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28: Restoring Humanity: Gradeless Learning
14 Plays7 years ago
For this episode we're trying something new. Instead of having a guest, I'm (Chris) deep-diving into one element of progressive education - offering history and advice to gradeless learning. I tried my best to cover an extensive look at this topic, including - most importantly - the point of why this is needed.
There are many quotes and research provided, here is a list of the resources used:
- Much of the historical data (and all quotes) are from "Making the grade" by Jack Schneider & Ethan Hunt (2013).
- We recommend the portfolio tool Seesaw.
- **Mistakenly, I said that Seesaw was free for everything except grading - this is mostly true, but to assign "skills" and organize student posts via tags it is $120/year. A simple workaround is to create folders for skills and have students upload work into them.
- I celebrate the upcoming work of the Mastery Transcript Consortium.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to New Podcast Format
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:14
Speaker
My name is Chris.
00:00:15
Speaker
Thanks for listening in today.
00:00:16
Speaker
We're going to try a new format in this one and see how it goes.
00:00:19
Speaker
Today, it's just me, and I'm kicking off a new idea, which is restoring humanity.
Overview of Progressive Education
00:00:24
Speaker
These will potentially be overviews of a major theme in progressive education, and my goal is to provide a thorough summary of what that practice is, why it's important, some history behind it, and then how we implement it.
00:00:34
Speaker
This work, as well as our regular podcast and free resources, are a result of our incredible patrons.
00:00:40
Speaker
I want to say a special thank you to Nick Covington and Cynthia Jester for making this work possible.
00:00:46
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project and find everything we do, as well as contribute on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:00:55
Speaker
So, without further ado, let's begin restoring humanity.
Challenges of Grading Systems
00:01:04
Speaker
We're gonna start off with a quote from the very well-named I.E.
00:01:08
Speaker
Finkelstein, who said, when we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether it be numbers or letters,
00:01:19
Speaker
to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students to these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt
00:01:37
Speaker
and the reliability of the marking system.
00:01:39
Speaker
School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument.
00:01:45
Speaker
What faults appear in the marking systems that we are now using, and how can they be avoided or minimized?"
00:01:51
Speaker
That quote is from 1913, and what we're going to talk about today is reconsidering grading altogether.
00:01:59
Speaker
We're going to start off with some history, but first here's what we're going to be explicitly stating.
00:02:05
Speaker
Our argument
00:02:06
Speaker
is that grades are not a useful measurement of intelligence, nor a useful means for what their goal is to do, which is to tell someone how they're doing and how to get better.
00:02:17
Speaker
In fact, we're going to argue they do the exact opposite.
00:02:21
Speaker
They do very little to motivate students to do better, and students don't really get anything out of receiving a grade.
00:02:28
Speaker
It seems to be the only reason why we issue grades is that it's an easy way to tell college is what's going on, even if it's not accurate.
00:02:37
Speaker
First off, there's two terms that we're going to use throughout that are incredibly important to understand.
00:02:42
Speaker
And that is extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation.
00:02:45
Speaker
Of course, extrinsic motivation, which means from the outside or exterior, extrinsic motivation is when you're motivated to do something because of some kind of reward at the end.
00:02:57
Speaker
For example, you want to make a lot of money or you want to receive a grade.
00:03:00
Speaker
versus intrinsic motivation, or from the inside, interior, which is where you do something just because you wanna do it.
00:03:08
Speaker
There's no reward you're seeking at the end, you're doing it just because.
00:03:12
Speaker
For example, learning because you're interested in it.
00:03:15
Speaker
We're gonna jump into some history here
00:03:17
Speaker
to talk about how we got into this
Origins and Criticism of Grading in the U.S.
00:03:19
Speaker
point.
00:03:19
Speaker
How do we get to the point where grading was pretty much a given when you go to school?
00:03:25
Speaker
There are obviously alternative schools that are trying different things, but for the most part, when a parent puts their child in school, it's safe to assume they think they're going to get an A through an F. So the American scoring of students had its roots in the mid-1800s.
00:03:40
Speaker
The Ivy League schools, Yale and Harvard, experimented with a bunch of different points, percentage, and other systems.
00:03:48
Speaker
And we get the system that we have today in 1897 from a relatively small women's college called Mount Holyoke, which took all of these different ideas and developed the modern scale.
00:03:58
Speaker
So a 4.0 is an A, 3.0 is a B, so on and so forth.
00:04:02
Speaker
And there's all these different arguments and reforms that existed.
00:04:06
Speaker
Let's start in 1846.
00:04:07
Speaker
You have Horace Mann, who you probably know as one of the early adopters of compulsory education.
00:04:13
Speaker
He expressed concerns that students were going to be way too focused on class rank, and he said it would incur moral hazards and delinquencies as they look towards all these different extrinsic motivators.
00:04:26
Speaker
He said, why don't we just show progress of a student over time through monthly report cards to show growth and development over time?
00:04:34
Speaker
And in general, early reformers sought to eliminate class rank by having some kind of grade system.
00:04:41
Speaker
They thought they would inspire intrinsic motivation.
00:04:44
Speaker
In fact, they talk a lot about the literal definition of intrinsic motivation through grades.
00:04:49
Speaker
They thought they could track students' progress and push them to succeed over time by saying, okay, you got a C on this one, now we need to work our way up to a B and then to an A. And this was pretty commonplace through the late 1800s.
00:05:01
Speaker
However, as the school system rapidly expanded in the late 19th century during the Industrial Revolution, it became obvious to administrators and many teachers that when their classes and schools grew way larger, they needed a more efficient way to communicate a child's knowledge.
