In the Richard Stiggins' piece, he talks about how we are too focused on testing for the knowledge of students and rarely focus on their progress as learners. He states that we should also have assessment for learning rather as well as our common of learning assessment. What he means is that our assessments that we have in place now hold a strong emphasis on student content and the accountability to the scores from educators but hardly do we assess for teacher practices that will improve learning. Some of the examples he gives include
- understanding and articulating in advance of teaching the achievement targets that their students are to hit
- informing their students about those learning goals in terms that they understand, from the very beginning of the teaching and learning process
As a response to his rhetoric I would like to challenge some of his ideas. I completely agree with his rhetoric. If students are not learning because of assessment we have in place then we should have a different conversation of how we assess our students and education system. However, if this were to pass into implementation, how do you assess for it? People and politicians would want proof of learning, what would be the proof? What grading scale do you assign to this learning? Are my questions even relevant to kids learning? Also, does assessment and accountability promote student learning? Next question, does this form of assessment also lower standards for students? Or does it provide for assessing for student needs?
Just some cool videos if you have yet to see it. :) Actually you should totally watch them!
I just wanted to be the first to comment on my comment. BOOM! :D
ReplyDeleteFirst we must not lose focus on the mission, which is to help all students succeed. I feel assessment for learning can put all students on a path of success by enabling the student to experience a productive emotional dynamic. Its about moving the focus on exclusive reliance on assessments that verify learning to the use of assessments that support learning. One way this can be achieved is when teachers share achievement targets with students in a language that is student-friendly. The goal of assessment for learning is not to eliminate failure but keep failure from becoming chronic.
ReplyDeleteAbel, I really enjoyed the videos! I thought the point about purpose and profit in the last video was especially relevant to our job as teachers. If students are only working toward profit (e.g., grades, high test scores) and do not feel a sense of purpose, they are likely to put forth work that is not their best. We can tie this thinking to our conversation about assessments by asking ourselves if assessment "of learning" is hurting our profit/purpose bond, and if assessment "for learning" can help to fix the problem by giving students a sense of autonomy and support. I think it was interesting, yet not surprising, how in the first couple of videos, 9th grades were able to be bribed to get better grades, but I wonder how much material they were actually retaining. Are they putting forth work that just meets the requirements, as the last video would suggest? My guess is that they are "learning" the material in a "binge and purge" fashion, and that they probably feel uninspired by their academics. This is not the goal! While I am happy to see an improvement in students' grades, and perhaps some of them are learning better than before, getting students to do their work through external motivators is saddening to me. How about we as teachers, principals, policy makers, and whoever else, get together to think about why we're actually teaching kids what we're teaching them, and then tell them our reasoning! If it's not good enough for them, then perhaps that just means we have more thinking to do.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a good point that Mike Rose also bring up in his book Why Schools?. He asks what is the purpose of schools in general and where do we want to end up as a nation. External pressures may give a student an immediate ratification of their learning but it does not mean that they are happy or have complete autonomy with their lives. You bright to light a great point our school system is focused on an "profit" based system and we rarely focus on a individual "purpose" in education.
DeleteHey Abel,
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I love the RSA Animate series, so kudos for including one. We always joke about how most of our time as teachers will be spent grading, but I think that it also shows how important assessments are and should be. We should be evaluating student success and growth. The conversations we have about how to assess need to be with other educators. It will always be difficult to find an assessment that doesn't have its flaws. Our students have varied needs, so we will be looking for growth in different areas of each student. What we need is communication. Communication with administrators, policy makers, test makers, students, colleagues. What I've been seeing a lot in my mentor teacher's classroom is a student asking her why they aren't doing well or why they have a certain grade and her response is always "I don't know. I'll have to look in the grade book." What does the grade book tell us? What *should* it tell us? How can students know where to improve?
Your example at the end really depicts the nature of this beast. A grade does not tell a student much about how, what, and how well they are learning. It also does not give feed back to a teacher about the specific needs a student needs in order learn to their potential. If in a perfect system grades reflected student learning then yes we wouldn't need other forms of assessment. Please have these questions in mind during our discussion in class.
DeleteHi, Abel.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with what everyone else has been saying, specifically Jaime's point about all assessments having flaws. As I was creating the rubric for my lesson, I found myself at times liking and disliking my rubric, because it was not something I'd ever imagine teaching at the high school level. My rubric was just straight to the point, but I do not necessarily know how much of impact it may have on my students. Particularly in my situation, I feel like all students do an assignment for a grade. If they knew they weren't getting a grade, they wouldn't even try to do it for their own sake.
I think that what you are saying is quite interesting. I would just like to say that when it comes to national testing, there are most definitely problems with how we assess students. In fact, in my Controversies in U.S. Schools class last semester, I wrote a research paper about problems with standardized testing and how we should assess our students and the answer is pretty simple: One-on-one assessment by the teacher. Yes, it is more time consuming, but it benefits the students tremendously. However, when it comes to smaller assessments for the classroom how should be assess students? Should the assessments be more flexible? For example, if you taught your students a lesson, gave them homework, and as you were grading it you realize that many of them got the same answers wrong. Something went wrong. They didn't get it. As teachers, we should then be flexible with our grading as we would be with slowing down and stretching out the lesson if they do not understand.
