Image by Flickr user zen and used under Creative Commons License

This is part of a series of posts that will build into my final paper for the Motivation course I am taking this semester. I want to emphasize that this a rough draft and welcome comments, especially ones that point out flaws in my logic or understanding of the motivational theory under consideration. I’m going to try and use my “blogging” voice here rather than my “boring academic voice” that I use in my official paper, but I apologize in advance if I don’t entirely succeed.

In achievement goal theory, it is the learner’s goals for learning that are most salient. In this conceptualization, students who take a mastery goal approach towards their learning focus more on their own individual ability to master new ideas and competencies. Students with a primarily performance goal approach focus more on their ability to prove they are better than others or that they can be judged successful by others. As Ames and Archer (1988) contrast them, the performance goal orientation is associated with “achieving success with little effort,” while a mastery goal orientation is described as valuing the process of learning itself “and the attainment of mastery is seen as dependent on effort (260).” In this theory of motivation, students adopting a mastery orientation have more positive outcomes, including a willingness to pursue challenging tasks, and use more self-regulating behaviors, and persevere in the learning tasks. In contrast, students with a performance goal orientation experience more negative outcomes, including an unwillingness to fail and anxiety.

Using achievement goal theory to predict the ways in which these divergent orientations towards learning might impact a learner’s motivation within a badge system can be useful. Badge systems are certainly patterned after similar systems within digital games, where these goal orientations have resulted in the negative outcomes associated with performance goal orientations. Studies that have examined gamers’ motivations have found a negative impact on mood when players adopted a performance goal orientation towards the game, valuing achievements over other aspects of game play (Ryan, Rigby, & Przybylski, 2006). Additionally, there are contextual factors that interact with these individual student orientations. Classrooms, for example, can be organized in such a way as to support a mastery over performance orientation and thus impact student motivations and outcomes, with classroom performance goal structures correlated with multiple negative outcomes for students (Lau & Nie, 2008). This suggests that these learning sites, like classrooms, should consider students’ achievement goal orientations and encourage a mastery approach whenever possible.

The Khan Academy emphasizes displays of competence over task mastery, an emphasis that aligns with a contextual goal structure that is performance goal oriented. By awarding badges and points for watching videos or answering rote questions without making mistakes, displays of competence are rewarded. These badges, in turn, are displays that rank users against each other, which could also explain the rampant cheating that some of the Khan Academy users have resorted to, certainly a maladaptive outcome predicted by the interaction of a student’s performance goal orientation with the Khan Academy’s performance goal orientation.

References

Ames, C., & Archer, J. (1988). Achievement goals in the classroom: Students’ learning strategies

and motivation processes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 260-267.

Lau, S., & Nie, Y. (2008). Interplay between personal goals and classroom goal structures in

predicting student outcomes: A multilevel analysis of person-context interactions.

Journal of Educational Psychology, 100, 15-29.

Ryan, R.M., Rigby, C.S., Przybylski. (2006) The Motivational pull of video games: a

self-determination theory approach. Motivation and Emotion: 30, 347-363.

doi:10.1007/s11031-006-9051-8

Had you been following the #ncte11 twitter feed on Friday morning, you would have seen a number of messages coming out of the session I was in. Convened by Jim Burke, and following a rousing call-to-arms from Linda Darling-Hammond in the General Session, the panel boasted some big names in the field: Carol Jago, Sandra Stotsky, Judith Langer, and Arthur Applebee.  An NCTE Featured Session, it was entitled “Preparing Today’s Students for Tomorrow: Reports, Reflections, and Recommendations from Recent National Studies.”

Carol Jago presented on a more well-rounded approach to the idea of text complexity: focusing not only on the quantitative pronouncements of “grade level” (beyond the Fry Readability test of counting syllables).  She suggested that there is a qualitative understanding of a text that we intuitively understand: the amount of figurative language, allusions, and the like. She also discussed the relationship of the reader with the text and stressed the importance of providing books that were in the zone of proximal development for a young reader. “Kids should be reading two books at once: one that they devour and one that is in their ZPD,” was the message from Carol Jago.

