Teaching Inquiry

Getting students curious and excited to pursue intellectual work they find meaningful. This is what any conscientious educator wants. But our institutions are structured in ways that largely impede such engagement with learning. This is the Core Conundrum of my blog.

To make productive sense of this big C Conundrum, I have been breaking it down into smaller (but still pretty big) c conundrums. In this series, that smaller conundrum is the conflict between two functions of education: supporting learning for all students and sorting out the most talented and high achieving for distinction.

Here’s the deal: Educators who identify with Team Support believe that sorting students is at best a secondary concern and ideally should be someone else’s job. Rather than pit students against one another in competition for scarce resources—in this case, for A grades—Team Support wants students to partner in learning. By Team Support standards, anytime most (or all) students meet a course’s designated achievement standards and receive an A, this is a successful outcome.

But, given enough classes with enough high percentages of As—i.e., given widespread grade compression—repercussions will ensue that make it harder to achieve Team Support’s mission. This is because the education system prioritizes sorting, and the phenomenon of grade compression defies the dominant ideology.

Education journalist Beckie Supiano usefully explains that, in a system geared toward figuring out “who deserves to land well,” and in a political economy increasingly precarious for those who don’t land well, this other idea that “maybe learning has some value besides just the salary you can get with it, that’s really been de-emphasized…. And I think it’s kind of hard to resurrect.” Insofar as this series’ central tension is concerned, the consensus that higher ed is for career preparation stacks the deck in favor of sorting.

In fact, grade compression is upon us, especially at selective institutions. And we are already seeing repercussions emerge, most notably Harvard’s new policy enforcing the scarcity of As. Compression also makes any grade less than an A feel like a mark of dishonor, leaving students afraid to become modern day Hester Prynnes—their backpacks emblazoned not with a scarlet letter A, but an A minus.

At the same time, many students are directing less energy toward coursework and more toward alternative domains for sorting like internships and exclusive clubs. Again, these developments are most pronounced at selective institutions—higher education’s perpetual canaries in the coal mine—but should grade compression continue to expand, such behavioral shifts will be increasingly salient across the landscape of higher ed.

Team Support is not directly responsible for any of these developments. But just because something isn’t your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your problem. It is therefore okay for Team Support to hate the sorting function, but it is not okay to pretend that we are absolved from its implications.

In the final post in this series, then, I focus on what Team Support might do to better manage its status as institutional underdog. I say better manage, because this is not a problem we have the power to resolve on our own. We operate within institutions that reject our basic mission. This means our options are limited, those options have limited potential benefits, and even those benefits come with tradeoffs. What I propose is that we grapple with this messiness and try to bring as many stakeholders as possible—students, colleagues, administrators, parents, etc.—into that project.

Specifically, I advocate cultivating assessment literacy. This is honestly not my favorite term, given that everything is called a literacy practice these days, but it will do for now. I use the term in part because there are existing definitions that I think need to be reimagined. The Center for Assessment, for instance, defines assessment literacy as “the knowledge and skills associated with designing, selecting, interpreting, and using high-quality assessments to improve student learning and to serve other important educational and policy purposes.” This definition is true in the most basic sense, but I have two key problems with it.

First, this definition’s narrow focus on logistics fails to address the underlying values that drive decisions about assessment and, especially, how these decisions can produce values friction. This is my term for the various ways values can conflict and compete when policies ostensibly guided by those values are implemented. Second, this definition situates agency only in the people who conduct assessments and those who oversee the people who conduct assessments, not the people being assessed. Students are basically direct objects here.

So, beyond determining protocols and rubrics, verifying the validity and reliability of metrics, and so on, let’s expand assessment literacy to include critical awareness of the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs associated with different protocols of assessment, especially how these protocols orient (or disorient) students to the learning process. In this framework, assessment literacy is relevant to those who conduct assessment, those who oversee assessment, and those who are assessed.

Greater assessment literacy is needed up and down the ladder of higher ed, but I focus here on students. As the people most impacted (and often harmed) by decisions about assessment, students deserve the opportunity to understand better, and possibly have more direct say in, the hows and (especially) the whys of assessment. Again, the goal here would not be to resolve what are essentially unresolvable issues, but to embrace the messiness of questions that lack singular answers, such as: What do students want and need from their education, and to what extent can and should those things be assessed? What should not be assessed? How might different approaches to assessment change how students experience the learning process?

Having students participate in these conversations is a way to cultivate student authority, one of the guiding principles of this blog. As Paul Hanstedt puts it, authority is the power and readiness to effect change on issues we care about. Authority is arguably the learning goal that matters most, but like students’ engagement with learning, our education system is poorly designed to foster it.

Here is my premise: Knowing that an assessment protocol has reasons behind it—reasons that can be defended but also argued against—is better than feeling like one is at the mercy of a black box of opaque forces. In having these conversations, my hope would be for students to feel less buffeted by the seeming arbitrariness of each instructor’s individual approach to assessment. That is, recognizing that any assessment approach is tied to institutional histories, administrative imperatives, disciplinary guidelines, human fallibilities, and underlying values—even if students disagree with and/or resent some or all of these factors—might make the experience of being assessed less frustrating and stressful. In some cases, it might make the experience of being assessed feel more rewarding for students.

And in instances where students are given some agency to shape assessment protocols—as with certain forms of alternative grading—they might have greater insight into what protocol makes the most sense for that particular course at that particular time. Perhaps most importantly, having some say in the learning and assessment process might make students a little more invested in that process, which (again) is what this blog is all about.

Assessment literacy, then, is a necessary, if woefully insufficient, step on the path toward authority. To put this another way: I propose assessment literacy as part of changing assessment from something conducted primarily on students into something conducted primarily with them.

