1. Photo by flickr user Kristina Alexanderson
Learning is not a Mechanism:
Assessment, Student Agency, and Digital Spaces
Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer)

2. Photo by flickr user mirando
Grading has become the elephant in almost every room where discussions
of education are underway.

3. Photo by flickr user mirando
A brief aside on “grade-grubbing.”

5. Photo by flickr user Peter Lee
We have built a system that puts far too much emphasis on grades, and we
shouldn't blame students for the failures of that system.

6. Photo by flickr userViewminder
Grades also motivate, in at least some small way, every tool developed by
edtech software and hardware engineers.The grade has been coded into all
our institutional and technological systems.

7. Photo by flickr user Pedro Figueiredo
Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital tools. Rather,
digital pedagogy demands we think critically about our tools, demands we
reflect actively upon our own practice.This means knowing when and how
to put tools down, as much as knowing when and how to take them up.

8. Photo by flickr user Paul
• The large-format blackboard was first used in the U.S. in 1801.
• The vacuum tube-based computer was introduced in 1946.
• In the 1960s, Seymour Papert began teaching the Logo programming
language to children.
• The first Learning Management System, PLATO (Program Logic for
Automatic Teaching Operations), was developed in 1960.
At the invent of each, there was fear, resistance, and thoughtless enthusiasm.
At the introduction of the Radio Lecture in the 1930s, Lloyd Allen Cook
warned,“This mechanizes education and leaves the local teacher only the
tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom.”
This sentence is not all that different from ones we’ve read about the
MOOC over the last 3 years, or about online learning over the last 25.

9. Photo by flickr user in pastel
Prior to the late 1700s, performance and feedback systems in U.S.
Education were incredibly idiosyncratic.Throughout the 19th Century, they
became increasingly comparative, numerical, and standardized.

10. Photo by flickr user Matt Barnett
An “objective” system for grading was created so systematized schooling
could scale. And we’ve designed technological tools in the 20th and 21st
Centuries that have allowed us to scale further.Toward standardization and
away from subjectivity, human relationships, and care.

11. Photo by flickr user www.GlynLowe.com
Ranking. Metrics. Norming. Objectivity. Uniformity. Measurement. Rubrics.
Outcomes. Quality. Data. Performance.Averages. Excellence. Curves.
Inflation. Mastery. Standardization.

12. “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the
apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the
physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and
appliances with which they are dealing.”
John Dewey, Schools ofTo-Morrow
Photo by flickr user Thomas Hawk

13. Photo by flickr user Shelly
When I first taught online, I encountered the horror that is the grade book
inside most learning management systems, which reduces students (often
color coding them) into mere rows in a spreadsheet. I’ve watched this tool
proliferate into all the institutions where I’ve worked. Even teachers that
don’t use the LMS for its decidedly more pleasurable uses have made its
grade book more and more central to the learning experience for students.

14. On its surface, the LMS grade book does not seem all that functionally
different from an analog grade book, which also reduces students to mere
rows in a spreadsheet. But most learning management systems now offer
(or threaten) to automate a process which is, in fact, deeply idiosyncratic.
They make grading more efficient, as though efficiency is something we
ought to celebrate in teaching and learning.

15. Photo by flickr user Mirai Takahashi
And I find myself genuinely confused when anyone suggests there is a way
for us to do this work objectively. For me, teaching and learning have always
been (and will always be) deeply subjective.

16. Photo by flickr userVictoria Pickering
Learning management system grade books, often mapped to rubrics and
outcomes, assume students (and their experiences) are interchangeable.
Neatly comparable.

17. “ANGEL helps busy educators manage grades with flexible features that
are easy to use. Automated Agents Save Time.”

18. Canvas:“Grades can serve as a communication tool between students and
instructors and allow instructors to track the progress of students.”

19. “Blackboard is a course management platform that allows instructors to
interact with students … from putting up copies of handouts and
presentations to quizzing students on what they’ve learned to calculating
student grades and putting them online.”