Next up was Sandra Stotsky, the only name on the panel that was unfamiliar to me. I now know why. Conservative in the extreme, she rose to the podium to begin with a study that examined how the number of English teachers using canonical texts (The Scarlet Letter, The Odyssey, MacBeth, etc) has decreased since 1989. My bias was such that I didn’t at first understand that this was a bad thing. Her other studies showed that Readability of texts (presumably determined by the very Readability formula that Jago had stated not moments before was not sufficient to determine text complexity, but let’s go with it) was between a 3rd and a 10th grade level, some folks were only assigning one text in a High School grade and they certainly aren’t teaching New Criticism.  Of course, those of us in schools know that part of this is due to the unyielding pressure of the standardization movement, where English teachers feel as if they have no choice but to abandon longer works in favor of succinct readings that can be read in 6 minutes, followed by 4 minutes of answering questions (ACT allows only 8 minutes for reading a passage and answering questions, so maybe I’ve been generous). No matter: the point stands that the English curriculum could use some coherence. I am totally on board with that. I just know that I, along with many folks I know, struggle with what coherence looks like. Especially when you are developing READERS, readers who may need remediation for a whole host of reasons, often associated with the fact that we do a really bad job of supporting the 1 in 4 children living in poverty in this country. But I digress. What Stotsky then presented was what made my blood boil. Two sterling examples of the most dry, inappropriate curriculum that featured Grade 6 reading the Book of Genesis and the Odyssey and culminating  with Grade 9 reading Sonnets (I’m guessing Shakespeare), Chaucer, MacBeth, Pride & Prejudice, and more. I found two female authors on one list, one of whom was Zora Neale Hurston, who also represents the only minority voice on the list (unless you count Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which was assigned for summer reading). The other comprehensive curriculum sample she presented did a better job of more women and minority authors, until one hit High School where it dead-white-male-ville.

I fail to see how this develops readers, represents complexity, or prepares students for increasingly global workplace wherein our students will have to negotiate different cultural norms. How does reading The Scarlet Letter (sorry to pick on this, but it is a representative example) help students negotiate this world better than say a slew of other even 20th century authors and voices? Why the crowding out of women and minority authors? Does a comprehensive curriculum mean that the only voices we hear are those that replicate the power structures of oppression so shameful in our history? This is troubling in the extreme.

In the end, it is up to us to make sure that voices like this don’t prevail. It already feels like a struggle to do what is best for our learners. If we select a non-dead-white-male text, we have to explain its complexity, advocate for it. If we select a dead-white-male text, we have to understand that it must hold value beyond its canonical significance and use it in a way that still empowers the voices of our students.

POST EDIT:

• English Companion Ning Conversation of the Stotsky Study: http://englishcompanion.ning.com/forum/topics/the-stotsky-study-of-high (h/t @msstewart)

Image by Flickr user zen and used under Creative Commons License

This is part of a series of posts that will build into my final paper for the Motivation course I am taking this semester. I want to emphasize that this a rough draft and welcome comments, especially ones that point out flaws in my logic or understanding of the motivational theory under consideration. I’m going to try and use my “blogging” voice here rather than my “boring academic voice” that I use in my official paper, but I apologize in advance if I don’t entirely succeed.

In this case, let’s consider that badges here are operationalized as a reward system instead of an assessment system. For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to rely on existing learning sites with badge systems that I’ve seen in use, namely the Khan Academy, which is largely an automatic reward system based on levels of interaction with the site’s content, such as viewing tutorials or taking quizzes.