Fortunately, Team Support seems increasingly open to discussing with students the differences between conventional and alternative approaches to grading, which is a good start toward building assessment literacy. In practice, however, I suspect such discussions are often meant to steer students to the (foregone) conclusion that alternative grading is better. But, if assessment literacy truly encompasses values friction, Team Support must be open to the possibility that students might have solid, intellectually defensible reasons for preferring conventional, sort-oriented protocols.

There is no correct way to build assessment literacy. But in the interests of starting somewhere, I will highlight values friction.

Values Friction: The Pedagogical Hare and Tortoise

When we don’t actively consider what our values are, they tend to be shaped for us, especially by the institutions in which we operate. But when we become conscious of the values driving our perspectives and behaviors, we gain capacity to reconsider whether those are the values we want driving us, especially when we perceive values friction. As an example of how we might go about this, let’s consider a scenario I call the Pedagogical Hare and Tortoise.

In a recent episode of the Grading Podcast, hosts and guest Peter Lijedahl wrestle with the concept of “fairness” in assessment, specifically when teachers offer multiple attempts to demonstrate course learning standards—a key component of many alternative grading approaches. To unpack the messiness of fairness, they juxtapose one student (our “Hare”) who demonstrates proficiency on the first assessment (most likely a test) against a second student (our “Tortoise”) who only demonstrates proficiency after several assessments.

The speakers note that when they present variations of this scenario at alternative grading workshops, many teachers chafe at giving the same grade to both students, which they believe would be unfair to the Hare. Whereas Lijedahl points out that the “second student did something that we in the education business like to call learning, and that should be celebrated.” For Lijedahl, what matters is that both students reached the designated destination, not how quickly they arrived there. So, to give the Hare a higher grade would be unfair to the Tortoise.

The answers people provide to this scenario say much about the values underlying their orientation to assessment. For Team Sort, picking up knowledge and skills faster—or at least demonstrating proficiency faster—is a proxy for the high talent and intelligence that mark the best students for distinction. And I think this is the default position held by most people unfamiliar with (or put off by) alternative grading. Indeed, that the Tortoise’s progress is far from universally “celebrated” illustrates Team Support’s underdog status.

Here we see that two people who believe fairness in assessment is important might nevertheless define that term differently and thus come to very different conclusions about the same situation. The Pedagogical Hare and Tortoise scenario also spotlights the connections, and potential conflicts, between fairness and other values such as equity and access. Centralizing one value sometimes requires making tradeoffs with others.

I encourage Team Support members to present this scenario to students, perhaps via individual freewriting followed by small group discussions and then full-group debriefing (that’s how I generally introduce conversations on messy topics like this). Which students might share the “default,” sort-coded position that the Hare deserves a higher grade? Which might agree with the support-coded position that the Hare and Tortoise deserve the same grade? And would any of them argue that because the Tortoise showed more evidence of actual learning relative to what they knew at the beginning of the course, they deserve a higher grade?

The goal would not be to reach consensus about what fairness means or whether it should take precedence over other values. Rather, having students formulate initial thoughts and sharing them with peers might help clarify for them where they land on the Sort vs. Support spectrum (and before that, to recognize that such a spectrum exists) and to see that other people land elsewhere on that spectrum.

Students might, then, become more conscious that: 1. They have a position on assessment issues like the Hare and the Tortoise, 2. Their position is shaped by underlying values; 3. Not everyone shares these values or even understands them the same way; and 4. There might be some friction in their own values. And in this space of conscientious messiness, perhaps students start to feel a little less like assessment’s direct objects and a little more like its co-agents.

Concluding Thoughts: In Search of an Adequately Unforeboding Metaphor for Assessment

Obviously, I have only scratched the surface of what it means to cultivate assessment literacy, let alone to positively impact students’ orientations toward learning. This is a concept I will return to in future posts, but for now I think it’s worth considering the oddness of assessment’s place in the education system.

Assessment impacts every component of students’ educational experiences (and often their mental health), and it paves their professional trajectories (or, in too many cases, veers them off their professional trajectories). Yet, for something of such consequence, it is shocking how uninvested the education system has historically been in cultivating assessment literacy. The mechanisms of assessment largely occur outside the awareness and understanding of the people who face the brunt of its impacts. And educators often receive minimal professional development on how to conduct assessment themselves. So, assessment remains obscure and mysterious, and it often feels arbitrary and idiosyncratic.

As troubling as I find this state of affairs, I often get the feeling it is a feature rather than a bug. Perhaps the opacity around assessment is institutionally useful insofar as it covers up an inconvenient truth—namely, that at the heart of assessment is a gigantic lacuna. Assessment is supposed to measure learning, but I do not believe learning can be directly measured. We are stuck with performances that act as (at best ambiguous) proxies for learning.

Whatever approach to assessment we choose—within individual classes, within programs and departments, within whole universities—we cannot escape this basic truth, though we can bury that truth in bureaucratic procedures, rubrics, standards, grading quotas (or the abolition of grading quotas), manifestos, white papers, op-ed pieces, jeremiads, you name it.

Above, I described assessment as something of a black box. But maybe it’s more of a black hole, something we cannot see even as it entraps us inexorably.

But no: this is not the appropriate metaphor to conclude this series. Instead of a black hole, let’s think of assessment as a “turtles all the way down” scenario, or the idea that any explanation we offer for a phenomenon will itself require further explanation, ad infinitum. This metaphor doesn’t solve anything, but at least it leaves room for a sense of wonder and possibility (if you don’t like this turtle, there’s always another one below it!) rather than impending doom.

Would students be better off if assessment were routinely conducted with them rather than merely on them? I’d like to think so, but who knows? Any project to make assessment literacy a core learning goal would immediately raise the meta-question of how to assess students’ assessment literacy. But let’s put a pin in that issue for now; it’s yet another turtle to explain on our long way down.