00:05:17
Speaker
Up until this point, even though grades were used on these monthly report cards, there was still a lot of very detailed feedback and what really could be seen as essentially a growth mindset in schools, as in they saw students who could be improved month to month.
00:05:31
Speaker
And this starts to switch in the late 1800s when there's a push to standardized grades.
00:05:37
Speaker
There's more and more colleges that are popping up, and they all want to have the same universal message.
00:05:42
Speaker
An A at one school is the same as it is at another.
00:05:45
Speaker
This really not only drastically changed how teachers were providing feedback and looking at students month to month, which eventually moves to semesters or even yearly, but it also changes how curriculum works because classes need to be relatively the same, how schedules look, and just really in general your school culture, the rules start to look the same across every single school.
00:06:06
Speaker
It was very much focused on efficiency.
00:06:07
Speaker
And this also correlated with the creation of the college entrance examination board in 1899, which if you're wondering is the same college board today,
00:06:15
Speaker
Which has been criticized for doing a lot of the same stuff.
00:06:17
Speaker
A lot of schools do the exact same thing in order to meet the needs of the College Board or SAT or any kind of major testing organization.
00:06:25
Speaker
When this massive growth of schools occurs, there's a lot of confusion and a lot of uncertainty.
00:06:31
Speaker
For example,
00:06:32
Speaker
If all these schools are doing different things and we're trying to find ways to make them all the same, what happens, let's say, if students are all taking different classes?
00:06:40
Speaker
Let's say one student's an advanced course or one student's taking three arts classes.
00:06:45
Speaker
What are we going to do?
00:06:46
Speaker
Well, one, we make the majority of the classes are the same.
00:06:49
Speaker
Two, we try to figure out, are some classes worth more than others?
00:06:54
Speaker
And one attempt at this was called Harvard's Book of Comparative Merit.
00:06:58
Speaker
which is literally a book that tells you what classes are better than others, which is when, in our opinion, things start to get a little bit disarrayed.
00:07:07
Speaker
Ultimately, that book was thrown out because it was seen as far too subjective, but we still have a lot of those elements in today's education system.
00:07:15
Speaker
Sir Ken Robinson talks a lot about this in his Creative Schools TED Talk, but essentially there's no denying to any teacher or student in school that we see STEM classes at the top, followed by humanities, and then the arts.
00:07:28
Speaker
There's definitely a hierarchy of what classes are important.
00:07:31
Speaker
I mean, if you go and take an AP class, at most schools that's on a 5.0 scale, whereas if you take a regular class, including the arts, that's on a 4.0 scale.
00:07:40
Speaker
So if I want to have the highest possible grade and the highest possible class rank, I should take all AP classes, which may eliminate my ability to take a class in the arts or it's the class I'm interested in in an elective.
00:07:51
Speaker
So from the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, which is when that Finkelstein quote came from,
00:07:56
Speaker
There was a really big divide manifesting between those who were doubling down on the standardization of grading and those who were starting to question and just reject the practice altogether.
00:08:06
Speaker
In 1911, an observer at the University of Missouri wrote, quote, "...the grade has in more than one sense a cash value, and if there is no uniformity of grading in an institution, that means directly the values are stolen from some and undeservedly presented to others."
00:08:23
Speaker
In other words, it's an early 1900s look at what could be seen as almost the grade inflation argument, where someone would say, well, how is this student any better than this other student?
00:08:34
Speaker
How can we decide which kid is the best, quote unquote, based off of their grade average?
00:08:41
Speaker
So that's the doubling down on grading side, the people that are trying to make grades even more objective as if they could be really that objective at all.
00:08:50
Speaker
On the other side, you have people like the economist Thorisdn Velben, who said in 1918, the system of academic grading and credit resistlessly bends more and more of current instruction
Impact of Grading on Education
00:09:01
Speaker
to its mechanical tests and progressively sterilizes all personal initiative and ambition that comes within its sweep.
00:09:09
Speaker
Which is very similar to the argument of progressive educators today.
00:09:13
Speaker
The more and more we see harsh,
00:09:16
Speaker
grading initiatives or what some people call common sense reforms or back to basics, which in other words means going back to just saying these are the standards that matter and let's do those, the more trivial education becomes because we're only focused on four core subject areas and those classes are very traditional and not a lot of room is placed on a student actually learning.
00:09:37
Speaker
It's more on them just being given a certain set of information and taking it with them.
00:09:41
Speaker
There's not a lot of focus on all the other things of education that are important, like figuring out what you care about or all the things that you were interested in before you went to school.
00:09:50
Speaker
Why can't we develop those?
00:09:52
Speaker
And really, my favorite quote from this era was in 1935.
00:09:54
Speaker
It was a teacher.
00:09:56
Speaker
She wrote in this journal, and the source is unnamed.
00:10:00
Speaker
She said that she rejected report cards.
00:10:03
Speaker
She saw those against report cards as a challenge from a group of young crusaders who have chosen to be known as the intrinsic clan against the entire family whose surname is extrinsic.
00:10:16
Speaker
Of course, this is exactly the same as it is today.
00:10:19
Speaker
You still have the vast majority of educators and really people in general because it's a part of our educational culture who see the extrinsic motivation of grades as very important.
00:10:29
Speaker
For example,
00:10:30
Speaker
Why would my kids do anything if I don't give them any kind of grade?
00:10:34
Speaker
Which essentially is saying what you're doing isn't inherently valuable to a kid because kids would do it if they thought it was valuable.