Under Skinner’s (1950) model of operant conditioning, the observed behavior of the student viewing a tutorial or taking a quiz is the behavior that we would like to encourage.  We want  the student to persist in that behavior, and therefore learn more from viewing more tutorials and taking more practice quizzes. In this model, the behavior of interacting with the site leads to a consequence, or reinforcer, of earning a badge. This positive reinforcer of the earned badge, in turn, leads to the strengthened or repeated behavior of the student’s continued interaction with the site’s content. Behavioral theorists have also identified that the timing of the reinforcer has a great deal to do with how effective it is at encouraging the desired behavior–an idea known as the reinforcement schedule.   Reinforcers can be on a continuous reinforcement schedule, for example, and be presented every time the desired response is demonstrated.  The Khan Academy largely employs a fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule in which badges are awarded after a set number of responses. This type of reinforcement schedule predicts that there will be a drop in persistence, especially once the set number of responses occurs and no reinforcer appears (i.e. I already earned the badge for watching tutorials five days in a row, so I am very unlikely to watch five days in a row again since I’ve now earned my badge for that behavior). The schedule that results in the most persistence is called a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule in which the reinforcer is presented at intermittent times after the behavior is demonstrated (think slot machines). While Khan Academy  has largely a fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule, they also advertise that some very “rare” badges can be earned in ways that are not clear, thus employing the variable-ratio schedule. By also awarding these rare badges, the intermittent nature of the reward would predict an increase in persistence because it is unclear which action will lead to the jackpot (perhaps overcoming the problem with the fixed-ratio schedule of the other badges? Not really sure on that one.).  While this would predict the more persistence than the other reinforcement schedules, it still predicts that gradually response will drop off.

There is one important assumption that is made in predicting how badges might impact learning behavior–that the reward of the badge is actually a positive reinforcer. For some, a digital badge may mean very little and therefore not function as a reinforcer at all.  In this case, a behavioral view would predict a lower rate of persistence than for individuals for whom the badge was seen a positive reward.

Additionally, if we assume that the awarding of a badge functions as a positive reinforcement, there is an additional prediction to me made about whether or not the potential harm of using a reward system outweighs the potential learning benefits. The use of rewards has been shown to be highly detrimental for intrinsic motivation especially (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999), and considering that the majority of users in these open course systems are there voluntarily (or are intrinsically motivated to visit the site and engage with the content), is it worth using badges to possible decrease the motivation that brought the learner to the Khan Academy in the first place?  This is the typical argument leveled against behavioral learning techniques: those gold stars may not only be motivating in the short-term, but harmful in the long-term.

But would different outcomes be predicted based on different theories of motivation and learning? More on that soon!

References

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 627-668.

Skinner, B. F. (1950). Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review, 57, 193-216.

I blogged earlier today about my Current Issues in Motivation and Learning course. So far this semester we are on Week 9, and each week has been a new set of motivational theories. As a newbie psychologist, this has been a bit overwhelming. I felt confused about the ways the theories built on each other and the sometimes subtle differences between them (Dear Psychologists: self-concept, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. This is maddening.). At any rate, I made a giant map of all the things we’ve read so far and I’ll be updating it as we finish up. I’ve embedded it below. Also (for my classmates), if you have your own Prezi.com account, I’ve made this able to be copied so that you can take it and make it your own.

This semester I am taking Dr. Cary Roseth’s Current Issues in Motivation and Learning course. I have also been following the Digital Media and Learning Open Badges competition.  As I’ve been reading and thinking about different motivational theories, I can’t help but wonder about the ways that those theories might explain how the Badges for Learning idea might work in practice.  So I’ve decided that I will be putting these ideas to work in my final paper for my motivation course.  My plan is to take the motivational theories we’ve been reading about and use them to make predictions about how badges for learning might impact student motivation and possibly achievement (when appropriate for the theory).  My  paper is due in about a month, but as I develop these predictions, I plan to both blog about them in this space as well as post my final paper here (don’t worry, it’s supposed to only be 10 pages).

I do want to address one issue, however, before I begin. In the initial launch of the Badges for Learning competition and even in subsequent writings, blog comments, and twitter conversations around the web, I’ve noticed that there is a real tension as folks try to imagine how to implement Badges for Learning. It seems to me that the at the core of badges is to develop an alternative assessment structure for not only open courses online, but perhaps even more traditional, face-to-face classrooms. I keep seeing the argument repeated that badges are a way to highlight the self-directed learning that is occurring all over the web. Despite these intentions, the idea of badges as a potential motivator creeps into the conversation. While this may not be the primary intention of badges, I think that the idea of badges a motivator is tangled up in the conceptions of badges.  At first this horrified me: I worried that we were moving reward stickers and gold stars online, and I wasn’t impressed with how well those worked in the face-to-face classrooms. But as I realized how ignorant I am of explanations of what and how people are motivated, I thought it was worth keeping an open mind about.

