Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alfie Kohn
more precision in the form of quantified ratings can actually exacerbate the negative effect grades have on students’ intrinsic motivation and depth of understanding.
perhaps reluctantly, we see the need to move on to step two—eliminating any sort of grading—if we’re truly committed to creating a focus on learning.
The more their attention is directed to how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing.
fact, getting students to keep taking their temperature, so to speak, has a range of disconcerting effects—on intellectual development, curiosity, risk-taking, psychological health, and relationships with fellow learners.1
rubrics are all about evaluation. They offer umpteen different axes along which to make students think about their performance—often at the cost of becoming less immersed in what they’re doing.
Why bother to get rid of a defective method of reporting achievement (like grades) if we’re still using a defective method of assessing achievement (like tests)?
my curriculum and pedagogy aren’t sufficiently engaging, is that an argument to rely on grades to coerce students into doing what I want?
influenced by progressive educators such as Alfie Kohn. It could be that they are concerned about how, when comments on papers are accompanied by grades, students disregard our comments—often not even reading them and certainly not using them to improve or learn more deeply.
There have been, for a hundred years, those who believe human learning and schooling can be broken down into little bits and assessed, just like other types of production, using principles of scientific management, or the Taylorian method of breaking factory production and other tasks into smaller ones and maximizing efficiency, normed outcomes, curves, and the like.
Protocols [lab experiments] certainly tell us something, but their web has not been precise enough to catch the important ingredients that go into cognition, memory, perception and attention, to say nothing of intention, desire, self-esteem and all the other variables of the rhetorical situation.
Two researchers attempted to test how much consistency (reliability) they would find among faculty evaluating the same papers. They found little agreement in English and history—there was a range of 39 percent—
Further evidence about the effects of grades is that grades discourage risk-taking and encourage replication of safe tactics.
Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible (or, at least, unlikely) in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another.
Grades are not good incentive. They incentivize the wrong stuff: the product over the process, what the teacher thinks over what the student thinks, etc.
All of this demands exactly two pedagogical approaches: 1. Start by trusting students. 2. Realize “fairness” is not a good excuse for a lack of compassion.
I have primarily relied on self-assessment, asking students to do the work of reflecting critically on their own learning.
Syllabus description on grading
find it strange that teachers and institutions would predetermine outcomes before students even arrive on the scene.
argue, instead, for emergent outcomes, ones that are cocreated by teachers and students and revised on the fly.
Currently I have students write self-evaluations two to three times throughout the term.
The first of these is usually more directed (with specific questions) than the last (which opens into something more like an essay).
Their self-evaluations (which I sometimes call “process letters”),
ask the students to grade themselves.
have found that asking students to give themselves a grade also makes the why and how of grades a valuable subject of the conversations we have—valuable because they will go on to be graded in other courses, and thinking critically about how and why grading happens helps that become more productive for them.
“When the how’s of assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why’s back into the shadows.”
try having the first third of the term be ungraded, a sandbox for students to experiment inside before moving on to the more formal activities of a course.
“Learning to look carefully, to see what you’re looking at, is perennially acclaimed as the essential skill for both artist and scientist.”
within traditional grading and feedback systems. A process letter can be text, including (or pointing to) representative examples of work students don’t otherwise turn in.
some work is assigned but not collected at all. This frees teachers from feeling they have to respond to, evaluate, or even read every bit of work students do.
Increasingly I don’t ask students to turn assignments in to me (aside from their self-reflections). The community of the class becomes their audience. I
Grading contracts convey expectations about what is required for each potential grade
Having students build personal or professional sites on the web, for example, can help them craft a digital identity that exists outside (but also in conversation with) their coursework.
Peter Elbow encourages making rubrics plainer and more direct, a 3 × 3 or smaller grid.
The rubrics I find most exciting are ones crafted by students—so that the making of the rubric becomes an act of learning itself rather than a device (or set of assumptions) created entirely in advance of students arriving to a course.
Alfie Kohn’s “From Degrading to De-grading.” In it he argues the negative effects of grades: 1. Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.
Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks. 3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. 4. Grades aren’t valid, reliable, or objective. 5. Grades distort the curriculum. 6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. 7. Grades encourage cheating. 8. Grades spoil teachers’ relationships with students. 9. Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other.
those who received comments only were more engaged in the task and viewed the work as either a success or failure. This meant that the work had problems that could be corrected, and the student had the power to make these revisions. However, when students received grades, they were more ego driven and saw success and failure as a reflection of themselves.
Daniel Pink’s book Drive. He suggests three things that motivate someone to learn: autonomy (the desire to be self-directed), mastery (the urge to get better at something),
and purpose (the idea that what is being done has meaning).6
hypothesized that if I could make the learning in the classroom more resemble the natural ways people learn outside the classroom3—“in the wild”—it would be both more effective and more enjoyable for everyone.
At the end we can assess the entire experience, rather than students worrying about how an early misstep is going to mean lack of success.19 In appendix 3.1 you see how I walk students through a review of their entire journey, as they note where they began, what activities they did, how they might regard them months later, and how they think about their total experience.
have students figure out how a class fits with their own lives, course of study, and interests.
If the genuine goal of college is to prepare students for life, then it is vital that they develop their own standards.
Every assignment is accompanied by students’ written self-assessments of their work.
Conduct portfolio conferences.
Students suggest their grade, which I can accept or not. No, not every student suggests an A.
Assessing student learning is all about checking where students are against standards and learning targets we have created and making sure students understand these concepts and can speak to them as well.
In lieu of scoring, why not say to a student “You aren’t there yet” or “Try another way” to encourage them to keep going? When we say “try another way,” we want to make sure we are filling students’ toolboxes with strategies, so they learn to use what they have in a variety of ways.
asking students to collect their feedback and strategies in one place with a feedback log.
With teachers’ use of more instructive, and concrete, feedback, students will be able to review what they have learned, use the feedback, and then practice applying it first in similar settings and then to alternative ones across content areas.