00:10:40
Speaker
It's only valuable because that grade exists.
00:10:43
Speaker
Versus those of us who are more progressive who see intrinsic motivation as the key goal.
00:10:49
Speaker
A student will learn something just because it's important.
00:10:52
Speaker
The reason why this stuff resonates so much is that a lot of progressive education is based on the thoughts of John Dewey
00:10:58
Speaker
And, wouldn't you know, John Dewey was the writer of the early 1900s who influenced most of this thought.
00:11:04
Speaker
As you're probably aware, John Dewey published many of his works on experiential education in the early 1900s.
00:11:09
Speaker
But, as you obviously know, grades aren't going anywhere from there.
00:11:13
Speaker
Not only did teachers of the early 1900s see grades as an important extrinsic motivator, but when schools kept expanding and when more and more universities were built, grades still were the most practical way to communicate what was going on.
00:11:27
Speaker
So you have someone like V.L.
00:11:29
Speaker
Beggs, who was a critic of report cards, especially in elementary school, who said in 1936 that, quote, conclude that a school's most important contribution to a child's education is recorded on that card.
00:11:43
Speaker
Again, we see in the early 1900s the same issues that we see today.
00:11:47
Speaker
People heavily concerned that people are only cared about that extrinsic reward of a grade and what that grade means rather than the actual important part, which is learning.
00:11:57
Speaker
And again, we see the value that teachers and administration sees in these grades has nothing to do with learning as much as it does with, one, forcing people to learn something, but two, and this is probably the bigger one,
00:12:10
Speaker
easily communicating what's going on.
00:12:11
Speaker
When you have a system that's rapidly expanding, it makes sense that you want a simple way to organize all this.
00:12:17
Speaker
We see that pushed even further in the 1910s onward when you start to see the IQ test being used in the military and then later the SAT test, which is modeled after the IQ test.
Issues with Standardized Testing
00:12:27
Speaker
And you see more standardization in terms of objective grading as well as objective tests.
00:12:32
Speaker
People wanted to find ways to measure intelligence based off mathematical principles or rationalist principles.
00:12:39
Speaker
Of course, there's a lot of problems with this mindset because not only is it very difficult, if not impossible, to measure someone's intelligence based off of rational thought because there's so many issues with what questions you're asking and so on and so forth.
00:12:51
Speaker
But there's also a lot of very big problems when it comes to the racist observations that came out of this.
00:12:58
Speaker
For example, the founder of the IQ test had a lot of basis in the eugenics movement.
00:13:05
Speaker
Again, as we move into the 1930s and 1940s, we see a lot of educators push back against the objectiveness of grading, but grading is still seen as a normalized practice, and it's just seen as the best effective way to communicate anything.
00:13:18
Speaker
Now, there are alternatives that people try.
00:13:20
Speaker
For example, in 1936, there was a small group of teachers who attempted this thing called a narrative letter.
00:13:26
Speaker
It was where they sat down together and they wrote a really long letter about a student's progress to parents, and it was formatted using the standardized form.
00:13:34
Speaker
What was really interesting from it is that they reflected and they said the letter, quote, would become as meaningless and as stereotyped as the subject marks they replaced.
00:13:44
Speaker
And later they said that the letters would become false standards of value among our pupils.
00:13:50
Speaker
In other words, similar to the alternative grading methods of today, no matter what system you replace grades with, as long as you are still assessing students based on some form of standardization where they are ranked against each other,
00:14:02
Speaker
Students will only value that ranking instead of what they're learning.
00:14:06
Speaker
A little bit more here as we come into the modern age, moving up through the 1960s.
00:14:10
Speaker
Almost every single college takes on grades, but that doesn't mean you don't see more and more critics as well.
00:14:15
Speaker
You see the old arguments from restoring intrinsic motivation from the 1800s, as well as this new, almost worrisome thing that was warned about in the late 1800s, which is the increasingly low levels of social and emotional well-being among students in relationship to grades.
00:14:33
Speaker
As in, as colleges become deeply more and more competitive, students are more anxious and nervous and worried about their grades, which was not really the case before this time when college wasn't necessity or at least seen as one.
00:14:48
Speaker
So now we're kind of coming full circle.
00:14:51
Speaker
We're faced with the challenge of replacing the system, which really isn't that old.
00:14:54
Speaker
Our argument is that we should return to those original feedback systems of the early 1800s, restoring intrinsic motivation to education, basically ditching grading altogether.
00:15:04
Speaker
However, we have to also look at all these historical problems that came along the way.
00:15:08
Speaker
For example, how do we compare one student to another?
00:15:12
Speaker
I mean, we have colleges that are always going to have some kind of competitive education.
00:15:16
Speaker
gains for admission, or at least we can assume that.
00:15:18
Speaker
How are we going to rank them?
00:15:20
Speaker
Should we?
00:15:21
Speaker
And then what about teachers?
00:15:22
Speaker
How can they possibly give detailed feedback to all these students without giving them a summary in the form of a grade, especially when their class sizes are so large?
00:15:30
Speaker
In summary, the debate of the last 150 years is essentially the exact same as it's always been.
00:15:35
Speaker
Do we accept grading as a measurement of student learning and find ways to make it increasingly objective, or is that possible?
00:15:42
Speaker
Or do we find a way to communicate knowledge without ever assigning a grade?
00:15:46
Speaker
Our stance is obviously on the latter, and I'm going to share a lot of research and data to why soon.
00:15:51
Speaker
But first, I want to make a note about how recent this is.
