What Gets Measured Gets Done

What gets measured gets done

If the goal is to improve learning of students, for most teachers, the big project to tackle is classroom assessment policy.  

Classroom assessment practice, perhaps more than other components of teaching, is still shaped a great deal by what is pragmatic.  As I’ve mentioned before, the primary negative effects of the factory school system we imported from Europe come from class size combined with the need for consistent records.  Assessment is particularly impacted by this, and for much of the modern era has been reduced to merely grading assignments.  

As always, technology may be of some use in mitigating this, but also can make the situation worse if we’re not careful.  The advantage of tech in grading is to save the teacher’s time in doing final calculations: teachers enter grades as they go, and the system keeps a running total that, in more recent years, is live-updated or pretty close to it.  Parents can log in at a glance and see how their kids are doing.  Teachers are spared the work of calculating a student’s grade repeatedly and a lot of phone calls are probably saved as well.

Is this practice ideal? Has it primarily evolved due to its practicality or its educational value?  Has the advent of digital gradebooks shifted focus to the wrong place, the grade instead of learning? I believe so.

One of my sons attends his public high school, another attends a private elementary school.  Though his teachers use grading software, on a weekly basis we receive a folder with all of his work from the previous week. My wife or I go through the folder.  We look at each assignment and discuss the good and the bad.  Most importantly, if there’s something concerning, we see it right away and in detail.  For example, one week this spring we realized he didn’t understand improper fractions, so we worked on it and practiced--a quick adjustment.

With my older son, the conversation is different.  “You have a 2/10 on ‘Practice 5.  What’s going on?”  It’s hard to get it much more specific without the work, etc.  It’s not that one couldn’t get to the same place as in the example above, but it would be a lot harder.  More importantly though, grading in this way implies the most/only important thing is the final grade.  What gets measured gets done.  Kids will focus on the final grade.

Grades are the end result, the record of learning, but slowly they’ve crept into our minds purpose of learning, as opposed to mastery.  We’ve saved time with our current grading practices, but they’ve also shifted the mindset of students, teachers, and parent away from thoughtful qualitative discussions about learning to more mechanistic systems of reporting.  The cost of this is in actual student learning, not to mention the extent to which school starts to become about how to game various systems and become a more educated human being.

Whether a teacher or a parent, we have to think very carefully about what we choose to measure and tend. We need to focus on measuring and reporting learning--the formative, not summative marks.