The first action-research study I ever carried out as a classroom teacher  (back in 2002) looked at motivation and standardized testing. My questions centered on whether or not students’ own personal preferences for different types of assessments might impact their achievement.  My findings were pretty inconclusive, and as I’ve dug into the relationship between motivation and assessment, I’ve found that there has been very little research in this area overall. The impact of standardized tests versus performance evaluations or other non-standardized assessment practices on student motivation is still unknown.  Seeing the stress of my own students before the ACT or hearing stories from my friends about their second graders crying under their desks during testing weeks makes me wonder about it more.  This is all to say that I’m really curious about this issue: what if a student is highly motivated in school and the negative impact of standardized testing is short-circuiting that motivation? I think that most teachers can quickly think of examples of students for whom this is true. They are motivated, they love school, and their achievement on the big test is always low. It just doesn’t reflect what they know and what they can do. For these reasons, I’m all for some sort of alternative assessment structure.

So as I develop my ideas, I welcome comments and criticisms as I go.  The plan is to post a theory and prediction about badges every few days. Wish me luck!

Hackjams are simply “Webmaking for the rest of us.”

Why a Hackjam?

In our development as writers, there are always the tools that assist us in making the thinking in our heads visible and readable.  The transformation of thoughts into prose is complex.  Young children are certainly full of imagination and compose oral stories to the delight of their parents. Yet bringing those stories to fruition on the page is a long and laborious process as the prerequisite motor skills are developed to form letters with a pencil. Learning the QWERTY keyboard beyond hunt-and-peck is a similarly frustrating process that prevents the fluid act of composition.

As more and more research and attention is paid to the ways our literate lives are mediated by interactions on the internet, less attention is paid to the function of the tools that get us there. How many facebook posters understand the algorithm of the newsfeed? How many people uploading content to Youtube understand the genesis of the embed code? There is an entire hidden structure of the webpages with which we interact that mediates the way we compose and present ourselves on the web.

Enter the hackjam: designed to make visible the a few of the hidden structure of the internet for K12 students (but most grownups I know would benefit, too!), these tools provide an entry into inquiry about the ways we are both freed and bounded by the hidden structure of the internet pages we visit.  By developing our hacker selves, we are then empowered to move ourselves more critically through these spaces, rather than being led through them.

What is a hackjam?

The hackjam, developed by Mozilla, is designed to illuminate a few key concepts:

• Tinkering and remixing the web in order to better understand it
• Understand that the web is written with HTML and styled with CSS
• Highlighting what it means to have and support an open web

At WIDE-EMU, you will be invited to develop your hacking skills through the use of a few simple tools.  For a sneak peak of what it is to participate in a hackjam, follow the links below.

• On hacking public education by Chad Sansing
• Learning with Hackasaurus by Erin Wilkey Oh
• Hackasaurus: Webmaking for the rest of us
• HackJam #WideEmu Agenda

If you’d like to participate in the hackjam, bring your own laptop loaded with Firefox. I’ll help you do the rest!

This morning I was actively engaged in the backchannel for the Digital Media and Learning competition announcement. This year’s competition focuses on Badges for Learning, which seems inspired in part by Mozilla’s Open Badge initiatives and P2PU.  I fully admit to spending most of my time on the backchannel really trying to understand where the faith in badges as tool for fixing issues with education comes from. Is it based on anecdotal evidence from places like P2PU and Khan Academy? From gaming influences? Specifically, I wondered about the empirical evidence or theoretical basis for this interest: had someone done this well on a small scale? Is this rooted in research on performance assessment or motivation?

There is a lot to unpack in these questions, so for today I think I will focus on trying to best summarize both what the advocates say and what some of the critiques/skepticism around badges are.

Why badges?