00:15:54
Speaker
Not only was grading really developed towards the end of the 19th century, but it was really all not ever agreed upon.
00:16:03
Speaker
The strong argument of why grades were needed was more a point of simplicity and necessity for the timeframe.
00:16:09
Speaker
As schools expanded, they needed something quick and easy to do.
00:16:13
Speaker
The goal of why they did grading wasn't necessarily because they thought it was best practice, although it was for some, but more so because it was just the easiest thing to do, and as the system grew larger, it became harder and harder to change.
00:16:25
Speaker
That newness, that recognition to how recent it is, is so important to this discussion, because the more recent the institutionalized or systemic change was made, the easier it is to change it.
00:16:37
Speaker
The longer we wait, the more and more it becomes commonplace,
00:16:40
Speaker
It seems like many of the progressive voices were silenced, or at least marginalized, because the main system, the apparatus, was just so sadly obvious to everyone.
00:16:56
Speaker
Now let's move into the modern day, and what backs up everything that I'm saying here.
00:17:02
Speaker
It's my view that grading is a practice that hurts kids.
00:17:05
Speaker
It makes them demotivated if they're doing poorly, and also worrying, it makes them motivated towards an extrinsic goal rather than learning.
00:17:13
Speaker
It seems like most of us succeed in spite of how grades are given, rather than achieving because we're achieving high grades.
00:17:21
Speaker
And it's a situation that I'm sure most people are familiar with in their classrooms.
00:17:24
Speaker
It happens to me all the time before I adopt a grade-less learning.
00:17:27
Speaker
So I would hand back a student a lot of notes on their project.
00:17:31
Speaker
At the top, there would be some form of grade, or even the last page, it doesn't matter.
00:17:35
Speaker
The student would search for where that grade is, let's say a B, they put it in their backpack, and that was kind of it.
00:17:41
Speaker
They might take a quick glance at their feedback, but it really wasn't all that important because what they really wanted was to see how they did on the assignment overall.
00:17:48
Speaker
Now, let's say a student gets a D, and let's say they really worked hard on it.
00:17:53
Speaker
Not only does a student give up, which is worrisome because we did nothing to actually help them, but many of them get much worse.
00:18:02
Speaker
They might make a comment about how useless school is and they just kind of stay in the exact same place.
00:18:06
Speaker
And there's a correlation between those who achieve low grades, getting lower and lower grades over the course of the year, as well as just dropping out of school altogether.
00:18:15
Speaker
And the system seems to almost support that.
00:18:18
Speaker
I mean, if you constantly get Ds, there's nothing really motivating you to do any better.
00:18:23
Speaker
And I'm sure you could make the argument, well, they should just push harder and work harder.
00:18:27
Speaker
That way their grades get better.
00:18:29
Speaker
But if you're constantly working hard and getting a 60% while all of your peers are doing much better than you, there's no denying that's not going to really make you want to do better, especially in adolescence when the most important thing to many of us is how we compare with others and how people see
Grades and Student Motivation
00:18:46
Speaker
us.
00:18:46
Speaker
And then also there's the student who always gets A's.
00:18:49
Speaker
That student might be motivated to always achieve an A, but it becomes really the only important part of their worldview.
00:18:56
Speaker
If they don't get an A, a lot of times they'll go into a frenzy and they'll demand that you change it.
00:19:00
Speaker
They're so obsessed.
00:19:01
Speaker
They'll cry if they'll get a B. And many parents support this almost.
00:19:05
Speaker
They punish their kids if they don't get all A's.
00:19:07
Speaker
The problem with that is, is that it's hurting who they are.
00:19:11
Speaker
It's not making them happy anymore.
00:19:12
Speaker
They only care about extrinsic motivation.
00:19:14
Speaker
There's no intrinsic motivation left.
00:19:16
Speaker
You know, these students, they don't necessarily even care about the content.
00:19:19
Speaker
They only care about the gray at the end.
00:19:22
Speaker
And if our goal is to restore intrinsic motivation, seeking to learn just to learn, which is what humans naturally do, we're going to inspire that lifelong love of learning rather than diminish it.
00:19:32
Speaker
You can see this replicated in pretty much any type of learning, whether that be, you know, many kids like to read, but the second a new reading program provides them, let's say, with pizza after reading five books and they take a quiz, they become purely focused on eating that pizza at Pizza Hut rather than really caring at all about what they read.
00:19:49
Speaker
You'll find students who used to read books all the time, and now they just skin through books and take simple quizzes online through, like, the Accelerated Reader program.
00:19:57
Speaker
They really lost any desire to read just because they enjoyed reading.
00:20:02
Speaker
Again, it's all about that reward.
00:20:03
Speaker
Or you'll find, let's say, students who enter school with a lot of interests, but they're silenced and they just kind of stop asking questions because those questions aren't going to be on the test.
00:20:13
Speaker
Why would I waste, quote unquote, waste time by learning about something I'm interested in when I'm not going to get a grade for it?
00:20:21
Speaker
And there's so much research that supports this notion.
00:20:24
Speaker
It nauseates me.
00:20:26
Speaker
I don't want to imply that research doesn't have any faults, obviously some things are hard to replicate,
00:20:32
Speaker
And you can't measure with data a lot of things that make learning important.
00:20:36
Speaker
For example, a lifelong love of learning is hard to measure.
00:20:38
Speaker
It's very subjective or what makes someone happy.
00:20:40
Speaker
But there is a lot of hardback data that shows why grading doesn't work regardless.
00:20:46
Speaker
And I want to give you some research studies in the last 30 years or so quickly to give an overview.
