MODULE 5

Concept 1: Motivation


Summary:

In chapter 12, Woolfolk looks at motivation and its implications for the classroom. She writes on page 463 that, “the motivation we experience at any given time usually is a combination of trait and state.” We are motivated to do things in part because of the kinds of people that we are, but also because the situations that we are in require us to do those things. Art students work on their projects in part because they enjoy their artistic practices, but also because those projects are required to pass their classes. Woolfolk later says on page 364 that, “There are situations where incentives and external supports are necessary. Teachers must encourage and nurture intrinsic motivation, while making sure that extrinsic motivation supports learning.” Students who are not intrinsically motivated will have a hard time putting in the work that they need to, but teachers also cannot expect students to reach their learning potential without extrinsic motivation.


Reflection:

I found Woolfolk’s description of motivation as a continuum, rather than a dichotomy between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, to be very helpful, and it was interesting that she didn’t completely disregard using extrinsic motivators in teaching. This contrasted sharply with Alfie Kohn’s view of motivation that we looked at in an earlier module, which insists that students cannot be extrinsically motivated, as motivation is inherently internal. While I agreed with Kohn that teachers will have a great deal of difficulty getting quality work out of a student who has no interest in an assignment or subject, or even in succeeding in the class, I also agree with Woolfolk that students do also need external support. We all have many demands placed on our time and energy, and sometimes the extrinsic incentive can help us to justify devoting that valuable time and energy to a task that would be useful to us—otherwise, it’s easy to fill up our schedules with other things. For me, even though I love making art, finding time to work on projects when I don’t have any studio classes is a challenge. I am intrinsically motivated to work on my art, and I do find the time, but it’s easier to do so, and I manage to set aside more time, when my grades are contingent upon my work. It’s also true that teachers sometimes need to guide students toward work that their students don’t yet realize the value of, and this can only be done by relying on extrinsic motivators in addition to students’ intrinsic motivation. For example, one of my high school classes read Gabriel García-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—a dense, lengthy, and uncomfortable book that few of us would have chosen to read of our own accord. In fact, many of us complained about the assignment, and disliked both the reading and the analysis of the book. However, I’m now very glad that we did read it, because it’s an important cultural touch point in Latin American and post-colonial discourse, an important tenet of magical realism, and a valuable look into the effects of colonialism on the cultural psyche. I’ve drawn on that knowledge many times since taking that class, and I know understand how important and beneficial it was for my learning.

I also appreciated Woolfolk’s acknowledgement that intrinsic motivation is important, but also difficult to develop in students—especially in the older grades. I’ve experienced the decline in intrinsic motivation that Woolfolk describes, and many of my peers have shared that they have, too. Life gets busier, fuller, and more stressful as we get older, and it’s difficult to find the time or energy to do anything that we don’t absolutely need to do, because we’d rather just relax. However, it seems like when our schedules become more manageable, that motivation begins to return. Many college students—myself included—dedicate more time to taking care of themselves and investing in their emotional health than they did in high school, as a college schedule can be more easily molded to fit a well-rounded lifestyle and students have more control over their time. When my schedule is more manageable, I’m more motivated to go to the gym, eat healthier, and put time and energy into non-academic or work-related things that make me feel well, and in turn, that rest and wellness makes me more intrinsically motivated to do what I need to. I think that Woolfolk could have more clearly connected her discussion of these need to ways in which teachers can support their students’ motivation; teachers should be aware of the demands placed on their students, and shape their classes to make space for rest and health by prioritizing important material, reducing busywork, and making sure that assignments and assessments are effective with the time and effort that they require. For example, one of my science teachers had us create a lesson about a human health project and teach it to the class. I chose memory and cognition, and I remember more about neuroscience, action potential, and the anatomy of the brain from that project than I do from all the tests and studying I did for our brain unit in a different class, and I put more work into the research because it was an effective and enjoyable way to learn. My teacher didn’t rush the project, and set aside the last month of class for our research and planning, leaving space for good, healthy pacing that made it easier to put in the work.

