The debate about grades goes on. Here is an interesting and one honest approach to grades covered in the NYT article A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean.


The key point is that UNC Chappel Hill has decided to publish the median grade for all students in a class along with the grade the individual student achieved for the course in the transcript. They are also considering publishing the standard deviations. This is certainly an honest approach to grades that boldly declares" It is not so important what you learn in this course so long as you test better than your peers!" And, of course, there are absolutely times in life in which you want to know, out of these 30 or 300 people, who can score the highest on a teacher-made curriculum test. Maybe there is a popular upper level course with only a few seats or maybe you want to award departmental honors for your best performers.

Clearly it says nothing about who really learned the material. With curving, it is possible that no one really knows what any intelligent person would consider a bare minimum for the course content. In the land of the ignorant, the neophyte may be king! Or if the teacher has done a good job teaching, the students have done a good job learning and the test is designed to test the full range of knowledge, the entire class may have achieved a great deal, though someone ends up with a D.

It is often said that no one wants a doctor who got a D in med school. Actually, if you normalized grades and forced a curve at a C average, then most everyone in med school would have less than an A average and most everyone's doctor would be a C student or lower. Many Harvard and Standford med school graduates would have a D average. Does this mean they are substandard doctors? Absolutely not, assuming that Stanford and Harvard have the discipline and will to flunk out those who really do not meet minimum requirements and that they have the integrity to graduate those students who do meet the requirements needed to become a doctor and truly help people. We continually confuse mastering a subject with identifying who is best in the subject.

Motivation in the 21st Century

Daniel Pink's newest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, presents the findings of social science and explores the large gap between theory and practice in most of our organizational and daily life, at work, at school, and in the community. Most of the motivation we experience in these settings is external, carrot-and-stick motivation. Do this and get a nice bonus. Don't do that or you will be fired, failed, or fined.

But that type of external motivation does not work well for the most important parts of life anymore, as not only a large body of empirical evidence shows, but also our daily experience. Designing highly creative new products, learning complex new skills, or building meaningful relationships with loved ones, clients, or your community clearly are incompatible with carrot-and-stick behavior. External motivators actually reduce intrinsic motivation, lower performance, crush creativity, and encourage short-term thinking and unethical behavior (think Enron and AIG).

Pink moves from showing the limited cases where external motivation works well, such as highly routine, boring, rote chores, such as an assembly line to demonstrating how 21st century work, learning, and life now depends more on creative and passionate engagement. He cites Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose as the key elements of intrinsic motivation, along with suggestions about how to re-tool our motivational systems.

Drive reads quickly, provokes thought, and provides some guidelines for improvement.

Voluntary Simplicity and Positive Psychology

Interesting article today in the NYT today on what has been called the Voluntary Simplicity movement. But Will It Make You Happy discusses the psychological benefits of having less, experiencing more, and strengthening social bonds. Buying fewer things, but planning, saving, and anticipating them seems to increase happiness. Purchases connected with leisure, fun, and family, such as sports equipment, backyard and family room supplements, and activities and games to play together increased happiness. And, most of all, shared friends and family experiences, such as vacations and events brought the most happiness. Some studies showed that too much money interefered with enjoying the simply pleasures of life.

Like everything else, there is more to be learned and certainly too little money, though it seems unneccessary to prove it, has also been shown to interfere with happiness. Composing a life is an art.

Hardly Surprising News about Stereotypes and Learning

Negative stereotypes shown to affect learning, not just performance, study finds. This study goes beyond the class work of Stanford's Claude Steele who found that simply filling out a blank for "Race" on a subject test depressed the scores of African Americans. Follow up studies found this effect true for women as well as different minorities on a variety of subject tests. This study investigated ability to learn precursor skills needed for higher order learning. Bottom line: stereotypes hurt.

Of What Value Is the Education of a Young Child?