1. In different contexts, badges can be evidence of various competencies. There was a lot of specific discussion of examples of this. The basic process is that I learn something, show that I’ve learned it, and then am awarded a badge. The process of how I was taught and what I did to prove I have the skill/knowledge is entirely open.  This is in contrast to grades in which an A in English may or may not tell you much about my writing ability, for example.
2. Related to point 1, badge systems would have to also be standardized in some way in order to assist in hiring decisions.  Badges would also assist potential employers because (and I’m paraphrasing) “Google would be your new resume.”
3. Additionally, NASA discussed that earning various badges could be tied to other competition, i.e. being entered into some fabulous space contest.
4. Additionally, it was repeatedly stated that what we were doing currently is not working. So why not spend time and money finding something that anecdotal evidence suggests holds a lot of promise? After all, lots of folks play video games, check-in on foursquare, and even learn calculus in order to earn badges.

Why are people worried about badges for learning?

There were a number of very valid concerns mentioned in the discussion. Here are a few:

1. Open badge systems run the risk of watering down the meaning of badges. It seems that it would be quite difficult to ensure the “pedigree” of a badge, i.e. how to make sure they are not only not counterfeited, but that my PHP badges are from quality issuers and that I  have actually demonstrated the competencies associated with the badges.
2. There is a lot of concern that this is just our current assessment/grade system dressed up in a novel way. Novelty wears off and assessment is fraught.  Neither do a very good job of encouraging learning.

Next my own concerns about badges for learning:

• I don’t feel as if I understand the theoretical basis for the research questions around badges for learning. Some of the anecdotes used to demonstrate the value of badges seemed more like performance assessments, while others seemed like typical mutiple-choice tests where a badge is delivered at the end rather than a score. Additionally, examples were given that directly positioned badges as a motivating device, which is hugely problematic (see this).  I do agree that more research needs to be done on the ways that motivation and learning is impacted by the types and/or presence of assessments we give.

I have a lot more thinking and reading to do before I feel like I can have a real opinion. I’ve also dedicated my current semester project for one of my courses (Motivation in Learning, see the twitter hashtag #cep910) to potential theoretical lenses by which we might better understand how badges function in some of the learning environments that already employ them.

Please let me know in the comments if I’ve misunderstood the arguments on either side, other resources you know of, or your own thoughts on this issue.

For more on the topic:

• Mozilla’s Open Badges: http://openbadges.org/
• Badges for lifelong learning (search on Scoop It): http://www.scoop.it/t/badges-for-lifelong-learning
• The Digital Media and Learning competition details: http://dmlcompetition.net/
• HASTAC announcement: http://hastac.org/DML-competition-launch
• #dmlbadges: twitter backchannel of the announcement, which was livestreamed. I will post the archive of the session once I see that it’s been posted.
• Badges in the Real World: http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/badges-in-the-real-world/
• Open Badge System Framework: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xGuyK4h7DLVeOrFPeegB4ORMutblJf9xVRZCizgx_j8/edit?hl=en&authkey=CNarn4UJ&pli=1
• Welcome to a badge world: http://www.alex-reid.net/2011/09/welcome-to-badge-world.html
• Notes on and concerns about this year’s Digital Media & Learning competition: http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/2011/09/15/notes-on-and-concerns-about-this-years-digital-media-learning-competition/

When I went through the Red Cedar Writing Project in 2005, I was a teacher of writing who was becoming a writer. At the center of the Writing Project experience is the notion that to teach, one must do. One of the first steps was to own our identities as writers, even though calling myself a ‘writer’ felt as if I was overreaching. That changed on our Writing Marathon day when we adopted the mantra: “Damn, I’m a Writer.”  I love that phrase because it encompasses that moment when we move from being afraid of that identity to coming more fully into ourselves as writers.

This summer marked the launch of the Gradhacker website, and I’m proud to report that I’ve been a contributing writer since the first week. I love the Gradhacker community and there are some great posts going up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The only downside to writing on biweekly basis (not to mention all the writing one does as a student) is that my personal blog space has been a tad neglected. I am starting lots of new things this Fall, so that hasn’t helped matters either. I figured I should give myself credit for those other posts, so I wanted to just acknowledge that work in this space, too.

