Meeting Expectations
Day 37 (of 187) – October 25, 2018
One of my curiosities in education is assessment and evaluation. One of the articles we considered this week was Students in my class were considering Alfie Kohn’s (2011) “A Case Against Grades.” In this group of three, one talked about Joe Bower’s work in Alberta with Grade 8’s. The second student summarized the article via PowerPoint and led the class through a discussion. The third student did a demonstration.
In this demonstration, she asked for four volunteers. Each of the volunteers left the classroom. One came into the class one at a time. The first two students were given “letter grade” feedback and the latter two students were given “descriptive” feedback. The objective? Each student volunteer was blindfolded and asked to throw a whiffle ball into a recycling box. They threw about 6-8 whiffle balls each. The first volunteer did a C-/C performance. The ball never made it into the box. The second volunteer did a B/A/A/A performance. Once he got the ball into the box, he was consistent and continued to throw the ball into the box successfully. The third volunteer got descriptive feedback to get the ball into the box to the point of yay/yay/yay. The fourth volunteer got the ball into the box over time with descriptive feedback as well. It was a brilliant “experiment” on demonstrating the difference between letter grades and descriptive feedback on learning.
My TAKE AWAY from this assessment/feedback experiment was the appropriateness of FORMATIVE FEEDBACK. One of the “complaints” from my previous course at SFU was that my students wanted feedback on their demonstration of learning AFTER the demonstration even though I was giving them ongoing feedback, if needed, during the learning activity. If they met expectations, they did not need formative feedback. They met expectations. I could understand if they wanted DESCRIPTIVE FEEDBACK as a form of summative, but it would never be intended for improvement because they would never do that activity again. It could be an opportunity for reflection, so it would be formative if they did a self-assessment versus me providing formative feedback afterwards.
In this experiment, I felt like my curiosity of my assessment method was clarified and verified. The second volunteer got the whiffle ball into the recycling box soon after the second throw. B-A-A-A-A. That was it. The third volunteer had similar results. “A little the the left. A little more power. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yay.” What did I observe? That in both cases, when the student MET EXPECTATIONS, the formative feedback ceased and what the students got in return was a summative assessment of A-A-A or yay, yay, yay…. verifying to the learner that they achieved what they were expected to do. The second volunteer even said during the post-experiment discussion that he could hear that the first ball hit the box. The sound of the ball hitting the box gave him the formative feedback he needed to MEET EXPECTATIONS (i.e. throw the whiffle ball into the recycling box). Furthermore, it happened during the learning process… not after. This was very telling to me. YAY!!!