00:20:51
Speaker
Probably the most important one and the one that's referenced many times is in 1987, which is then followed up in 1988, repeated through other various studies from other
00:20:58
Speaker
researchers.
00:20:59
Speaker
The original was by Ruth Butler, and she found that students have by far the highest motivation when they were only given feedback for their assignments, as in they worked way harder and learned way more when they only received substantiated feedback.
00:21:13
Speaker
That was followed by people who received feedback with a grade, and then in last was just a grade with no feedback at all.
00:21:20
Speaker
In other words, students learn more when they didn't receive grades.
00:21:23
Speaker
Then, in 1991, another researcher named Hall Beck found that students who had a quote-unquote grading orientation, which meant they cared primarily about their grades, actually had lower GPAs and, more importantly, lower social and emotional well-being than those who had a learning orientation, which meant they just wanted to learn new things.
00:21:44
Speaker
So ironically, those who were more extrinsically motivated by grades actually performed worse in school than those who just wanted to learn without grades.
00:21:54
Speaker
Then, in 1993, we have Adeline Moeller, who found that when students were taking a test, they were not more any motivated for that test when they knew grades were involved.
00:22:04
Speaker
They took multiple groups of people.
00:22:06
Speaker
One group of people knew that the test was going to be graded.
00:22:08
Speaker
The other group of people didn't think the test was going to be graded.
00:22:10
Speaker
And the students that took the test, knowing that there was going to be a grade, actually weren't any more motivated.
00:22:15
Speaker
Again, which rejects that notion that we have to have grades in order for kids to do something.
00:22:21
Speaker
In 1996, John Krumboldt outlined how the competition that arises from grading practices made students lose their sense of safety in the classroom.
00:22:29
Speaker
And as we all know, safety is widely regarded as the most basic need from learning.
00:22:34
Speaker
When students felt increasingly competitive towards one another, they felt judged by their peers, and when they did poorly or felt judged, they did not feel safe, and therefore they shut down.
00:22:43
Speaker
Eric Anderman, in 1997, researched that when students saw the test as a measurement for incentives,
00:22:49
Speaker
they were more likely to cheat than those who saw it as a method for improvement.
00:22:53
Speaker
And that shouldn't be shocking to anyone.
00:22:55
Speaker
If you know that a lot is at stake and it's very stressful, you're going to be much more likely to cheat at that than if you just feel like it's a way to make yourself better.
00:23:04
Speaker
Then we got in 1998 Gary Nottriello, who found, but there's a correlation between those who received low grades and those who stayed in school.
00:23:12
Speaker
In theory, and this was what Horace Mann proposed in the 1800s,
00:23:16
Speaker
Monthly report cards were meant to show a growth mindset.
00:23:19
Speaker
You would get a grade, you knew you weren't doing too well, and the teacher would do extra things in order to make sure you did better.
00:23:25
Speaker
But that's not how grades work now.
00:23:27
Speaker
Even though that might be the teacher's intention, there's no denying that when a student consistently gets low grades, that doesn't really propel them to work any harder.
00:23:34
Speaker
In fact, we know from all this research that it makes them work much less.
00:23:37
Speaker
In fact, to jump ahead here for a second, 2015 Astrid Portheis found that students who received a low grade on their semester or halfway report card
00:23:46
Speaker
They had consistently lower scores in the second half of the year, showcasing even more demotivation.
00:23:52
Speaker
If grades worked the way they were supposed to, you would assume that they would actually receive at least marginally higher grades.
00:23:57
Speaker
Going back in 2008, Anastasia Lipnevik replicated Butler's study, the motivation without grades component, and proved it.
00:24:06
Speaker
Again, they found that without grades, students had much higher motivation.
00:24:10
Speaker
In 2011, Caroline Palfrey
00:24:12
Speaker
did multiple experiments and showed that students when placed with a project that did not have a grade actually performed better than students who were placed on a project with a grade.
00:24:20
Speaker
And kind of along the exact same lines in 2015, Anne-Sophie Hayek found that groups were less cooperative and not willing to share as much when they knew they would receive a contribution grade.
00:24:32
Speaker
In other words, when someone walked into a group and they knew they were going to be judged by their peers and receive a grade, they were less likely to share information, which seems very counterintuitive, but again, it gets into that competitive judging aspect of your peers.
00:24:47
Speaker
You don't want to appear stupid, or at least stupid based off of the grading practice, which again is a problem with how we grade people if we're labeling people as stupid if they get low grades.
00:24:56
Speaker
And then finally, in 2014, Karine Sochal found that competitive grading practices impacted the psyche of girl students in science classes, as historically those tests were seen as favored towards male students.
00:25:07
Speaker
Male students always were kind of seen as the scientists and mathematics people, and we still see that problem today, despite some ways to fix that.
00:25:16
Speaker
And girls actually perform worse on these tests knowing that, when they found that there was a competitive grade associated with it.
00:25:23
Speaker
This phenomenon is really well explained in the book, if you have a chance to check it out, Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, who goes into how race and gender and many other facets that one feels judged by actually makes them perform worse in many areas, even though they might be on equal or even greater footing.
00:25:40
Speaker
So that's just a rough overview of, let's say, 15 studies of the hundreds that exist.
00:25:46
Speaker
There are so many, not only from recent years, but also the 1800s and early 1900s.
00:25:51
Speaker
And the exact same themes are in every single one of them.
00:25:55
Speaker
Grades hurt a student's interest in learning.
