In my Facebook newsfeed today The New Media Consortium quoted Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, “forget your perfect offering” (image above) which meshed rather nicely with our connected courses twitter discussion on slow education – allowing learning to be messy and inefficient. Learning is less about mastering than it is about exploring and experiencing.
However the reality of teaching is that assessment drives the curriculum. If the mastery of skills, the perfect recall of facts, the achievement of standards, is what is assessed as a measure of the quality of the learning, then the curriculum is unlikely to foster learning through disordered experience. An emphasis on perfection condemns many students who have had a valuable learning experience to a feeling of failure. And while a person with high-self-esteem sees failure as an isolated event that indicates ‘‘I lack some ability or quality;’’ to a low-self-esteem person, failure means ‘‘I am a bad person’’
The most important aspect of assessment as part of the learning process is the feedback that the student takes from it. While feedback has come to be seen as the comments that the teacher writes on the paper, it is more than this. In the first week of first semester I ask students to think of something that they are good at, and to write down how they found out they were good at it. They discuss and modify their lists, and we then talk about how all of these things are feedback on their performance, and that only one of them is “An expert told me I was good at it.” They probably still place undue weight on my comments on their performance, thanks to the ‘system’, but they take on board comments from peers, compare their process and output with others, judge their work against published criteria, and evaluate what they now know that they didn’t know before.
Feedback, to be effective in supporting learning, needs to contain cues to improving the process, and be devoid of cues that that direct attention to the self. However when feedback is attached to, or in the form of, grades, then students are more likely to interpret the grade as an indicator of self-worth, and not take on board the comments.
So how to provide this feedback, in a process distinct from grading? Luckily we have the Interwebs. In the proud tradition of crowd sourcing, making assessable work public through blogs, wikis, and a wealth of other publication and curation tools allows both peers and total strangers to provide feedback. A comment from a well-known musician saying, “I like your analysis couldn’t have put it more clearly myself”, or an impressive number of re-blogged posts, or a couple of people pointing out factual error or correcting punctuation, have had a greater effect in convincing students that the important thing is to give it a go and improve things when you can, than all my carefully crafted comments attached to their graded essays.
Assessment has always been personal and private, which imbues it with an angst inducing gravitas. Blogging, or keeping a Pinterest board, or Horrifying tweets, re-casts assessment as a process of monitoring improvement brought about with the assistance of a range of mentors and critics.
The most important aspect of assessment as part of the learning process is the feedback that the student takes from it. While feedback has come to be seen as the comments that the teacher writes on the paper, it is more than this. In the first week of first semester I ask students to think of something that they are good at, and to write down how they found out they were good at it. They discuss and modify their lists, and we then talk about how all of these things are feedback on their performance, and that only one of them is “An expert told me I was good at it.” They probably still place undue weight on my comments on their performance, thanks to the ‘system’, but they take on board comments from peers, compare their process and output with others, judge their work against published criteria, and evaluate what they now know that they didn’t know before.
Feedback, to be effective in supporting learning, needs to contain cues to improving the process, and be devoid of cues that that direct attention to the self. However when feedback is attached to, or in the form of, grades, then students are more likely to interpret the grade as an indicator of self-worth, and not take on board the comments.
So how to provide this feedback, in a process distinct from grading? Luckily we have the Interwebs. In the proud tradition of crowd sourcing, making assessable work public through blogs, wikis, and a wealth of other publication and curation tools allows both peers and total strangers to provide feedback. A comment from a well-known musician saying, “I like your analysis couldn’t have put it more clearly myself”, or an impressive number of re-blogged posts, or a couple of people pointing out factual error or correcting punctuation, have had a greater effect in convincing students that the important thing is to give it a go and improve things when you can, than all my carefully crafted comments attached to their graded essays.
Assessment has always been personal and private, which imbues it with an angst inducing gravitas. Blogging, or keeping a Pinterest board, or Horrifying tweets, re-casts assessment as a process of monitoring improvement brought about with the assistance of a range of mentors and critics.
No comments:
Post a Comment