Re-Evaluating Assessment; Recognizing Achievement and Skills

My daughter is a daisy. A daisy is the entry level status of a Girl Scout. Like the Boys Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts are an organization of people that support local causes, learn about their world, and share experiences. Their accomplishments and experiences are recognized by the earning of badges that gets fastened to their uniform. This sash of badges provides a visual record of their experiences and accomplishments and are treasured by the girls that earn them.

There are many assessment systems that we use, outside of our schools, that are based on the similar principles. One obvious example is the assessment systems that are built into digital games. An elaborate example is the assessment system built into the game World of Warcraft (WOW). This assessment system has players earning honors, levels, and capabilities through their game play and are represented in an elaborate profile system within the game. The honors, levels, and capabilities are achieved through experiences and activities the players complete during game play.

Another example of an assessment system that you may be familiar with is the one found within the NikePlus running system. In this tool runners have the ability to log all their runs, sign up for challenges, track their progress, communicate with other runners, and get tips from one another on improving their running skills. Accomplishments are measured through earning awards (badges) for challenges met, and tracking progress through graphs and charts. These accomplishments and recognitions can be shared with friends on the site and to the rest of the world through social media tools.

These two assessments systems, though very different in the content areas that they assess, nevertheless have some very strong similarities. First, these assessment systems cater to the individual. They address the individual’s interest from within the confines of the total activity. For example, in WOW players can choose to work collaboratively to achieve honors and levels, or they can choose to work independently to achieve honors and levels. In the NikePlus assessment system, the individual can choose to focus on challenges such as burning calories, losing weight, increasing speed and a whole host of other specific challenges. The challenges and the area of assessment are under the control of the individuals. They are not predetermined or created by some higher organization. A second important similarity is that these systems foster a model of intrinsic motivation. The individual’s desire to to achieve and improve is based on what the individual wants to do, not on what some other person thinks they should do. Intrinsic motivation is a very powerful tool in learning and education and forms the foundation for all types of learning. One last similarity of these assessments tools is their reliance on a visual representation of the individual’s achievements. People have always seemed to gravitate to displaying their achievements and status through visual representations. I can think of many examples: beaded jewelry, military uniforms, letterman sports jackets, medals and trophies, letter abbreviations before and after names, i.e. , Dr, PhD, EdD, coat of arms, flags and banners, seals, etc. etc. Visual representations of our achievements and skills have been around a very long time.

My thoughts on these types of assessment systems, and how we assess students in our schools, was actually launched in relationship to our district’s Innovative Schools Committee work. In looking at what we would like to share with the school board, in terms of where we should be heading as a learning organization, the ideas of how we assess our students kept creeping back into my head. How useful is the current assessment system? Who is the systems useful for? Are there alternatives to the current system? Are there more relevant tools that are more current for our current environment?

It just so happened at about the same time I started formulating and idea for an alternative assessment system, the following items were shared by some of the people and groups I follow online. “Why Badges Work Better Than Grades” by Cathy Davidson, and available here: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/why-badges-work-better-grades and “Badges in the real world - How badges lead to jobs, career advancement and new learning opportunities” by OpenMatt and available here: http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/badges-in-the-real-world/ These two posts only reinforced my thinking in terms of looking at alternatives for how we assess children in our schools.

As you have probably deduced from above, the alternative assessment system I am dreaming up is based on a type of badging system. The following chart compares what a badging system has to offer as compared to our current assessment system in our schools, specifically the school report card.

Badging Assessment System	Report Card Assessment System
Graphic, pictorial representation, strong desire to display and share badges.	Letter grades, A,B,C,D, F or O, S, N, U
No ceiling on achievements.	A+ is the highest you can go.
No ceiling on what can be measured.	Established by standards and governing organization.
Any person with a stake in the success of the learner can contribute assessments, including the learner themselves.	Teacher is the assessment contributor.
Higher degree of assessment relevance for learner.	Assessment record is limited in its relevance ability.
Assessment System can be deployed in multiple formats: specific content area, specific projects, theme/game based, etc.	Assessment system is standardized and predefined.
Assessment System lends itself to development of a culture, or foundation that can capitalize on human characteristics such as emotion, beauty, desire, creativity, etc.	Assessment system is limited in building culture or capitalizing on human characteristics
Fosters intrinsic motivation.	Foster extrinsic motivation.
Fosters greater degree of buy-in from learner.	Fosters limited buy-in from learner.
Assessment does not expire or is limited by a specific time period.	Assessment tool is limited by predetermined amount of time, grade level, or age.
Assessments can be tied to real-world experiences.	Assessment is tied to generalized content areas.