00:25:57
Speaker
And at best, it seems like grades motivate high achieving students for the wrong reasons.
00:26:02
Speaker
If our goal is to engage every student and make them better at what they do,
00:26:07
Speaker
it seems completely counterintuitive to issue them a grade telling them how they're not doing well, because it completely destroys any element for them to do better.
00:26:15
Speaker
The system works to make the gap larger between those who are performing well and those who don't.
00:26:20
Speaker
Those who fall further behind increasingly become demotivated, and those who do well basically stay at the top.
00:26:27
Speaker
And it's not like those at the top are really doing that well.
00:26:29
Speaker
You know, they might have higher grades, but all A's does not mean everything is okay.
00:26:34
Speaker
They have a tendency for higher anxiety rates,
00:26:37
Speaker
They have a tendency towards lower social and emotional well-being.
00:26:41
Speaker
And they also tend to have fewer and fewer student interests outside of school.
00:26:45
Speaker
You know, that typical all-A student is programmed in the system.
00:26:48
Speaker
They're only good at following orders, meeting parameters, and listening.
00:26:52
Speaker
They don't really know why they're doing what they're doing.
00:26:54
Speaker
They don't really explore their passions.
00:26:56
Speaker
They lose their imagination.
00:26:57
Speaker
They lose their creative thinking skills.
00:26:59
Speaker
And most importantly, they're just not as happy as they should be.
00:27:03
Speaker
Schools are meant to be places of learning.
00:27:06
Speaker
And it shouldn't be a charged statement to say that students should want to learn at school.
00:27:11
Speaker
And it's not that people don't naturally want to learn.
00:27:13
Speaker
Any small child can't wait to explore anything they can't get their hands on, whether that be books or experiments, playing with their friends, whatever that is.
00:27:21
Speaker
It seems like the longer that they're in school, the more they just go through the motions.
00:27:24
Speaker
And grades do play a big part in that.
00:27:27
Speaker
I don't want to imply that getting rid of grades is going to completely solve this issue, we'll talk about those more later on future podcasts, but they are one of the practices that seem the most plausible to change.
00:27:37
Speaker
So now let's move into what we can do differently.
Innovative Assessment Strategies
00:27:43
Speaker
I'm going to introduce a few things that we can do right now to improve assessment.
00:27:48
Speaker
Each of these involve a risk depending on where you're teaching at, and I'll talk about that in a second.
00:27:52
Speaker
These assessment techniques are outlined thoroughly with links to learn more in our free resource available on our website, which is called Grading Is Not Equal to Assessment.
00:28:00
Speaker
If we're not going to place grades on students anymore, that doesn't mean we're not going to assess them.
00:28:05
Speaker
Obviously, the teacher doesn't just do nothing at all if they're not giving out grades.
00:28:08
Speaker
We have to give them substantiated feedback.
00:28:11
Speaker
That becomes very difficult when you have very large class sizes or you have a lot of content to cover.
00:28:15
Speaker
So first off, and this is obvious and it's easy to say, not necessarily to do,
00:28:21
Speaker
But part of it is going to be giving up some of those standards.
00:28:23
Speaker
It's ridiculous to think that first off, all those standards are important, but also that we could get through all of them within the year.
00:28:29
Speaker
If we give up more of those standards and we teach just a fraction of what those things are, that will allow us to easily give more substantiated feedback, to remediate on work, and to really help students actually learn something.
00:28:43
Speaker
Now, in terms of actually giving feedback,
00:28:45
Speaker
A lot of times we put way too much weight on teachers' shoulders.
00:28:48
Speaker
The teacher is doing way too much work, whether that be planning or grading or assessing.
00:28:54
Speaker
So why not put more power in students' hands when it comes to learning and taking charge of it?
00:28:59
Speaker
For example, self-assessment is by far one of the most efficient means to learn how to do something.
00:29:05
Speaker
In fact, that dates back to the early 1900s with John Dewey.
00:29:08
Speaker
He came up with experiential education, and the core tenet of experiential education is
00:29:13
Speaker
is reflecting on what you've done.
00:29:15
Speaker
He actually said that it isn't the experience that makes you learn.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's the reflection after the experience where you look at how you got there, what you did, and everything you took out of it and how that informs you.
00:29:27
Speaker
That's when you actually learn.
00:29:29
Speaker
So when we give teachers all of the grading or assessing to do, and they write down what a student could do better,
00:29:36
Speaker
The student is missing that valuable part of reflecting on what they did.
00:29:41
Speaker
And it's not just what they did well and what they did wrong.
00:29:43
Speaker
It's also why they did what they did.
00:29:45
Speaker
And that's the big part.
00:29:47
Speaker
And finding more and more ways to model and show that is important.
00:29:50
Speaker
We have a lot of research in that document.
00:29:52
Speaker
Also, in addition to self-reflection, there's peer reflection, which is the exact same thing.
00:29:57
Speaker
You're still self-reflecting on what you did, but you're also looking at someone else's work.
00:30:01
Speaker
You not only have to look at what you did and why you did it, you have to look at other people and what they did and why they did that.
00:30:06
Speaker
And again, it's another way to actually learn from what you're doing and take charge for what you're doing and learn for yourself, inspiring that lifelong love of learning.
00:30:15
Speaker
And obviously, teachers can provide feedback from time to time.
00:30:18
Speaker
But that's really just the start.
00:30:19
Speaker
If we're going to eliminate grading, we have to really completely change how we assess.
00:30:25
Speaker
We still need authentic formalized assessment, and we still need to push students to succeed.
