Competitively rank students by results say Gove

[noblegiraffe]

Our esteemed Education Secretary has praised an academy in London which ranks pupils every term by their results in each subject.

Now I'm sure that parents of the kid who comes top will be pleased and proud, but what about the poor kids who are less academically able or who have SEN who are destined to by told term after term that they are rubbish? That their achievements, though they may be the product of hard work and great determination are of less value than a more academically able student who has slacked off and winged a good result on the test? How will that do anything but completely demotivate them and destroy their self-esteem?

What the fuck is he thinking?

If any of you have any respect for Gove as Education Minister, I sincerely hope that this changes your mind.

But that is an argument for doing away with exams, just because some pupils will cheat.

Better just to try and stop cheating by invigilation.

'So you get the child who messes around in class or doesn't revise or doesn't complete the work so when inevitable failure comes, they can say 'yeah, well I didn't try'.'

There are children who will 'self-handicap' and not put any effort in, but you can't hamper teh education and rewards of other children for the sake of a minority

I agree, tethers, statistically there will be children who are being abused that you don't know about.

I taught one Y9 girl this applied to. She was rarely in class and when she was, she opted out of lessons by claiming to be thick, the usual avoidance tactics. Naturally I tried to get her to engage and boost her self-esteem etc, but when it came to report time, I graded her effort as inadequate.

Near the end of the year she got the idea that she wanted to better herself and was transformed, completing homework, engaged in lessons, asking questions. Her end of year effort was graded outstanding.

It was only later I found out that she'd been abused. But I am unclear about how the effort grade was inappropriate in either case. I see 'effort' as a series of behaviours - engagement, involvement, taking care, following instructions etc and this is what I will base my assessment on.

If you have done the research, could you comment please? I'm not sure how it was wrong to rate her effort poorly in the first instance - she knew she wasn't working hard. And surely her increased effort in the latter part of the year deserved recognition?

"But that is an argument for doing away with exams, just because some pupils will cheat."

I'm really not sure how you managed to read it that way.

It is talking about a culture of education which leads pupils to cheat in exams, not exams giving pupils an opportunity to cheat.

I think everybody realises that a reward for effort is not as valuable as an award for achievement. I think it is just part of teh 'prizes for all' mentality, which will ultimately dumb down education. We never had it when I was at school and I don't think teh teachers then were any worse than teachers now. I think it has comne in in teh intervening years due to a change in climate and politics.

I wouldn't be surprised if teh next step in teh process is to award marks based partially on achievement and partially on effort. The end result will be to devalue achievement.

This is a quote from an article that I disagree with because it seems to be against old-fashioned grading for achievement even arguing that it is counter-productive.

On grading for effort, it says similar to what tethersend says

'Never give a separate grade for effort. When students seem to be indifferent to what they are being asked to learn, educators sometimes respond with the very strategy that precipitated the problem in the first place: grading students' efforts to coerce them to try harder. The fatal paradox is that while coercion can sometimes elicit resentful obedience, it can never create desire. A low grade for effort is more likely to be read as "You're a failure even at trying." On the other hand, a high grade for effort combined with a low grade for achievement says, "You're just too dumb to succeed." Most of all, rewarding or punishing children's efforts allows educators to ignore the possibility that the curriculum or learning environment may have something to do with students' lack of enthusiasm. '

www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/grading.htm

Norfolk - is there any way you can badger your school into dropping the effort grade on work? That would drive me insane!

Alfie Kohn's a bit hardcore, Claig, he's the attachment parenting guru. I don't think he's made a particularly big impact in education - he is completely against rewards of any kind I believe.

'Students who perceived that their schools emphasized performance goals were more likely to report engaging in cheating behaviors'

Exams stress performance goals. I see this as an attempt to argue that it would be better not to have these performance goals because it would stop some children in cheating. I think this is a defeatist, dumbing down way of thinking.

You don't eliminate the 100m Olympics race just because some runners try to jump the gun.

noblegiraffe, I have never heard of Alfie Kohn. He sounds a bit far out to me, against any rewards as you say

It seems that he is a progressive, so at least we can be fairly safe that Gove will probably not be asking for his advice

www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/progressive.htm

I found this interesting when I read it.

Grading by effort seems to me to be a bit of a stange thing to do, as it is applying a bit of an arbitrary scale to something pretty hard to quantify.

Praising effort is different, but I really like the idea of praising the process of learning, and do try to do that in classes.

I spend quite a lot of time shouting at Michael Gove on the radio. Especially when he says that Science is a "list of facts"....

"It was only later I found out that she'd been abused. But I am unclear about how the effort grade was inappropriate in either case. "

Noble, this was a child who you later found out was being abused- there will be many more who unfortunately you (and I) will never find out about.

