - succeed in life.)
Poughkeepsie Day School in Poughkeepsie, NY is one of them.
- Josie
http://www.pdscompasspoint.com/
Yes, a number of schools, over many years, have abandoned standardized testing or rejected it outright. And many of us are also working to change the test-based method of teaching of No Child Left Behind, our national public educational policy. Thanks for writing, and for al you are doing. The fact that there are excellent schools like yours charting other ways is extremely useful to the larger process and project.
One of the many things I loved about working with the High Tech High schools in San Diego was that this type of discussion was earnest and ongoing. There was the constant sense that we were still in the early stages of our experiment, and the distinct hope of moving away from grades was present.
I've always wanted to get out and tour one of the Sudbury schools ever since seeing this charming documentary, Voices from the New American Schoolhouse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpuSo-GSfw
Anyone have any experience with these schools?
Cathy, et al.:
This is very timely, as we're having a series of campus conversations about grade inflation and the culture of grading.
"What would we come up with if we could start over, from scratch?"
Here's one of my favorite long-range dreams:
- We re-envision our institutions as interdisciplinary think tanks.
- We tell students that they aren't in school anymore, they are functioning, early-career members of research teams, digital media production groups, architectural design teams, management consulting groups, performance companies, etc.
- Students and faculty work together on these teams addressing research-driven problems and creative challenges. These teams would produce actual work products and contribute them to society. When there is economic value to the work, students share in the revenue and royalties.
- Grades would be irrelevant in an organization like this. Assessment and evaluation would blend input from peers, supervisors, mentors, project clients, and especially the individuals themselves. This experience is more like the so-called real world, including the academic world once you're done taking classes for a grade. Widespread use of tools like e-portfolios make this much more feasible than in the past.
- We'll keep plenty of classrooms and lecture halls available for work-in-progress talks, interest group meetings, and for faculty who are good enough lecturers to attract listeners who don't need credit or a grade.
I've worked in higher ed for 25 years and could list all of the reasons why this won't work, but let's not bother with that right now. What do you think?
We both know how this wouldn't work---so it would be exciting to try it with the challenge that students prove us wrong about our apprehensions. We're starting a new program at Duke where, for a semester or even full year, students don't take regular classes but work as part of professional research team, planning their learning and their advising around intensive lab-like research experiences, not just in the sciences but all across the curriculum. We already have an outreach program (Duke Engage) on this model and it would bring the same intense engaged research experience as the current outreach program. So we're about to test this, if it passes all the various credentialing committees. I'm pretty proud that we've been able to push various kinds of pedagogical experiments here. I'll report on how this one works. Thanks much for writing!
Thanks, Cathy -- the Duke program sounds like an excellent model; I will watch it with great interest.
BTW, here's an article that connects nicely with this thread:
http://bit.ly/91UlPg
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time!
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 1 (January/February 2010): 16-29
Best,
Andrew
Thanks for your post, Kathy. I wanted to recommend a resource for instructors to consider: the Learning Record.
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/olr/intro.html
I am using it for the first time this semester in my Writing in Digital Environments course, but many colleagues have used it to great success. The Learning Record asks students to compile work samples and observations that will ultimately be used as evidence when students analyze their progress throughout the semester across specific dimensions of learning and course strands. This grading method takes into consideration a much wider variety of student work than is normally used to formulate grades, and it asks students to reflect upon their work and assess how much they have developed. Of course, this is still a method of assessment, but it gives students a wider range of opportunities to produce meaningful work and to demonstrate improvement in various ways. This method probably ends up resembling Cheryl's "100% participation" to a large extent in that it tends to reward students who do the most work and invest themselves in the class to the greatest degree.
Thanks again,
Matt
One of my most daring experiments as a teacher hit on this issue. It was a few weeks before State Testing and everything was ramping up in that direction. I could feel this polarization of the room, with several in the class genuinely stressing out about the upcoming tests, and others fully checking out, absolutely unconcerned and - quite frankly - bored from hearing their teachers and administrators talk so much about it.
On both ends it was making my job difficult. My students were intellectually and emotionally unavailable. My material had no audience. I was, in turn, getting frustrated. We needed a reset.
I took them all outside. I should preface this by saying that we had established an incredible culture of trust, and despite that, I was nervous about the experiment. I asked them all to please line up in a straight line. That was all the guidance I gave them. They did so as you would expect, friends next to friends, students away from other students they weren't fond of.
Then I asked them to line up in order from tallest to shortest. Simple enough. Arbitrary. They did so.
Then I asked them to line up in order from the lightest eyes, to the darkest. This took them a while longer, but they did so. For many of them it was the first time they'd looked at each other in the eye.
Then I asked them to line up from loudest to quietest. It was starting to become more personal. They did so.
Then I asked them to line up from the most to least funny. This was starting to get uncomfortable. They looked at me, for assurance that I was serious. It took them a minute, but without another word they did it. I don't believe they knew the silence was likely just as hard for me as it was for them.
Then I asked them to line up from smartest to dumbest. I was careful to use that language. "Mr. E, are you serious?" "Yes." And they did it. It was probably the most painful thing I've ever done, or had to endure watching as a human being. The tone got pretty quiet. It was obvious that everyone knew their place in line before the exercise started. But no one had ever been asked to be public with that knowledge. No one was feeling very good about themselves, at either end of the line.
I then had them sit back down in a big family circle. I said thank you for trusting me, I know that was hard. And then I said:
"How dare you."
"How dare you allow ANYONE to categorize you that way. 'Smart' according to who? In what way? It's bullshit..."
What followed was one of the richest, most emotionally charged conversations I've ever had with a group of 9th graders. All about the grades, SAT scores, and the innumerous and ugly ways we quantify and sort ourselves in society.
Note: Please do not try to repeat this experiment.
That is amazing. Teaching students how to object to how they have been labeled--and how they have internalized these labels--is the most profound thing we can do as instructors. In"This Is Your Brain on the Internet," we're using a form of peer-leading of classes and peer-evaluation combined with contract grading. I've described that before on my HASTAC blog---it's the one that caused such a stir it was picked up as an AP story and bandied about and I got buffeted by the blogosphere, and also championed. Both. In any case, we began our peer-guided discussions with "grading" as our topic and it was led by the three graduate students in the course, one TA and two Teaching Apprentices. One of the grad students, for his part of the unit, asked students to volunteer experiences of the lowest grade they ever received, what they thought about it, how it was received by their parents and others. The stories were so powerful that I ended up remarking that, although we all know that the feared "permanent record" goes away once one is out in the real world beyond school, we carry a "permanent record" of our failures inside us forever. That is sobering. My students really learned from the historical approach to grading, realizing that it was a system created with a certain educational philosophy in mind, and putting the comments they had heard about their own bad grades into that context. It's not personal, in the long run, although it can scar us for a long, long time. Thanks so much for writing.
Cathy,
Love this post. Will send it to the students in my digital publishing class as a way to further explain why their grades are based on 100% participation. (I wouldn't even have that if I could get away with no grade, but we have yet to reach that level of comfort in this society.)
Thanks for this!
cb
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