00:30:30
Speaker
But if we're going to push students to succeed without grading them, that means they have to intrinsically want to succeed.
00:30:36
Speaker
So we need to find ways to promote skills that are important to the 21st century that everyone naturally wants to improve upon.
00:30:42
Speaker
For example, creativity or self-sufficiency.
00:30:45
Speaker
And there's a few of those that come directly to mind.
00:30:48
Speaker
The first of which is a student-led conference.
00:30:50
Speaker
A student-led conference takes place where normally a parent-teacher conference would take place.
00:30:54
Speaker
But instead of a teacher just rolling through all the things a student can improve upon, which again is that traditional notion of grading, a student sits down, which they've prepared for weeks for, and presents on everything that they've learned.
00:31:06
Speaker
Then the family,
00:31:07
Speaker
and the teacher both provide feedback on what they could do to get better.
00:31:10
Speaker
And there's no better way to relate to a student than having the parents there because the parents know way more than the teacher does about that student.
00:31:17
Speaker
And as a result, everyone learns and everyone knows what to do going forward.
00:31:21
Speaker
And the student is way more likely to reflect on that because they're the ones presenting what they did.
00:31:25
Speaker
There's no secondhand information.
00:31:27
Speaker
Now, building upon that is a formal presentation.
00:31:29
Speaker
Instead of taking a test or a bunch of quizzes, why don't you just present at the end of the semester or the end of the year what you learned on?
00:31:36
Speaker
There could be checkpoints built in where various people give feedback on what you're doing and tell you how to get better.
00:31:41
Speaker
And then at the end, you present to those same people on how you've learned.
00:31:45
Speaker
And in a perfect world, that would be parents, other students, a bunch of teachers, community members that could give feedback on how a specific kid is doing.
00:31:55
Speaker
It's looking at a student from that mindset of growth, seeing how they track over time, not standardizing them in any way.
00:32:03
Speaker
They're learning just for them.
00:32:04
Speaker
Finally, the last idea, and this is the one that's closest to me, is a portfolio.
00:32:09
Speaker
It can be combined with any of those other assessment techniques, but it's just finding ways to either take a few of your content standards or perhaps a few of your skills, which is what I prefer, for example, like a creativity portfolio.
00:32:20
Speaker
Students take what they've done throughout the year, they add it to the portfolio, they make it better and better, they choose their best works from that portfolio, and then they share it.
00:32:28
Speaker
It's proof and demonstration of what they've done, they can see how they've done over time,
00:32:33
Speaker
And there's a lot of cool apps, for example, Seesaw, that allow you to do this very easily.
00:32:36
Speaker
Seesaw is a phone app, a website app that allows you to upload your work.
00:32:41
Speaker
And it almost is like Instagram.
00:32:43
Speaker
You can just scroll through it and see everything that's going on.
00:32:46
Speaker
Parents can see that as well, which is great.
00:32:48
Speaker
Also, portfolios are a place that higher education is going, which I'll talk about in a second.
00:32:53
Speaker
Now, I said before that each of these requires risk.
00:32:56
Speaker
You know, there's no denying that in many school districts, moving away from grades is meant with resistance.
00:33:01
Speaker
And I really like the author and education reformer, Deborah Myers.
00:33:06
Speaker
She describes the people that she hires, as well as teachers that she likes, as people who practice creative noncompliance.
00:33:13
Speaker
It's essentially the teachers that are willing to pull the wool over administrators' and districts' eyes.
00:33:18
Speaker
They say one thing and kind of do another.
00:33:21
Speaker
And you know what?
00:33:21
Speaker
I don't want to elicit deceit.
00:33:23
Speaker
But we have to recognize that rebelling isn't always a bad thing.
00:33:27
Speaker
If we know these problems exist, the solution is going to have to come from within, from educators, because the ones who are benefiting from these grading schemes are those organizing all of it that want the most simple solution.
00:33:39
Speaker
Those are the top.
00:33:40
Speaker
So why don't we mess with the system a little bit?
00:33:43
Speaker
If your district requires grades, why don't you just let students assess themselves, let them give their own grades?
00:33:48
Speaker
And I'm sure you might say, well, students are just going to give themselves all high grades.
00:33:52
Speaker
Yeah, they will.
00:33:53
Speaker
Probably.
00:33:54
Speaker
If we know that grading isn't really doing anything for them and it's just demotivating, why not just let them do it?
00:34:00
Speaker
You still get a grade that you can put down.
00:34:02
Speaker
Better yet, it's the one that I use.
00:34:04
Speaker
We still have to report grades.
00:34:05
Speaker
I just tell students at the beginning of the year they're going to get an A. And I'm not going to pretend like this doesn't get you in trouble.
00:34:11
Speaker
Okay, parents are going to say that you're not getting their kids ready for college.
00:34:15
Speaker
Students might say that you're the easy teacher because you're not giving them as many tests or they're getting an A for being there.
00:34:20
Speaker
Administration might be concerned about your bell curve or what this is doing to students.
00:34:25
Speaker
But regardless, you're going to find that students enjoy your class.
00:34:28
Speaker
You'll probably find they learn a lot more.
00:34:31
Speaker
They're going to back you up and it's all worth it in the end.
00:34:34
Speaker
It might get you in a lot of trouble.
00:34:35
Speaker
It could potentially lead to you being fired.
00:34:38
Speaker
But I, as well as you, didn't go into this job to accept that school sucks and that when we see things that we know are wrong, we just have to deal with it.
00:34:47
Speaker
We're education professionals.