However, using this child as an example- you have no evidence that she was making 'inadequate' effort. She was making inadequate progress, inadequate achievement, inadequate attendance, she was displaying avoidance behaviours; all of these things are measurable. Her effort was not. You and I have no idea how much effort she was putting in.

"Near the end of the year she got the idea that she wanted to better herself and was transformed, completing homework, engaged in lessons, asking questions. Her end of year effort was graded outstanding."

This could have been for a number of reasons. Her homework was outstanding, her achievement (I assume) improved, her on task behaviour increased dramatically, she made more verbal contributions in class; all of which, again, are measurable. We still have no idea how much effort she was putting in. Any mark given remains teacher guesswork.

It's quite possible that getting to school when she was doing badly required more effort than when she began to achieve.

Praise and encouragement are definitely very important, which is why I think that Alfie Kohn is wrong. Praise for high attainment is also crucial and should not be denied to teh most capable students.

But I disagree with ethe Carol Dweck article. She says

'Students can have different mindsets about their intelligence. Those with a ?fixed mindset? believe their intelligence is simply a fixed trait - they have a certain amount and that?s that...... Those with a fixed mindset hate effort. They believe that if you are clever, everything should come naturally (and that if you need to work hard at something then you are clearly not good at it). I believe this is why many very bright students stop working in school when it becomes difficult.'

I don't believe students have a fixed mindset. I think students are the same, they all know that the more effort they put in teh more they will achieve. The key factor that differentiates them is confidence. There is a fear of failure and some feel it more than others and this means that some take the easy way out and fail to try. That way they can excuse their failure as being down to lack of effort. This fear of failure does need to be tackled and it is often due to unfavourable comparison with thier peers.

If these children are taught one-to-one, the fear of failure diminishes. Often these children prefer to work on computers because then no one sees if they get something wrong and their confidence isn't dented.

claig, I completely agree.

There's a phrase neither of us ever thought we'd see written down

Isn't the old adage 99% sweat and 1% talent?

Of course effort matters.

tethersend, I have agreed with you many times (just didn't admit it)

But as i'm slightly concussed, tired, headachy and a little weepy I'm going to leave you with your well thought arguments and go back to sleep...not capable of thought tonight

Well, I disagree!

See here for example.

I'm not saying effort doesn't matter.

I am saying that it should not be graded by an extraneous body as if it were measurable.

We are all able to accurately grade our own effort.

Praise can be given for the manifestations of effort (this may even be what the research did)- I would be interested to see research which measured the effect of praising labelled behaviour against praising 'effort'. The alternative to praising 'effort' is not only to praise achievement, which is what that article seems to be suggesting.

I don't fully understand teh edicational jargon here, but this is where I fear we are heading if the progressive grading trend continues. I think it will harm education, dumb it down and lead to lower attainment.

'Because they are concerned about student motivation, self-esteem, and the social consequences of grading, few teachers today use product criteria solely in determining grades. Instead, most base their grading on some combination of criteria, especially when a student receives only a single grade in a subject area (Brookhart, 1993; Frary, Cross, & Weber, 1993). The majority of teachers also vary the criteria they use from student to student, taking into account individual circumstances (Truog & Friedman, 1996). Although teachers do so in an effort to be fair, the result is often a hodgepodge grade that includes elements of achievement, effort, and improvement (Brookhart, 1991). Interpreting the grade or report thus becomes difficult for parents, administrators, community members, and even the students (Friedman & Frisbie, 1995). An A, for example, may mean that the student knew what the teacher expected before instruction began (product), didn't learn as well as expected but tried very hard (process), or simply made significant improvement (progress).'

course1.winona.edu/lgray/el626/Articlesonline/Guskey_helping.html

claig- for the love of god, don't let it get out! We best keep this one quiet

It's worth noting though that hardly any schools grade using A-G in the UK unless the grade specifically refers to GCSE/AS/A2 grades. the US does things differently I believe.

Or effort.

Well yes. I said that about grading effort too in my first post. And, as I also said, praising the process of learning (presumably including some "labelled behaviours") was what I found most interesting. The TES article I linked to first was by the author of the paper I linked to (but could only access the abstract).

Tethers, those measurable traits are how I grade effort, isn't that fairly standard? I think that students would recognise that too? I don't think that girl expected to be graded highly for her effort in maths when she wasn't doing any work, and I'm not sure how it would be bad for her to see that recorded. Obviously that differs from how much effort it takes her to get to school and be present in the classroom, but that is not what I am grading her on.

Yes. We would grade work according to NC level or GCSE/A level grade descriptors.

Along with a summative and formative comment.