There are probably many more differences and a few similarities between the two types of assessment systems described above. Please feel free to share your ideas in the comments below.

I am a geek. So you should probably realize that another big component to my ideas on an alternative assessment system would involve a technology component. The technology component focuses on the deployment and management of an assessment system based on badges. To be honest, the technology component interested me just as much as the alternative assessment system idea. This idea provided me with an opportunity to take something from an idea to an actual “application,” putting my teaching methods courses in the area of mySQL, PHP, and application development to good use … yes, I’m half-way joking, but truly believe if teachers came out of teaching programs with the ability to program and create tools for their students, I can only imagine how powerful that would be in our schools.

Stay tuned for part II ...

School Innovation Process - Part II: 5% Digital Proposal

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” - Dale Carnegie.

“The man who achieves makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all - doing nothing.” - Benjamin Fraklin.




Just getting started with difficult tasks is sometimes the most difficult part. In regards to new ideas, the path of least resistance is not to fight an idea, and it’s obviously not to implement a new idea either. The path of least resistance is to do nothing; to be frozen in inactivity. If you're anything like me, most of you can attest from your own experiences, taking the first steps on a difficult project can often spur a bout of procrastination, but once the first steps are taken, often, things start to flow. Even if the flow was not what was originally anticipated, it seldom leads to wasted efforts. In terms of taking action to improve our public schools, much has been discussed recently about the use of technology in the news:

School CIO: The New One-to-One
http://www.techlearning.com/article/36144

Online Course Reviews: The Rise of K12 Blended Learning
http://bbridges51.edublogs.org/2011/02/01/online-course-reviews-the-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning/


Three Trends That Will Shape the Future of Curriculum
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/02/three-trends-that-will-shape-the-future-of-curriculum/

Teacher-Replacing Tech: Friend or Foe?
http://www.fastcompany.com/1722914/can-computers-replace-teachers

Teachers, Parents Question Education Reform
http://www.magicvalley.com/news/local/west-end/article_ba4fad7f-3ca5-5ddb-85b5-b3658a60c67d.html

The writing is on the wall and the belief that an online component to public education is inevitable. Many private companies are coming out with education solutions. However these companies are commercial businesses with the ultimate goal of satisfying investors and earning money. Commercial developed curriculum can create instructional materials that address state standards, but they cannot create resources that effectively address local community needs. This is because they purposely create curriculum that can address the widest audience as possible. This inevitably will lead to curriculum that is very generic, or average at best. (I should say this argument also holds true for the current textbook materials we have even using for decades.)

Many people have a miss guided perception of technology in schools and digital curriculum. The ideas that computers are going to replace teachers is ridiculous. The evidence supporting the use of digital curriculum is supported in the concept of a blended instructional model. One where students continue to attend regular classes with other students and a teachers, but also are receiving instruction through the use of digital content outside of their normal classroom.

In terms of school innovation in general, one of the most widely sought after innovations is the ability to create more time; more time for learning, more time for school, more time for PBL (Project Based Learning), more time for meaningful computer usage, more time for professional development, more time for PLC (Professional Learning Communities), more time for relationship development, more time for individualized instruction, more time for feedback, more time for assessment, more time for student interests, and on and on and on. Many have tried to synthesize “new time.” Most of these have been focused on changing the structure of a typical school day. They have created block scheduling; class periods that last for hours as opposed to 55 minutes. They have lengthened the school day, to increase time students are required to be in their seats. Most of these have met with varying degrees of success, primarily based on whether or not curriculum and instruction had changed in response to the addition of more instructional time. One problem with these strategies is that they do not address the time outside of students in the classroom. In other words, teachers are still provided the same amount of time to develop the instruction for these longer class periods as they had when they were designing instruction for a fifty-five minute period. (Granted these examples are middle and high school examples, elementary schools face similar daunting tasks due to required minutes of instruction in content areas, and the emphasis on addressing standards found within the state assessments.) The thought being that developing instruction to capitalize on longer instructional periods takes more time, not just in the sense of the teacher developing an actual lesson, but also the fact that teachers will require professional development to effectively design those lessons to utilize the additional resource (time). So if we appear to agree that more time seems to be one acceptable solution/innovation that we have actually acted upon in the past in our schools, albeit one that is pretty much null on the scale of disrupt-ability, then how do we magically create more hours in a day that addresses all aspects of school and education, not just student seat time?