ReplyDeleteAs a huge fan of Freakonomics, I love the clips, thank you. However, I think the 3rd video is correct about the studies, re incentives and cognitive thinking. I would use incentives in a slightly different way. I would reward the improvement, not the "base score" - this evens the playing field for struggling students, in fact, it even gives them an advantage (if you're starting off with low baseline, there is a lot more room for improvement). btw.. in the 3rd vid.. the "transcendent purpose" scenario and everyone being happy so long as they make a "baseline" amount of money is pure claptrap. Our stupid society is all about "keeping up with the Joneses" so all one needs are a few people who make more than others to foil this piece of socialist thinking. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" We already know this pie in the sky thinking doesn't work as it's contrary to many selfish aspects of human nature. With the school system lacking general funding, I do not think there is $ available to give out to students. Parents should use it (as the Professor does with his daughter, though this raises issues of socio-economics and general inequalities. The system itself is supposed to give you "incentives" - got good grades. get high scores, get into a top school - get a good job, make $. I am not sure how to improve it, though this surely can use some major improvement. Incentives in education is a fairly controversial idea. I remember when teaching English in Korea, there was a debate about using "candy" to reward and incentivize students. In my educational experience, I never got candy - which is very unfortunate, because I loved candy and would have received lots of it. But with my unmotivated students from disadvantaged background (in Korea) I found candy worked! (though it has to be used "strategically"). The Korean kids were also very competitive and loved competing in groups against other groups or against their friends. To "win" candy on top of it worked wonderfully. so I constantly tried to design games and contests for them on the material I was trying to teach.
ReplyDeleteHi Abel,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. Yeah, I basically agree with Stiggins. We should be doing assessment for learning rather than of learning, as he so doggedly recites throughout his article. I, however, take issue with Stiggins’s rhetoric. He writes of the problems of our assessments, assessments that assess student achievement of rather than for learning. Okay so far. Then, in a move to demonstrate how woefully unprepared teachers are to assess their students in meaningful and productive ways, he notes that “there is no licensing examination in place at the state or federal level in the U.S. that verifies competence in assessment” (3). What? What? What nationalized form of assessment has ever shown itself to assess for learning as opposed to of? In this logic then, we need a state assessment of teachers to demonstrate that they will buck the tenets of a state assessment. Right after this sentence, in an even more problematic move, Stiggins uses a “thus” full of assumptions to write a causal relationship between teacher preparation programs (side note: a rhetorical name that devalues the intellectual work done in our university degree programs. Teacher prep sounds like a scrapbooking class at a community center...) and state testing. “Thus,” Stiggins writes, “ teacher preparation programs have taken little note of competence in assessment, and the vast majority of programs fail to provide the assessment literacy required to enable teachers to engage in assessment for learning” (3). In other words, if we aren’t assessing for assessment at the state level, universities will not teach assessment to their students. In education programs, Stiggins apparently reasons, we teach only to the test.
And the larger problem of all of this, of course, is that it perpetuates the line of thinking that situates our students within fabricated races of intelligence between nations. Why are we engaged in this national race to the top? Well, because we’re political pawns. If a politician can claim some hand (invariably through the flawed state testing that subsumes learning under the logic of numbers) in “improving student learning outcomes” that politician can flex his muscles another day, can garner the allegiance of mothers and liberals concerned about the education “crisis.”
Yes, this is a reductive reading. The geopolitics of race to the top education programs that use testing as metrics are about more than mere political clout. There’s money to be made by private contractors/investment companies, there’s the logic of neoliberalism that depoliticizes the very political questions of education by reducing them to supposedly neutral (and thus infallible and not up for debate) numbers, and the more general need for states to appear as foreclosed entities in competition with one another – raison d’etat. If Stiggins wants my vote, he’s got to sanitize his argument of neoliberal buzz words and the constant return to student measurement in regards to state standards. We know these are political tools. Why do we keep assuming that we can learn our way out of the crisis they create with their help?
In regards to the question: “People and politicians would want proof of learning, what would be the proof?” I think it’s very hard to quantify student learning because each student might have a different way of demonstrating that knowledge, i.e., discussion, written, etc. I think the reason most teachers use grades as an index of competency is due to its ease factor. This is where I indulge in some envy and say Math teacher have it pretty sweet compared to Language Arts teachers. What I mean to say is that 1+1 will always be 2, whereas the theme in Macbeth is subjective and open to the interpretation of the reader. It’s like comparing facts to opinions. Are opinions measurable? I think this is where a rubric comes into play in which you specify how many supporting details you require your students to write for each claim and so forth.
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