Just started reading a great NYT article on the importance, economic and otherwise, of young children. The Case for the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher reports the results of a new study that goes beyond previous studies that indicate that the effect of high-quality early childhood education washes out of test score results by high school. The new study confirms the earlier result in terms of test scores, but also looks at broader economic measures of well-being, such as a child's health or adult earnings.

You Can See a Lot Just by Observing

Yogi Berra's famous malapropism takes on new meaning in learning and teaching science. Science really does begin with observation. Some recent work with a pre-kindergarten class that had become fascinated with fungus illustrated this for me. Their classroom teacher and I were taking them on a walk through a wooded area near their classroom to look more closely at the woodrat nests we had seen on an earlier visit. Looking for woodrat nests is a bit like looking for green cars; at first you don't see any, but once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere.

There is an even earlier step when you first learn to recognize an object, such as a woodrat nest or a fungus. This too is a learning process. Usually when viewing something new, such as the woods, people see an undifferentiated blur. Then when someone points something out to you, shows you how that this thing, this rock, this nest, this lichen, can be separated from the blurry mass, it springs into reality. You can now see it where before you could not.

As we walked, one of the children pointed out a lichen on a tree and asked, "What's this?" We all looked at it and told the children it was a lichen. We told them that lichen was pretty interesting as it is a double organism, a partnership between an alga, which makes food, and a fungus, which provides the protective structure or home for the partnership. Most of them has seen algae on a pond and almost everyone knew about mushrooms, a very familiar type of fungus. Now that lichen had an image, a name, and some information connected with it, they started spotting lichen everywhere on our walk and wherever they went in the following days.

This strand of our curriculum emerged as the children began to see other organisms that resembled the lichen they had first seen. Some of these are lichen, too, we told them, but of a different kind. The first one we had seen was a foliose lichen, like the one at the top left of this page. They were now looking at crustose lichen, which lie flat on a bare rock or tree trunk and look like the image on the top right. Once you start seeing two types of something, you have a deeper concept or what the organism is, as well as what it is not. This is also the start of classification and taxonomy.

The PK class was on fire and the study deepened and broadened as they started looking at mushrooms as well and learning about the different types of mushrooms. The classroom teacher found nature books about mushrooms, as well as stories about mushrooms. We found that a husband-and-wife team of naturalists in our community that specialized in mushrooms and we learned the terms mycology and mycologists. They walked with the class in the woods and took the class much deeper into the study of mushrooms: how they get food, how they propagate, how they fit into the larger ecosystem. They class then devled into learning the parts of mushrooms and how these parts work together, structure and function. We dissected mushrooms in class and looked at them closely. This led to another lesson in looking for me.

I have found that starteding with looking at something small with your eyes along first is very helpful in getting an overview. Then we moved to magnifiers to see smaller parts larger, to see on a different scale. Finally, moving to microscopes allows them to see at a deeper level, but you still need to help young children know what they are looking at. At first, they may say that they see nothing. You look and you see the specimen very clearly, say a section of a mushroom stem. You often need to make the step of pointing out just what it is and just where it is for the child to see anything at all. We all learn to see in stages.

Great Teaching

Steven Farr of Teach for America has just published a new book called Teaching as Leadership which is profiled an The Atlantic Monthly article, What Makes a Great Teacher by Amanda Ripley. For ten years, Teach for America has been tracking data on hundreds of thousands of students, mostly in poor urban districts, taught by its currently 7,300 teachers. During that time they have found that some teachers are far more effective than the norm in raising student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. Teaching as Leadership tried to highlight and explain the specific traits and practices of the high performing teachers.

Far identifies five success factors:

1. Set big goals for your students
2. Recruit students and families into the process
3. Maintain the focus on learning and tie all activities to your goals
4. Plan exhaustively, working backwards from your goals
5. Work relentlessly to overcome the barriers to your goals.

The finding that some teachers are much more effective than others links very well to the general findings on expertise in any domain from brain surgery and rocket science to sales and sports. The focus on goals, planning, and communication tie well to the general research on leadership. Now if we can only implement these precepts on a wide basis.