My Gradhacker posts from this summer:

• Grad School made me stupid
• I loved writing this post. It is the closest I’ve come to articulating how I generally feel most days in school. The title is a little misleading: in this context “stupid” is a good thing.
• Google + Grad School = Awesome?
• The best part about writing this post was that Professor Hacker ran a post on the same topic on the same day. I had a lot of fun between the discussions in the two communities.
• Hacking the Digital Classroom with ‘Digital Is’
• I am a HUGE fan of Digital Is.  The National Writing Project’s work on digital literacy always impresses me.
• 7 Ways to Survive a Lit Review
• All summer I worked on a lit review and the best part about it were the little notes to myself I wrote as I went along for the blog post I knew I would write when I was done. Somehow the fact that streamlining my workflow might turn into a helpful blog post made it more fun. Maybe the 8th tip would be: plan a blog post about your workflow when you finish
• Banishing Impostor Syndrome
• While this post has the least amount of comments on the actual post, I’ve had more messages sent to me privately about this post than any other I have written. It clearly is an unspoken issue for lots of us (and I didn’t just hear from grad students).
• I also repurposed an old post: Mamacademic: how I hack parenthood, grad school, etc

In other news, a book chapter I wrote finally came to fruition. Here I am holding a real live book with my real live writing in it.

Zellner, A. (2011). Reflections of a Cultural Translator. In L. Rex and M. Juzwik (Eds). Narrative Discourse Analysis for Teacher Educators: Managing Cultural Difference in the Classroom. (pp. 131-135). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Summer is coming to an end and as I wrap up both my own courses and the course I’ve assisted in this summer semester, I thought I would pause to reflect and identify places for moving forward on this journey.

I blogged a bit this summer about my own growth as a researcher, which was facilitated by two of the three  courses I took this summer. In one course, I developed a research proposal that will function as my practicum proposal. In my program, the practicum is part of the “Research Apprenticeship” which follows roughly the same process as the dissertation: proposal, oral presentation of proposal to get approval, carrying out research, writing up research, defending research.  In another course, we focused on developing a literature review: another essential skill for the dissertation process (and for being an academic in general).

At the end of this process, I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a writer, first and foremost. Academic writing is a tricky thing, and  the feedback and guidance of both my instructors and advisor were invaluable. Writing is thinking, and I know that my research brain has developed along with my prose. I am not ashamed to say that I am in love with my research proposal, and I am thrilled that I’ve been able to design a study that gets at research questions that I find interesting and sustaining. I spent a lot of this year seemingly unfocused (much to the worry of my mentors in the program: focus, Andrea, focus! was the most common thing I heard), but I find myself back at the same questions that I articulated in my application to school, but they are more focused as well as being functional (as in: a person could actually design a study to answer them).  After considering other questions and ideas, in the end I feel like the topics I am looking at now are ones I could stick with over the course of not only my practicum, but could develop into additional studies that could be the focus of my dissertation. To be frank, I don’t have time to change my mind, so I wanted to be sure that I really liked what I am doing. And I do. (Additionally, once I get IRB approval for what I am proposing, I plan to post everything here on the site).

If year one was about experiencing school, year two will be all about strategy.  Every decision must consider two things: first, is this decision going to help me finish faster? and secondly, does this decision help me get a job when I am finished?  Spring 2012 brings defending my practicum, completing comprehensive exams, and developing my dissertation proposal. I want all my ducks in a row to get moving as quickly as possible into dissertation mode.

So here are the goals:

• move from exploration to professionalization
• solidify my career goals: make appointment at Career Services, develop a non-academic resume and cover letter (just in case!), keep an eye out for job postings to understand what is out there for people with my eventual degree.
• related to this, add a line to my CV every month (I know this sounds a little crazy, but I figure there is no harm in keeping this a focus every month, and wouldn’t it be awesome if I pulled it off? I heard this was something that folks on the tenure-track do, so it seemed like a good goal.)
• identify something every month that gets me to graduation faster: read dissertations from graduates of the program, etc,
• I also have a long list of brilliant people at my university that I have yet to meet. I am making it a priority to meet them this year.

Anything else?