00:34:49
Speaker
We have degrees, we study learning, we're willing to listen to some random dude talk on a podcast for 30 minutes about grades.
00:34:56
Speaker
We care about students, we care about children, and we care about education.
00:35:00
Speaker
And every situation is different, but we should be able to stand up for students using research-backed practice.
00:35:05
Speaker
And it's hard to take a small step on this.
00:35:07
Speaker
A lot of people are trying to find new ways to issue grades.
00:35:11
Speaker
For example, having mastery as a percentage and saying mastery or non-mastery, or having a 21st century skills rubric where you get a four, three, two, or one based off different skills.
00:35:21
Speaker
And it's not like these aren't well-intentioned, but the fact remains, even if you try to hide it, the problem isn't giving out the A or the B. The problem is that this is an extrinsic reward.
00:35:33
Speaker
It could be a four, it could be mastery, it could be pass, it could be an A. It doesn't matter.
00:35:37
Speaker
As long as they're shooting for something that isn't just learning and they're shooting for that extrinsic motivator, you're going to run into the exact same problems.
00:35:45
Speaker
Therefore, taking on the cause of just going gradeless altogether is really what's worth it.
00:35:49
Speaker
Finding ways to make this work in your classroom, or better yet, finding other teachers who agree with you and doing it all together, helps you make a framework for helping students achieve success and changing the system altogether.
00:36:01
Speaker
And I'm going to highlight again, it's a risk.
00:36:03
Speaker
But again, we went into education not as mindless grading robots,
00:36:07
Speaker
not as people who constantly get attacked for their professionalism or their accountability or their expertise, not to become people who just go with the flow and eventually just get so bogged down that we just accept the fact we'll eventually retire.
00:36:18
Speaker
We did this because we enjoy teaching and we try what's best.
00:36:28
Speaker
Now, thankfully, there is change on the horizon, real change that's going to change the education system.
00:36:34
Speaker
It's a lot changing.
00:36:35
Speaker
And I encourage you to promote the ideas I'm about to share with you to others, especially administration, to show that gradeless learning isn't just best research, but it also has a lot of reflections on where higher education is going.
00:36:46
Speaker
There's a lot of colleges that already accept going gradeless.
00:36:49
Speaker
They don't have GPAs or don't care about class rank.
00:36:52
Speaker
They don't care about standardized testing.
00:36:54
Speaker
But more importantly, there's a push towards portfolios in schools.
00:36:58
Speaker
And we're going to have Tony Wagner on next week, who's one of the contributors to the Mastery Transcript Consortium.
00:37:04
Speaker
as well as a representative eventually from the mastery transcript consortium.
00:37:08
Speaker
And they're probably the leaders right now and getting portfolios into schools.
00:37:12
Speaker
And it's really cool.
00:37:13
Speaker
I encourage you to check it out.
00:37:14
Speaker
Seriously.
00:37:15
Speaker
I was floored by it by going to mastery.org.
00:37:18
Speaker
They're an organization, a nonprofit who's trying to work.
00:37:22
Speaker
And so far I've been successful by, by changing college admissions and offering an alternative where there's no standardized testing and no grades.
00:37:29
Speaker
And instead, there's this really cool looking portfolio that students submit that they've worked throughout high school on that they submit to colleges.
00:37:37
Speaker
And what's really important is the transcript is adamantly against any kind of numerical or graded score.
Alternatives to Traditional Grading
00:37:44
Speaker
It's just a bunch of skills that a district assigns to teachers or even the classroom assigns themselves.
00:37:51
Speaker
where they work towards specific goals.
00:37:53
Speaker
Like let's say creatively solving a problem could be one of the skills.
00:37:57
Speaker
A student uploads proof of that on this website and it's standardized at least to the point where a college admissions counselor can know what the different skills are and look through them.
00:38:06
Speaker
It's a way to meld together some form of standardization so that colleges are all familiar with the process while still really radically transforming the system.
00:38:15
Speaker
Imagine for a second that colleges no longer care about standardized testing and they use these portfolios.
00:38:21
Speaker
You no longer have all that time ate up test prepping.
00:38:24
Speaker
Instead, what schools are going to have to do is teach students these skills that they're going to need to do well in the portfolio, which means more projects, more focus on skills, less focus on content, and just in general, way more focus on improving students rather than just issuing them some random score.
00:38:41
Speaker
So I encourage you to check out our next podcast with Tony Wagner when we'll talk more about that.
00:38:46
Speaker
Before we conclude, I hope that this was informative.
00:38:48
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed listening to this.
00:38:50
Speaker
I've never done a podcast like this.
00:38:51
Speaker
So please provide feedback if it has any point whatsoever to you.
00:38:55
Speaker
If it gains any traction, I'll do the same exact thing on a variety of different progressive ideas.
Conclusion and Call for Feedback
00:38:59
Speaker
I'm thinking mindfulness, restorative justice, critical pedagogy, democratic classroom, stuff like that.
00:39:04
Speaker
You can share your thoughts by tagging us on Twitter, which is at humrespro or H-U-M-R-E-S-P-R-O, or contact us on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:39:14
Speaker
Again, thank you for listening and joining me today.
00:39:16
Speaker
Let's restore humanity together.
00:39:23
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed this podcast.
00:39:25
Speaker
We want to connect with you and hear your thoughts.
00:39:27
Speaker
Follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Medium, and other social media, and be sure to check us out on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:39:34
Speaker
If you want to support us in our endeavor of starting a movement towards progressive ed through high-quality resources, consider supporting us on Patreon.
00:39:41
Speaker
Thanks again.