Concept 2: Essay Tests

Summary:

In chapter 15, Woolfolk dives into different forms of assessment and grading, including essay testing. She says on page 600, “The best way to measure some learning targets is to ask students to create answers on their own.” A test, like a multiple choice, test, that asks students to distinguish between correct and incorrect answers can certainly demonstrate accuracy and even a certain level of depth of understanding, but seeing how students recall, apply, and synthesize information to generate new answers will show much more. She later writes that in order to work within the constraints of essay tests, these tests, “should be limited to the assessment of important, complex learning outcomes,” and that, “the most difficult part of essay testing is judging the quality of the answers.” The same open-ended, creative aspects of essay testing that forms its strengths also makes it difficult to score with as much objectivity as possible, and limits the amount of content that time will allow for. To address both of these potential challenges, essay tests should be specific, with clearly defined goals and expectations that will yield insight into student understanding.


Reflection:

I agree with Woolfolk that narrowing down the focus of essay tests is necessary to ensure that students have time to craft a well thought-out response, and I think that this narrow scope is actually a very effective way to learn. By asking students to go in-depth on a specific topic, issue, question, etc., that they connect to and use to represent a larger idea, they are able to form a stronger understanding of the big picture and can provide a specific example to support it—a reciprocal relationship is formed between these two parts of their knowledge, strengthening their understanding as they can use the big picture to recall details, or the specific instances that they studied in-depth to draw big-picture conclusions. For example, during my teaching placement last summer, our second-graders learned about erosion through a broader study of earth science and the formation of landforms, while also building models that demonstrated how erosion happens in specific instances. When students had difficulty recalling the bigger concepts of how landforms change, my cooperating teacher prompted them to think about what happened in our erosion models, and they were able to work backwards toward broader concepts. But when a student couldn’t explain what was happening in an erosion model and why, my teacher asked them broader questions about how water and soil interact that brought them to the answer. While this kind of assessment wasn’t in an essay format, the strategy of connecting broad ideas to specific examples demonstrated here is the same, and my cooperating teacher could have easily translated these discussions into an essay question that asked our students to describe how erosion alters landforms.

I appreciated that Woolfolk acknowledged the difficulty of scoring essay tests, and cautioned against grading strategies that lead to unfair or unequal scoring. The process of scoring an essay isn’t quite so objective as the process of scoring a multiple choice test—even with a rubric, there is more room to judge whether a student uses “strong elaboration,” “effective use of evidence,” “clear reasoning,” etc. than there is to judge if a student chose the correct alternative to a multiple choice question. What makes something “good” or “strong” or “clear” is dependent on the assessor, which is why I think that providing examples and clear parameters whenever possible is necessary when giving an essay test. For example, when studying for the essay portion of an AP test, students will always look at essays that College Board has released along with their scores and rationale for those scores, so that students have a concrete idea of how the scorers interpret the criteria. Not knowing the scorer is looking for, whether it’s because the criteria is unclear, or missing altogether, is incredibly frustrating for students and makes it impossible for the teacher to get an accurate idea of how their students are actually performing. In one of my classes this semester, my professor had us write two short essays with only very limited instructions, and no scoring rubric. He took points off of my first essay and didn’t give a reason why, which was discouraging, because my paper followed the very broad instructions. When the next paper came around, I asked for a rubric, and for what he would give points for, but he simply said that the most important thing was to run a spell/grammar check on the paper. My classmates and I were very irritated by this, because it isn’t fair to give points based on an arbitrary idea of what is “good.” And students tend to have a very strong sense of fairness in the classroom—they know when they’re being put at a disadvantage or not given the tools that they need, and especially if this unfairness causes their grades to suffer, it will severely damage their relationship to the teacher. Rubrics, and fair scoring practices that Woolfolk discussed, like using anonymity and shuffling the order of scoring, builds trust in the classroom.

Concept 3: Norm-Referenced Grading vs. Criterion-Based Grading

Summary:

In chapter 15, Woolfolk also looks at grading methods, including norm-referenced and criterion-referenced grading. On page 610, she says, “In norm-referenced grading, the major influence on a grade is the student’s standing in comparison to others who also took the course.” Students who perform close to the average receive an average score, while students who are in the top percentiles receive high, or even perfect scores, regardless of their raw score. Alternative, teachers can also use criterion-based grading, which Woolfolk describes on page 611 as, “relating judgments about a student to the achievement of clearly defined instructional goals or standards.” Here, a students’ score is based solely on their own performance evaluated with a set criteria, meaning that even if all students fail a certain criteria, their score is not adjusted to accommodate those trends.