20. Photo by flickr user Kristina Alexanderson
The problem is not just the fact of grades but the fetishization of them.

25. Photo by flickr user Marcus Trimble
“Assessment tends so much to drive and control teaching. Much of what
we do in the classroom is determined by the assessment structures we
work under.”
Peter Elbow,“Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment”

26. Photo by flickr user A L
We’ve built an impenetrable phalanx of clarity, certainty, and defensibility.
There is no space for student agency in a system of incessant grading,
ranking, and scoring.

27. Photo by flickr user ninniane
The grade takes the complexity of human interaction within a learning
environment and makes it machine-readable: [A/A-] [A-/B+] [F+] [97%]
[59%] [18/20] [10/20]

28. Photo by flickr userVictoria Pickering
Why do we attempt so often to resolve this...

29. Photo by flickr userVictoria Pickering
Into this?

30. Photo by flickr user Chris Campbell
If there’s a better sort of mechanism we need for teaching in digital
environments, it’s a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for
delivering and assessing content, not for ranking and sorting, but for helping
all of us listen better to students.

31. Photo by flickr user Lorrie McClanahan
And, by “listen,” I decidedly do not mean “surveil.” The former implies an
invitation to open dialogue, whereas the latter implies a hierarchical
relationship through which learners are made into mere data points. My
call, then, is for more emphasis on the tools that help us fully and genuinely
inhabit digital environments, tools like ears, eyes, or fingers.

32. Photo by flickr user Steve Johnson
Can we imagine assessment mechanisms that encourage discovery, ones
not designed for assessing learning but designed for learning through
assessment?

33. Photo by flickr user Giovanni Arteaga
“The course as composition is not fundamentally instrumental, producing
an article or living up to an outcome; but rather the course as
composition is an action which has intrinsic value.”
~ Sean Michael Morris

34. Photo by flickr user Taro Taylor
Can we work to design a new approach to assessment within digital
systems that focuses on formative rather than summative assessment,
intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation, relationships rather than ranking,
emergence rather than predetermined outcomes?

35. Photo by flickr user Ken Douglas
In “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville writes,“Nothing so aggravates
an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

36. Photo by flickr user Sage Ross
With its incessant refrain,“I would prefer not to,” Melville’s story critiques
the changing nature of labor in the 19th Century. In “Bartleby,” Melville
wonders at what becomes of humans and human bodies in the wake of
rapid changes in how we work and how that work gets recognized.And
Bartleby’s response is a kind of civil disobedience.

37. Photo by flickr user Pedro FigueiredoPhoto by flickr userVictoria Pickering
When do we decide that a tool isn’t working, and how can we work
together to set it down en masse?

38. Photo by flickr user Luke Hayfield
I’ve foregone grades on individual assignments for over 13 years, relying on
qualitative feedback, peer review, and self-assessment. My goal in eschewing
grades has been to more honestly engage student work rather than simply
evaluate it. Over many years, this has meant carefully navigating, and even
breaking, the sometimes draconian rules of a half-dozen institutions.

39. Some Alternate Approaches to Assessment:
* Peter Elbow’s Minimal grading
A scale with only one, two, or three levels: turned in, pass/fail, strong/
satisfactory/weak.
A “zero scale.” Assignments that are not collected at all.
* Peer-evaluation
* Self-evaluation
* Portfolios or process-based grading
* Contract grading
* Authentic Assessment
* Feedback, or even better, dialogue

40. Photo by flickr user Fio
“Nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion, as empty gestures
of defiance aimed at masking inferiority or substandard work” (5).
bell hooks, Teaching toTransgress

41. Photo by flickr user Jasn
Schools, and the systems we’ve invented to support them, condition us to
believe there are always others (experts or even algorithms) who can know
better than us the value of our own work.

43. Photo by flickr user Donovan Shortey
When we ask students if and how they're learning, we have to just believe
their answer.This data is more valuable to me than any “objective” study.

44. Photo by flickr user Fio
Can educators find ways to stop having conversations about teaching
and learning technologies without students present?

45. “We often ignore the best resource for informed change, one that is
right in front of our noses every day—our students, for whom the
most is at stake.”
~ Martin Bickman,“Returning to Community and Praxis”
Photo by flickr user tai chang hsien