Here is my proposal. The components of which are fairly obvious, and one that leads us through a common agreed upon notion in terms of innovation. The simplicity of the idea at the initial phase will create results that compound as we get better and better at the it eventually leading to the potential to radically change how we educate children. I actually believe we have been in this early innovation stage for a number of years now, but are only now entering a period of time that all the pieces are coming together. Our actions today will only control the speed at which we get to the ultimate result and the degree to which we decide to use up resources in the process. This innovative idea is already in practice to some degree, in pockets around the country, however it is handicapped by its self-restricted small scale. The most effective use of this innovation only reaches its full potential when the number of people implementing it is beyond the size of a single school. What is this grand idea? The simple idea that school districts mandate that all teachers be required to convert 5% of their classroom curriculum into a digitally deliverable, shareable, modifiable resource.

How does the conversion of traditional classroom instruction to digital content address the ability to create time? It does so indirectly. A common argument about requiring teachers to convert 5% of their curriculum each year is the idea that they would just be duplicating what they do in the traditional classroom, just putting it in a digital format. This is actually a valid argument. But it falls directly within the acceptable norm for the initial phase of this innovation. This is common with any type of technology. The first use is to actually automate a current practice by either making it easier to do or doing it faster. This automation principle may not be relevant to education in the beginning, because teachers would naturally say that the time it takes to create these initial digital resources could be well spent in other work related activities. But that is kind of my point. If the content that they are initially converting can be delivered digitally to students, why not deliver it digitally and use the saved classroom time for more guided complex instruction? For most teachers, converting components of their curriculum into a digital format would be something completely new to them. However, if the results of their initial efforts are successful, it brings up one very important fact; if students are able to access the learning content digitally on their own, why have we been using up valuable time in the classroom for this teacher led activity? Why don’t we recoup the time we save with the digital delivery of content and utilize it in the classroom with more meaningful face-to-face instruction, and design an instructional day that can accommodate professional development?

The practice of this innovation over time would lead to additional innovations that would further improve on the initial idea. For instance, over a number years, the coordinated development of digital resource by teachers would lead to a very large library of digital instructional content. These content resources would be extremely valuable in the sense that they are locally created and address the local population. If and when a school district were to begin offering innovative alternative education programs to students, they would have a collection of instructional resources that could be readily available to that alternative education program. In addition, with an ample supply of teacher created digital resources, the purchase of “textbooks” could be eliminated and the teacher created resources could be used to create the district authored "textbooks."

This proposal though simple in idea, is vast in its implementation complexities. But by successfully addressing the all the complexities of this idea, and changing our expectations of administrators, teachers, students and parents, a few years down the road we could be really in a position to improve our public education system. Digital resources the teachers would be creating would also evolve into more powerful learning tools, a curriculum, over time capitalizing on the continued sophistication that teacher would be acquiring. It is not out of the realm of believability that with the advances in technology and software development you could have teachers creating their own applications to help improve student achievement. Granted those are extremely optimistic predictions in our current economic environment, but after a decade or so of implementation, I believe we could be at that point.

The following is some brainstorming on some of the complexities of what a proposal such as this would entail. I'm sure I've missed plenty, so if you have other ideas, questions or comments, please post them below in the comment section.

Full Version available here: 5% Digital Each Year on Prezi

(CreativeCommons Licensed Image Courtesy of Don Wright on Flickr.com)