Reflection:

I agree with Woolfolk’s assessment of “grading on a curve,” but I think that she neglected to discuss how norm-referenced grading can also be a useful tool when implemented in a way that does not punish students for the performance of their peers, or limit the number of students who can succeed. In my experience, curves are usually used in hyper-competitive, high-takes environments, like certain law programs. The cutthroat atmosphere that exists both in these environments, and often in the fields that programs like these prepare students for, is certainly detrimental to learning—anecdotally, it only seems to promote cheating—but teachers can use norm-referencing in their grading without grading on a curve. In some of my AP classes, my teacher used norm-referenced grading to assess which questions were widely misunderstood and adjust scores to benefit students. These teachers recognized that a significant section of their students missing a question indicated that there was something wrong with the question, or that the material hadn’t been adequately covered, so they didn’t count an error on their part against their students. This allows for reflection on student learning, and allows teachers to see what needed to be retaught or strengthened, and what worked well. Especially because standards for grading are based on where students should be at any given level, it makes sense to base their scores on trends in group performance—after all, standards and criteria are based on trends, too, but instead of looking at trends after the assessment is completed, the scorers determined a standard based on previous groups’ performance. I think that using norms-referenced grading in formative work, or for feedback for work that goes into a completion grade, is an excellent way to assess where students are, and when judged against more universal criteria, to assess where one group of students is in relation to other groups.

The rigidity of criterion-based grading makes it so that it doesn’t adapt or account for environmental differences, which I think Woolfolk could have discussed further. For example, in my placement last fall, our students took an assessment on contractions in class, and almost every student was consistently missing answers. My teacher was alarmed, because past classes had entered fourth grade with contractions essentially mastered, but because of the effects of two years of remote learning, this group didn’t have that knowledge. If she had simply judged the class’s performance based on her usual criteria, her students would have received poor scores that weren’t entirely fair, because the schooling path that they had followed was different from the path of previous students. This is why I think that teachers should use norm-referencing at the formative stage of learning to identify and then bridge gaps in understanding, and develop fair criteria that assess what has actually been taught. It’s definitely true that pure norm-referenced grading can be harmful and unfair, and students deserve the even playing field and transparent expectations that come with criteria. No student should be punished because other students scored higher or worked just as hard as they did, and that punitive aspect of norm-referenced grading works against learning goals by emphasizing domination over individual achievement and growth. But I think it’s also unwise, and even unfair, to simply judge students against a set of criteria without considering what it’s based on, or who sets the standard.

I appreciated Woolfolk’s emphasis on the effect of grading on students, which is an important consideration for either method of grading. Students respond poorly to low grades, which means that an unfair low score based on a curve, or based on unfair criteria, will be detrimental to learning. I know that when I don’t perform as well as I wanted, I form negative associations with the class and question my own abilities. However, I’ve found that when I have the opportunity to retake assessments or revise assignments for a better score, those negative responses go away. I think that Woolfolk’s suggestion to mark grades as incomplete, and work to revise and reassess goes toward this same effect, and I know that in my classroom, I’ll always provide this opportunity. Retaking and revising requires a great deal of effort, too, which makes it a system that is difficult to take advantage of, while still providing leniency and a focus on growth. This means, though, that I’ll also have to set deadlines with intention, and structure the class in a way that consistently centers growth; if I let students turn in work from the beginning of the class at the end of the term, I may be overwhelmed by grading at a critical point in the year, and I’m not showing students how to manage their time or learn at a good pace. I also may need to have a final assignment due before the last day of class to allow for time to revise and reassess, as learning that a student didn’t understand a core concept or important topic (which is usually the basis of a final) on the very last day of class isn’t helpful, because there’s no room for further learning. Centering growth requires a shift in practice and an adjustment in the traditional classroom toward intentionality in structure that makes space for mistakes, intervention, and real growth.