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Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...damnkids.htm

school alfie kohn students edreform education interest current commentary

shared by Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
  • Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10
     
    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Peter Beens

Daniel Pink on Drive, Motivation, and Incentives | EconTalk | Library of Economics and ... - 44 views

www.econtalk.org/...daniel_pink_on.html

DanPink podcast interview motivation inspiration education

shared by Peter Beens on 31 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Peter Beens on 31 Aug 10
     
    Daniel Pink, author of Drive, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about drive, motivation, compensation, and incentives. Pink discusses the implications of using monetary rewards as compensation in business and in education. Much of the conversation focuses on the research underlying the book, Drive, research from behavioral psychology that challenges traditional claims by economists on the power of monetary and other types of incentive. The last part of the conversation turns toward education and the role of incentives in motivating or demotivating students.
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...tcooa.htm

assessment grading achievement education kohn

shared by Benjamin Light on 13 May 11 - Cached
  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
      Deb White Groebner on 13 May 11
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
      Terie Engelbrecht on 27 Jun 11
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
      Deb White Groebner on 13 May 11
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
      Benjamin Light on 19 Nov 12
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
  • Rob Reynolds on 14 May 11
     
    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
  • Terie Engelbrecht on 27 Jun 11
     
    Excellent summary!
Thieme Hennis

A taxonomy of motivation and game design | Instructional Design Fusions - 0 views

instructionaldesignfusions.wordpress.com/...-of-motivation-and-game-design

game-based game gamification games learning education pedagogy design motivation

shared by Thieme Hennis on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Thieme Hennis on 10 Aug 12
     
    "The will to learn is an intrinsic motive, one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise. The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in the fact that what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning (Bruner, 1966, p. 127)."
Roland Gesthuizen

Dan Pink: How Teachers Can Sell Love of Learning to Students | MindShift - 108 views

blogs.kqed.org/...l-love-of-learning-to-students

learning motivation students teaching assessment DanielPink

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 20 May 13 - No Cached
  • educators are sellers of ideas
  • Games have the potential to make math more relevant or engaging, Pink said, but if they lead to standardized thinking about getting to the one right answer, that can be problematic
  • If the only aim of a game is for points and badges, the game has little benefit for the player. For a game to be compelling and a good source of learning, it should be capable of providing rapid, robust, regular, and meaningful feedback.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Students who are driven by external rewards (grades, trophies), will be fare worse than those who are self-directed, motivated by freedom, challenge, and purpose
  • When students assessed themselves, they held themselves to a higher standard. This changed the way he looked at the kids.
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 20 May 13
     
    "Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas. "
Roland Gesthuizen

How to Create Nonreaders - 58 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...nonreaders.htm

reading motivation writing literacy education AlfieKohn learning

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 12 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 12 Nov 13
     
    "In fact, it's not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself.  If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things.  That's what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for.  But you can't make them do those things well ... The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do."
Marc Patton

DimensionU | U GAME. U GAIN. - 57 views

www.dimensionu.com/...landing_flash.aspx

Teaching_Ideas Science Mathematics

shared by Marc Patton on 07 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 07 Jun 12
     
    A collection of maths games and activities to play online and download. The games can be set to a maths subject and age group. Play both single and multi-player games. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
  • Marc Patton on 28 Jun 12
     
    At DimensionU, kids find video games that are fun, educational, and rewarding. Parents find an easy and proven way to motivate their children to learn.
Amy Roediger

ClassBadges | Home - 83 views

classbadges.com

badges rewards awards motivation resources education

shared by Amy Roediger on 06 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 06 Nov 12
     
    Keep your class motivated with this is behaviour management tool where teachers can award virtual badges for anything. Choose from a large collection of badge designs. The children can see their progress with their own personal login. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+%26+Rewards
  • Amy Roediger on 05 Feb 13
     
    ClassBadges is a free, online tool where teachers can award badges for student accomplishments. Through your teacher account, you can award badges customized for your classroom or school.
Amy Roediger

quizscorer - 56 views

www.curriculumbits.com/...mis0014

game quiz teaching education review resources

shared by Amy Roediger on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 09 Jul 11
     
    A two team quiz scorer whiteboard resource. Great for keeping your class motivated. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+&+Rewards
  • Amy Roediger on 09 Jul 11
     
    Here is a simple way to keep score on a whiteboard while 2 teams face off in class.
Panagiotis Apostolellis

Team A - Phase 2 - 0 views

sites.google.com/...phase-2

shared by Panagiotis Apostolellis on 25 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • FitWithFriends (FWF) should help students attending UVA achieve their fitness goals by motivating prospective gym goers through connecting them with potential workout buddies. FWF will provide guidance to new users in creating a profile and matching with another person through simple instructions. It will provide a service in which users can input information, such as fitness goals and availability. FWF will also provide a database that will educate users on how to use different equipment as well as supply different workouts. Next, users can match with a single user or a group, and if it is mutual, FWF should be able to connect them within a day of the match to plan workouts. FWF will handle various physical activities from running or weightlifting to rock climbing depending on user interests. FWF can also offer rewards to students who continue to complete workouts. FWF will work to build deeper connections between students through a medium other than academics.
  • System concept statement
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