Evaluation
From UpdateNet English
Contents |
Arranging evaluation in a supportive manner
No wonder the students strive towards good grades. That, it seems, is the goal. The subject matter is only serving the purpose. We know, ‘grades are not valid, not objective and not reliable.’ (Bruegelmann 2006), nevertheless day after day exam rituals are staged. Exams surround school learning with an aura of importance and meaning.
This goes far into the continuous education systems and into families. Fathers and mothers know from their own experience what it is about, and therefore the focus is on grades. This has produced a flourishing market for support tutoring. Parents in Germany spent 4.6 billion Euro on it last year, more than ever.
The teachers are under pressure too. When the class is only at chapter 8, but the parallel class already at chapter 12, that seems suspicious. And for a teacher not to look stupid means the urge to look good in comparison tests. Therefore students and classes are being prepared for tests at almost all times, which is implicit confirmation that school is not about learning but about exams and grades, not about questions but about answers, and, only the right answer.
The school system is really a system of selection. The Swiss author Peter Bichsel (formerly a teacher) made the self-critical statement: ‘had I made my students to critical people, to people that take their time deciding, to people who don’t only think in right or wrong, they would have all failed on their long way to school.’ (Bichsel 1971) He realized, he said, that school was about using exams to prepare students for exams.
De-trivialize
Etymologically ‘to evaluate’ means ‘to assess and judge’. It comes from the French ‘évaluer’, which is derived from the Latin ‘valére (to be powerful, to have the power). To evaluate makes a statement about the perceived value of an achievement or event.
In the school context it is clear what evaluation means. ‘Assessment and selection build the background of all school situations. At best they can be overridden temporarily. As long as they play a role in the form of exams, tests, marks and grades they structure the rest of the time. That leads to the apprehension that learning is always in danger of being preformed by the good/bad code of assessment situations. Detours and mistakes from which we could learn have to be avoided, short term regurgitated facts become more important than learning processes.’ (Boenicke/Gerstner/Tschira) In other words, schools decimal places fetishism distracts from actual learning. It makes school learning a dressage performance of memorizing and retrieving.
Niklas Luhmann makes a comparison to trivial machines: ‘They respond to a question, if correctly programmed, with the right answer’ at any time. That leads to the conclusion: ‘trivial machines can be observed for mistakes and be treated selectively according to unmistakable or mistakable operation.’ (Luhmann 1986)
A de-trivialization of school begins where ‘school’ usually ends: with tests and grades. Because ‘the upbringing to maturity looses itself in the scenery of learning, the education assignment becomes a performance track after a prefabricated scheme. In any case, learning happens in the form of the self-staging techniques which are required to pass this school system.’ (Boenicke/Gerstner/Tschira)
In school situations, learners principally focus on what is required to be rewarded (in form of good grades) or to avoid punishment. The dressage of animals works after the same pattern. We don’t talk about teaching, but about trimming… Evaluation in a pattern of ‘complete,’ ‘hand-in,’ then wait for the judgment, and as the case may be triumph, resign or bargain, in no way serves the understanding and the encouragement of independence. On the contrary! Erno Lehtinens statement is resolute: ‘Students are made to believe that the goal of school work is having good grades, no matter how, and not about making an effort to understand something.’ (Lehtinen 1997)
It is clear; exterior factors determine school thinking and acting. If you do this you get that. The students know: I need a sufficient mark. But if they are asked what that means in the subject matter, what they will have learned, they don’t have a clue. And quite frankly they don’t care either.
Encouragement, not selection
A new learning culture needs a different exposure to achievement. Felix Winter has formulated 5 theses to this topic:
- Thesis 1
- The traditional result assessment doesn’t fit into a new learning culture and does hinder its development.
- Thesis 2
- In the future the performance evaluation will play a different and central role in learning. It turns into an element of a new learning culture. Its position and function in the learning process will shift the course.
- Thesis 3
- The relationships between the new learning culture and the traditional result assessment can’t be dissolved with single actions or attempts to improve the grade system. It needs an extensive change of concept. The focus has to be on the exposure to students achievements.
- Thesis 4
- If the result assessment is to be made specifically useful for a new learning culture and school learning in general, it will be necessary to apply a variety of methods to determine, reflect, assess and document achievements. (…) The future result assessment can’t rest on a general method of assessment any longer.
- Thesis 5
- In the course of the reform of result assessments the understanding of achievement has to change too. School needs an extended understanding of achievement that is suitable for its specific area and a new learning culture. The static term of achievement in which it looks like a previous definable measurement has to be supplemented with a dynamic and tracking achievement understanding.
Professional feedback helps the students to look at products and processes from a different point of view, and, to understand their own being and doing.
Reflection centers on questions like: What did succeed? What do I learn from that? What can I do better/different? What could help me to do so? Only when we develop an interest for the effect of our actions can we learn how the effect is. The interest in the effect of our actions presupposes a culture in which it is not about getting rid of what we’ve done as quickly as possible, like the motto: out of sight, out of mind.
An appreciative exposure to achievement leads to a constructive behavior and a relaxed climate of interaction and achievement. The requirements are clear: more encouragement, less selection.
Evaluation is most important as a means to provide encouragement. This means the results are the beginning. They build a starting point; therefore they are helpful because they help to initiate the next steps. The consequence is not so much about the methods of evaluation but the purpose they serve. Focusing on the encouragement aspect is especially important. The exposure to school achievements centers on the goal of increasing the individual likeliness to succeed. The homogenous nature of the school system resulting in a level of medium dissatisfaction should not be the goal, but rather, the goal is to explicitly acknowledge and exploit individual differences.
In short, it is about identifying, specifying, illuminating and encouraging the students’ personal strengths. This goal serves the interaction, because it belongs to the most important human motives to ‘overwork’ ourselves, the willingness to positively change.
Sources, resources, links
Sources:
Boenicke, Rose/Gerstner, Hans-Peter/Tschira, Antje: Lernen und Leistung. Vom Sinn und Unsinn heutiger Schulsysteme. Wissenschaftliche Buchesellschaft. Darmstadt. 2004
Müller, Andreas: Mehr ausbrüten, weniger gackern. Denn Lernen heisst: Freude am Umgang mit Widerständen. Oder kurz: vom Was zum Wie. hep-Verlag. Bern. 2008
Winter, Felix: Leistungsbewertung. Eine neue Lernkultur braucht einen anderen Umgang mit Schülerleistungen. Grundlagen der Schulpädagogik. Band 49. Schneider Verlag Hohengehren. Baltmannsweiler. 2004
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