Shifting ownership to students through feedback and reflection... not points

One of our first activities of the year was to convince me
that accumulating points demonstrated their learning.

Points were not my friend

Last year I found a newfound opponent that impeded learning. Points. While reading Articles by Alfie Kohn on learning, points, and motivation and reflecting on my own life, I found that points simply motivated me to complete work, but not actually learn. While some learning took place during the completion of assignments, points were not helping long-term retrieval and the motivation to change behaviors.

Throughout the year I found that students looked to me as the gatekeeper of their grade and it was on me when they did not succeed. Students regularly admitted to doing the minimum on their notes or copying their peers. Screenshots of daily quizzes were commonplace. Sure, scores were high, but was learning actually taking place?

This school year I completely changed the way that class was structured with regards to homework, activities, and most importantly, grading procedures.

Purposeful Homework, Formative Assessment, and Reflective Grades

After reading  Make It Stick and many posts from The Learning Scientists I knew I had to change the way I structured class. Homework would be specific and lay the foundation for what we were going to do in class. Activities during class were not simply going to reteach the notes they already took but allow for questions and higher level thinking. Sure I would lecture, but only when students would review notes or an activity and ask questions of curiosity or for clarification. Buy-in and focus significantly increased.

I also wanted to make formative assessment the cornerstone of my class wherein students would take their scores and use them to guide their learning and change their behaviors. I reflected on an experience I had in high school. My biology teacher gave us a quiz each day of the week and each day I struggled to get even 50% of the questions correct. After going over each quiz, I knew all the information and yet still had a 50%. I was not happy. This did not demonstrate my learning at that point anymore. At the end of the week, we took a test and I remember that my teacher explained the purpose of these quizzes was to learn and reflect each day in order to prepare for the tests. She explained how these were our highest test scores to date and she was throwing out the quiz scores since they were practice.

"We can be honest with ourselves bc it’s for us, not for a grade. We’re better aware then of what we need to look at" - Carly

I decided to implement this strategy using the strategies of Effortful Retrieval and the Testing Effect. Students would take a formative assessment, usually multiple choice Google Forms or short Free Response Questions. They would receive immediate feedback and then track the concepts they got incorrect. None of this was graded, yet 80% of students surveyed were neutral, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with the following statement: "Making formatives for a grade would increase my motivation to try on them." My feeling was that once a grade is assigned that is where their learning and reflection stops and I wanted to stress the importance that you should be learning from your incorrect responses.

"Because there is less stress I feel that I am not doing the homework to get points but to actually learn. I also think that it makes people feel guilty if they don't put in the work they need to which in turn makes them work harder next time." - Madison

Reflection was the other cornerstone of this process. Students each received a Google Sheet where they would track their formative scores, their effort on their homework (based on 5 criteria for best practice), and then fill out a Google Form assigning themselves a formative grade for the unit. Here is an example I pulled of one of my students: Biology Unit Reflection Sheet. 55% of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "My reflection on my effort on notes has helped me to get a better sense of my overall effort," with 25% being neutral. This tells me that I am helping students to be reflective in their own practices and in turn changing behaviors in order to reach their goals. My goal was to have cognitive dissonance occur, wherein students who want A's but were not putting in the effort were forced to reflect on their practices. The reflection then would ideally cause a change in their thoughts or actions.

"I can really see the effect that not doing homework has on me and my grade, which kickstarts me to get it done." - Daisy

What Needs Improvement

I know that I have highlighted some of the positive aspects of this, but there is still much I will go about changing and thinking about next semester. For example, more than one student (each is enrolled in 3-5 AP courses) said that because grades were not as commonplace, our class went on the back burner. When students have extremely busy schedules they will obviously make the rational choice of probably doing the work affecting their immediate grade. Makes sense to me. Each of these students did earn an A first semester. The quote below is one example:

"I definitely feel less stressed, but also I feel less pressure to get it done just for the credit or points like in other classes. In this class when I do the homework, I always get something out of it and put effort in."

I do not have data to back this claim, but I felt like the same number of students did their notes this year that did it in previous years where I counted note taking for points. The problem is motivating the students who are earning a C, D, or F to do their notes because they see that it will benefit their learning and in turn, their grade. I did feel that the self-reflection caused students to work much harder in my class overall than in the past. I have had students who at the beginning of the year were earning D's and F's because the topics were new and difficult to finish the semester by earning A's and B's. I have never seen this type of improvement. (I have embedded a lot of talk about Growth Mindset and have done a number of activities that have helped me create a serious bond with students that I will outline in another post.)

With that being said, I felt I needed to hold students more accountable for doing their notes by embedding activities wherein they needed their notes to start class in order to create questions on topics they do not understand or by solving a problem or identify examples of psych concepts within a short excerpt. This is probably going to be the most significant change I make for the second semester and I am excited to see how it goes.

This last quote from a student summarizes how great of a semester this was:

"They forced me to be reflective on my effort and study methods even though I was not aware that this reflection was happening. Also, they caused me to be more motivated because whatever grade I got was directly related to the effort I put in." - Julia

Thanks for reading and as always feel free to contact me with questions, concerns, or new ideas for me to consider!

Trevor