Blog Entry #5

Bostonian Henry Adams wrote, "Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignornance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." He was commenting on the style of American education in the 19th century, which placed undue emphasis on students' ability to memorize information. One hundred year later, critics of American education might very well argue that not much has changed.


This week's readings delve into what is arguably the most controversial aspect of formal education: assessment and grading. Last week we looked more at the question of how to assess students and determine their grades. Now we're talking about why we assess students, why we determine grades at all. These issues are really fundamental to teachers' development because they beg the question, what is the purpose of formal education.

The author of What the Best Teachers Do sees teachers split between those who see education almost as a punitive exercise, an ordeal oriented not to helping students learn, but to making students jump through hoops; and those who see education as a uniquely transformational process, one that turns proverbial punk teenagers into self-directed scholars who not only want to learn, but who love to learn. For his part, McKeatchie in Teaching Tips urges teachers to embrace the latter view, but is more realistic about its implementation.

In my entry this week, I'll lay out my own view, and discuss the ideas and suggestions from the readings that I intend to try out in my own classes.

I love the notion that formal education is a transformational process, and agree that it does transform people--most of the time modestly, sometimes extraordinarily. But do I agree with Henry Peter Brougham, who in 1828 called education the force that "makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave"? No. And I think even a cursory review of 20th century history would back me up.

Americans, being an unfortunately anti-intellectual lot in general, often see education as a process that churns out productive workers. Others see education as the key to unlocking great wonders of human potential. I believe that education--writ large--should do both. And while responsibility for realizing this end result does rest in large measure with teachers, particularly in the early stages of formal education, I think more responsibility rests with students at the university level. As such, I think students, as they start progressing through the educational ranks, must be increasingly evaluated on aspects of performance.


I base my view not so much on philosophical grounds, but on practical ones. Having been a student for many years, and a teacher for a few years, I don't see evidence that every student has an intrinsic desire to be the kind of learner we'd all love to see in our classrooms--the learner with limitless curiosity and the passion to engage wholeheartedly in every subject. If this intrinsic desire exists, it can probably only be nurtured in the earliest stages of life. By the time students are in university, they're as curious and as passionate as they're likely to get. As they get even older, emotional maturity may help them become more patient and focused, which should improve their ability to perform well in school. But, their levels of curiousity and passion for learning are unlikely to change significantly.
What the Best Teachers Do bemoans the fact that so many teachers seem too concerned with performance, and not concerned enough with learning. I believe that in order to realize a university education's dual purpose of graduating self-directed scholars who are also productive workers, teachers must emphasize learning but not totally relinquish necessary performance requirements.



In reality, performance-based aspects of grading are not merely about the teacher's convenience, as What the Best Teachers Do says, but about helping students learn to cope with the rules and norms of real life. Deadlines exist in various forms for all professions and even in the most liberal of classrooms, the end of the semester is still a deadline everyone must adhere to.


At the same time, teachers should reevaluate whether or not the rules and regulations of their classrooms have legitimate educational underpinnings. For example, a teacher may compel students to complete assignments in a particular order because successive assignments require students to apply certain concepts that are introduced in that order. Students may be asked to do assignments and readings at the same time so that the class can review and discuss what they're learning and doing as a group.


Rules and regulations that don’t have educational bases, however, may still be necessary. For example, science students may not have much or any flexibility about when they can access the lab, due to university safety procedures, as well as the unwieldy logistics of having to coordinate the schedules of dozens of science classes.


Rules and regulations that do not serve a compelling educational purpose and are not necessary by some other standard should be discarded or adjusted. In What the Best Teachers Do, we learned of a student who wanted to do a report on War and Peace but wound up not having enough time to complete the book before the report was due. The teacher could have adjusted her system in a couple of different ways. For example, she could have created a list of works her students could choose from, with the idea that all the works on the list are those that could reasonably be completed within the time frame of the assignment. Alternatively, she could have ranked various works in order of length and complexity and assigned deadlines to students based on the rankings so that longer, more complex works would be due later than shorter, less complex works.


