OCT15 Entrance slip

 

1) What are your "student bird" and "teacher bird" thoughts about assigning percentages or letter grades in the assessment of student work? What do the grades indicate? How are they arrived at? Whose purposes do they serve? What are positive and negative aspects to giving grades? to be assigned grades by an instructor?

I think assigning percentages or letter grades are just a measure of how the students grasp the essential knowledge (about a math concept, or about how to solve a problem). It is more straightforward for math courses than other courses such as English, because when you can solve a problem correctly, you certainly do have an understanding of the concept/problem type. Grades indicate the level of understanding. They also indicate how quickly one can solve the problems, for the tests usually have time limits. They serve as a sign of achievement, at least partly, if not accurately. They serve as a sign of competition, for sure. Students compare their own test results with others to make sure that they are excelling at school. Positive aspects are that they are warning signs for students who are “falling behind” in the learning process, so that they would try harder. (as indicated in the article, "Grading allows me to compare my marks with others; if I'm not doing as well as others, I seem to try harder!") Negative aspects include unnecessary harm of self-confidence, inaccurate representation of the real abilities, and excessive stress for the students. Negative aspects of being assigned grades by an instructor would be that students lose the autonomy and intrinsic motivation to study.

 

2) What are some of the unintended side effects of grading? How do grades and marks in themselves format the social relations and learning situations in a classroom, a school, a district?

 

“Some students compete against each other, flaunting superior test scores over their friends. Others are embarrassed by their grades, trying to hide their scores or feigning indifference by parading their poor marks.”

This situation is pretty common in high school if the scores are made public, or even when they are not made public. Students will still compare with each other and this might create some side effects regarding social relationships and self-confidence.

 

“When students are graded, they are constantly reminded to think about the rewards or punishments they will receive for an assignment or test. Therefore, their motivation to learn decreases (Kohn, 1998). “

 

When given reward/ extrinsic motivation, students tend to focus on the reward instead of the actual learning task. However, I think this is also questionable because if they are not even given rewards / punishment, they might not just enjoy the task as the author stated. They would likely disregard the task. So there has to be a carefully kept balance between the two situations. As the author also stated, “some forms of external rewards actually support students' motivation to learn. Ryan and Deci (2000) argue that if those external rewards are used to control students and diminish autonomy, then they decrease intrinsic motivation.” Hence, we should be careful about which type of extrinsic motivation we use.

 

Also, “students are externally controlled by grades and this will hinder their growth as self-directed, autonomous learners”. Students stress out when thinking about the grades. This may not be a good thing for their interest of studying.

 

3) Could you imagine teaching math and/or science without giving grades? How could a teacher encourage learning without having an emphasis on grading?

 

You can teach without emphasis on grading but you can’t teach without giving grades... I mean, you could do it if you don’t want to get into the university. However, nowadays students have the stress of getting into the university so they kind of have to learn how to take tests. That is part of the skills too. A teacher can encourage learning by teaching relational understanding of concepts and asking the students to experiment with and discuss about the solutions in a group setting. They could have their own choice of topics for the week. but eventually the teacher has to teach all of the contents for the course. So maybe they could choose to do the activities they want to do, for instance, making up their own projects about a certain math topic and then talk about it together in class. This might provide some intrinsic motivation.