Monthly Archives: December 2010

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01
Dec 10

Random Entry: Grades

The Schwartz paper says “several challenges emerge in attempting to cultivate modeling practices in classrooms. First, students need an authentic reason for building a model other than ”doing school” (pg 652).

I have been thinking about the topic of grading for a while now. I personally hate the idea of it. I think I hate it so much because it was a constant pressure for me as a child to get the best grades–to get the A+! It seems to me now to be a very behaviorist way of motivating kids to “do school.” I have been struggling mentally to come up with an alternative to the current system of giving kids grades and ranking them from 6-12 grade (and even in lower grades in certain schools). I have these seemingly extreme thoughts of wanting to removing ranking systems altogether, but how would we determine who gets to go to Harvard?

Looking at the learning progressions papers, I was thinking to myself, this sounds like a pretty great idea! Then I thought, if I’m a teacher, how am I going to come up with a test as well thought out as these researchers say theirs are. As one person, can a teacher address the issues that will arise when they discover that one student is a one on the progression scale and one is a four. I feel that we stretch teachers too far in the classroom. I see twenty-seven students for four hours a week as a TA, and I feel that in the laboratory setting it is practically impossible to meet the needs of every student. Another thing that discouraged me when thinking about learning progressions was, if a student is at a 1 and a student is at a 4, who gets the “A.” Are grades given out? Should students be punished with a C for not progressing as quickly as other students? Of course, that is what we do know isn’t it?

To this day, I am still driven by the thought of getting a bad grade. I received a 92 on a test recently, and was disappointed at my performance. I think what we do to students at a young age, ranking them and telling them who is smart and who is not, is very detrimental to their psyche.

Last little comment. If grades didn’t exist, would kids want to learn? Would I want to learn? Perhaps we would learn what we wanted to. But of course this would have to be a self-motivated process. This could have its benefits and negative consequences in my case! Any thoughts?

   

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01
Dec 10

Learning Progressions

In the Duncan article, learning progressions are defined as ”successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning within a content domain that follow one another as students learn.” Keeping this in mind, I’m wondering why there’s such a clamor for this all of a sudden (all of a sudden?). On the one hand, thinking back to particular science classes I took (ie. biology, chemistry, physics) back in high school, the curriculum didn’t exactly focus on learning progressions. We were basically just taught a bunch of, what seemed to us, disjointed concepts that were all relevant under the overarching umbrella of “science”. On the other hand, I clearly remember progressing through different steps in each of my math classes, building upon each prior lesson. But then again, is there any way to attack math other than that approach?

Duncan  goes on to mention that LPs are hypothetical, but I’m not sure they are. Shouldn’t each concept really be built upon prior relevant concepts? Perhaps I’m completely misunderstanding the point of what Duncan is saying, but I don’t believe I am.
After reading the Steedle article, though, I think I’m beginning to understand the issues that come with teaching learning progressions. What might be a sensible progression for one student may be either too large or too small a step for another student. This isn’t something I had considered before. This could present itself as a serious impediment to a student’s learning. The obvious solution to this issue is several learning progressions, but that doesn’t really seem like a sensible solution with practical classroom applications. O the complexities! 
When Steedle goes on to talk about exam scoring, I’m pretty fascinated by the idea of a multiple choice exam where rather than having one correct answer and three incorrect, each answer is just worth a different value. For an answer which requires higher reasoning, more points are rewarded. 
In SciEd 411, we had to discuss the different science standards through a bunch of different scientific fields such as earth science, biology, and chemistry. Reading about these learning progressions I am reminded of these evolving standards. I see these standards as learning progressions themselves, albeit somewhat abstract and generalized ones. I suppose it would be sort of difficult to consider grade 7 as an evolution of what was learned in grade 6 as students would probably have a difficult time retaining all of the information they gained. 
I was reading through the different steps Wilson provided on page 720 and it really helped elaborate on what I meant in my last paragraph. But why spread all of that information out over so many grades? Is it really that difficult to provide that entire lesson over the span of a year? Two at most? Just how long are these learning progressions supposed to take, and why? I like the idea of these learning progressions, but I don’t like how spread out they seem to have to be.
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