This week’s readings also centered on tests and other tools of assessing student learning. I agree with the assertions that McKeatchie listed at the start of chapter 7 in Teaching Tips, particularly his urging that teachers use a variety of methods to assess learning. Larger classrooms and teachers’ fear of being overwhelmed by having to grade hundreds of exam papers has led to an overreliance on multiple choice and similarly objective question types. The problem with this, as I wrote last week, is that it’s extremely difficult to test higher level learning with these kinds of questions. Large classrooms also make it more difficult to assign other kinds of work. The result is that only low-level learning takes place. Teaching Tips reemphasized the limitation of these kinds of tests in assessing whether students have reached higher-level learning objectives.

Another argument raised by the readings this week concerns the meaning of grades. I agree that grades are ultimately a way to tell student how well they’re learning (and performing) and to tell teachers how well they’re teaching. But then we must ask what “learning” is. What the Best Teachers Do says, "Learning entails primarily intellectual and personal changes that people undergo as they develop new understandings and reasoning abilities" (p. 153). This is true, but how do teachers measure these intellectual and personal changes? Ultimately, all measures (i.e., grades) are based on the teachers' criteria of what is and is not important in the classroom. Even having students grade themselves or each other simply confuses them, as they try with varying degrees of success to divine what grade they think the teacher would give them.

Teachers could abandon grades altogether and turn the university experience into a sort of Montesori school for adults, but such a system wouldn't last long. Students themselves would soon demand grades, as well they should, in order to help them know whether or not they're learning, as well as to help know how well they are doing in comparison to others.


So grades must be based on how well students demonstrate meeting the course objectives. For example, one course objective in COMM 110 is for students to effectively and competently deliver a variety of speech types. Students’ grades for these speeches should tell students how well they match up against the definitions of “effective,” “competent,” and other criteria established in class. To be able to give grades that communicate this, though, teachers must be teaching to the objectives. If COMM 110 teachers spend all their class time reviewing the definitions of speaking terms from the textbook, and not showing what the application of these terms in speeches looks like, then the bad grades students would likely get in such a class would be as much a consequence of bad teaching as students’ leaerning.


An example of this unfortunate state is the COMM 112 class I assist in. Lessons consist almost entirely of lecture that are very “laundry list” in nature and focus mostly on the history of American media and, in some cases, the inner workings of media operations. The tests reflect this. The name of the course, though, is "Understanding Media and Social Change." The syllabus has no objectives, only a "course overview," but the name of the course implies that we should be helping students analyze the role that media have in our lives. The class is big—it has more than 130 students—and teaching that many people in a way that emphasizes analysis and other higher-level concepts is not easy. Even more challenging is trying to measure how well 130 students are developing analytical skills.

COMM TA’s just stitched together the first exam for our COMM 110 (Fundamentals of Public Speaking) classes. I say "stitched together" because we were e-mailed the test bank of questions and invited to select which ones we wanted and in what order. Virtually all the questions tested students' knowledge of terms used in the public speaking textbook. This is not bad, assuming that knowledge of these terms is an objective of the course, but I’m not sure these tests should weigh as heavily as they do in the final grade. In COMM 110, students’ ability to actually deliver a variety of speeches is what we’re most concerned with, which is why every student must give five graded speeches.


So for next semester, when I will be solely responsible for COMM 112, I want to add focus more on the media’s impact on society and how the ever-evolving media might continue to influence society in the future. This semester the class does group projects, in which groups do research and present to the entire class their findings about a particular medium. Most of this research is on history and current status of the medium. I’d like to see if I can ask students to imagine how the medium might evolve. For example, what might the internet look like 20 years from now?

This semester the class is being asked to do a lot of daily writing, but the purpose seems only to make students attend class. The writings are never reviewed or used as a launch pad for discussion. Next semester I’d like to change this. Not all the writings will be graded, in an effort to reduce stress, as McKeatchie suggests.

Teaching Tips talked briefly about a revolutionary curriculum shift more than 20 years ago, launched by Alverno College. I wanted to see what kinds of tools I might find on their website. This site details this curriculum and has links to a number of assessment tools the college developed.