Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant.
A lot of the time, I think grades and this obsession with having perfect grades makes students afraid of failure. In life, it is inevitable that you will fail at some point, so I think that this notion of having to achieve perfection does a disadvantage to preparing students for the real world.
A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related
I 100% agree with this. I don't believe that my ability to get a good grade on a test proves that I understand and remember the material. If I were to take the same test a month later, I would probably fail it because I am not retaining the information. I only truly retain information when I am able to fully understand the concept and when I find the information to be interesting.
In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.
I really appreciate this statement because, as a student, I do believe that at times my ability to learn has been hindered by my desire to succeed. There have been numerous times, in which, I simply memorize something for a brief period of time well enough to regurgitate the information on the test. But, this process prevents me from fully understanding and developing important concepts.
or example, a grade-oriented environment is associated with increased levels of cheating
I definitely agree with this statement. In a lot of my biology classes that have been competitive, I've seen quite a bit of cheating going on to secure good grades. While this is not okay on any level, it speaks to what a competitive environment will do to your morals.
Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
We have shifted to a society where students are only motivated by grades. Students are disengaged from learning and are driven only to receive an above satisfactory grade. Through this students have learned to just do an assignment for the sake of doing it, instead of actually trying to learn about the topic. I remember in my calculus class, a student told the professor "Only teach me what's going to be on the exam, and the additional stuff, don't worry about it". This just speaks to how grades have caused students to only care about them, which leaves them disengaged in the classroom.
Jeff Robbins, who has taught eighth-grade science in New Jersey for 15 years, concedes that “life was easier with grades” because they take so much less time than meaningful assessment.
Reading this quote in isolation annoys me and really speaks to the impact that grades have had on the education system. I think part of being an instructor is to be able to guide and mentor students to become better versions of themselves and well versed in the subject that they are teaching - that requires individualized, honest, and constructive feedback and shouldn't be considered a chore
Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.
This is very true - as a college student at a liberal arts university, when selecting divisional classes that are required to graduate, oftentimes we seek the "easiest" class as opposed to the class that provides the most mental stimulation
I was writing for a grade — I was no longer exploring for me.
Writing can be used as a form of self-expression and a means to communicate all of our ideas and inferences no matter how big or small. Grading hinders creativity, as views that we hold that go against the individual administering the grade limits our capacity to think beyond what is accepted by the professor
Suddenly all the joy was taken away.
Students in my #LIB100 class at Wake Forest University will be annotating and discussing this article. I hope our discussion of grades allows them all to find more joy in learning. :)
t’s regular human communication astride a new medium.
This is an important point to emphasize. I think that people overcomplicate communication via technology, and that people use the medium to communicate in a way they normally would not. I think that whether you are communicating face to face or screen to screen, communication is communication.
It would, in fact, be a mistake to think that what any of us do is digital. The endeavor of education—even outside Humanities fields—is human.
I agree with this idea. I think that no matter how much new technology is introduced, the core of teaching comes down to the teacher and the teacher's ability to interact effectively with the students. A bad teacher can't hide behind technology forever--at some point they will be exposed.
Plus, you could reuse the content again and again! Design the course once, teach it ad infinitum.
I disagree with this assumption that teachers would simply get lazy and continually reuse content. I don't think the reusing of content is enable by LMS. I think some teachers already reuse content, and that the choice to do so is dependent on the teacher. I don't think LMS changes this fact, or enables teachers any more than they already are.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues against the banking model, in which education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”
I think this is a very interesting analogy, that I've never thought of before. We are in a sense just being pumped up with knowledge from our professors in the education system. I believe this needs work though. Any ideas for improvements?
First, the ubiquity of the LMS must be dealt with.
Although LMS systems are used in all of my classes, I am lucky that it is only used as an administrative means to upload files and grades. The classroom doesn't seem to be affected by this system too much
but simply slotting your pre-written materials into an online framework and calling it a class is not interesting or sound pedagogy.
It implies a level of ignorance and causes teaching to become stagnant as there are no considerations made to the potential changes in preference that students may have to feel engaged in the course
learning management system
Learning management systems, if you're unfamiliar with that term, are systems like Sakai, Blackboard, or Canvas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system