IF OUR GOAL IS TO HELP KIDS… “What are we trying to do? If our goal is to help kids become critical thinkers, lifelong learners who really enjoy thinking and reading, and playing with numbers and ideas; if we want to help them become good learners and good people who can create and sustain a functioning democracy, then education would look very different from the way it looks right now, at least in our culture. We would have to question the use of grades. What research finds is that when kids are trying to get good grades in school, three things tend to happen. “They begin to lose interest in the learning itself. Now the purpose is just to get a good grade, rather than to engage with the question or problem at hand. Second, they tend to think less deeply and retain knowledge for a shorter period of time compared to kids who don’t have any grades, and third, they tend to pick the easiest possible tasks. That’s not because they’re being lazy, it’s because they’re being rational. We tell kids we want to see a better report card; we want to see higher grades. Naturally they’ll pick the shortest book or the easiest project, because that maximizes the chance of achieving that goal. So, regardless of what you’re goal is, if you’re interested in assessing kids, and teachers and schools to see “Are we doing a good job here?,” you would never need tests in order to see whether kids are learning and where they need help, and you would never need grades to report the results of the evaluation.... [because] it’s the case that some of our deepest thinking kids just don’t do well on tests, and some kids who get great grades have never had an original idea in their lives.” Alfie Kohn, Education Theorist
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:48:00 +0000
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