So, I started thinking I should post here a little bit about what I am posting over at the ol’ Gradhacker.

On Friday, I took on the idea of how technology might facilitate the giving of student feedback:

As a former High School English teacher, I have experienced the overwhelming tsunami of having to provide feedback on a weekly basis to ~150 students. Between that experience and my more recent experiences teaching online students, I’ve thought a lot about providing feedback on student writing and student products.

Before we jump in to resources and tips, I want to make one thing abundantly clear. Providing feedback is not the same as a giving a grade. I subscribe to the Dr. Jeff Grabill school of thinking on this who responded to me once in this way: “Grading is too late for revision feedback.”  So what I mean when I say feedback is that an instructor or peer provides information to the student about the student’s product in a manner that allows the student to then revise the product for the better. So what are some ways to manage the time-consuming task of giving students opportunities to receive feedback?

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/tools-providing-student-feedback#ixzz1uthHxeXj
Inside Higher Ed

In early May, my wife, our two small children and I will pack up our serendipitously named 2003 Honda Odyssey and travel 262 miles from our home near Indianapolis to the campus of Michigan State University. There I will proudly don my newest prized possession: my master’s hood. However, unlike many others who will also walk through such a ceremony this spring, this trip is different in that it will be just my third time on campus as 100% of my degree has been completed online.

Some have asked why I would go to the trouble of sitting in a hot gymnasium for two hours only receive a fake diploma. It is a fair question. In part, I want to chronicle the event for my children so that they can see that Daddy likes to learn. But more importantly, and surprising to those who have asked, I feel impelled to take part in the ceremony because I am eager to meet in person the professors with whom I have connected with so well online.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/think-outside-lms#ixzz1utiHuYME
Inside Higher Ed

I was so excited to help Nick make his Gradhacker debut.

This semester I took an Introduction to Qualitative Methods course. For our final project, we were to do a poster session on a proposal we wrote during the course. For this poster, I invited people to add a post-it note to my poster that answer the question “Who is a teacher?” I invited viewers to post this in text form or in the visual form of a drawing. In this way, we built a “quilt” of teacher identity in the midst of discussing my poster. It was fun to play with the genre a bit and the responses were so interesting. For more information about the project, check out my handout  (it looks a little wonky embedded, but I didn’t want it to take up the whole page: click the link for a better view) and my poster:

My Final Project Poster

Recently for my Introduction to Qualitative Methods course, I was asked to identify my own epistemological leanings, specifically in the context of how I design research studies. I thought it would be useful to post those musings here and check back in a bit to see if they still hold. As always, comments and criticisms are welcome:

The root of the word “science” is to “know.” My epistemological leanings, my understandings of how I “know,” are heavily influenced by my undergraduate training in the biological sciences. The scientist is trained not only in designing and executing experiments, but also in observing the natural world. Charles Darwin, a notable scientist surely, grounded his theory of evolution in what is technically a case study of the Galapagos Islands’ avian residents. Science and research need not be limited to one methodology, for there is much that we do not understand, and it would be foolish to think that one method alone was the sure path to knowledge. I situate myself in a place that is driven by questions and methods that are strongly grounded in theoretical frameworks.  If there is an observable phenomenon that I have questions about, I consider those questions through the lens of a theoretical frame. I first consider what specific theories might predict about the phenomenon.  Nonetheless, predicting outcomes is not the only way to do science or to have knowledge. I consider myself post-positivist in this sense. I habitually think in terms of theories making predictions, yet I recognize that not every human action is predictable. Learning and the study of education are complex and messy, and not every situation will fit in the theory-prediction box.  As Erickson (1986) notes about school classrooms, “Interpretive researchers presume that microcultures will differ from one classroom to the next, no matter what degree of similarity in general demographic features obtains between the two rooms, which may be located literally next door or across the hall from one another (p. 128).” No matter how large the sample size or how robust the theory is, there will always remain a percentage of outcomes that remain unexplained. This ambiguity is where I find the entire “wild profusion (Lather, 2006)” so important.   I earnestly reject the quantitative/qualitative divide while recognizing that my own personal research brain tends to work best in a more quantitative environment. That being said, I joke that I am a positivist with critical theorist (and even post-structuralist) leanings.  I may feel most at home with a giant data set and a regression, but that does not mean that I don’t reject the dominant culture’s blind acceptance of the validity of these methods.  As a former K12 classroom teacher, I have the lived experience of the ways in which statistics and data are used as a hegemonic tool, one that often was used even to disempower teachers and students. As Lather (2006) stated, “Profoundly interventionist in the history of the welfare state, statistics has served as a political tool in the theatre of persuasion in a way that maps onto the recognized needs of policymakers (p. 49).”  I began teaching the year No Child Left Behind was enacted: I can’t think of a better example of political theater in which statistics played such a menacing part.  Social science has no option of conducting research in a vacuum, and as a social scientist, I feel it is my responsibility to not only advance the field, but do it in a way that is ethical.  My definition of ethical responsibility includes a responsibility to identify the ways in which my own privileges (as a middle-class person, as a white person, as an educated person, as a quantitative researcher, etc) inform my research.

References

Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative research in education. In Merlin C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research in teaching (3^rd ed., pp. 119-161). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Lather, P. (2006). Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: teaching research in education as a wild profusion. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19, 35-57. doi: 10.1080/09518390500450144

With the convening of the DML 2012 conference, the conversation on my feeds has once again turned to badges. As I’ve outlined in this space before, I am somewhat of a badge skeptic. At first it was a general uneasiness, then I started thinking about motivational theory and what it might predict about the use of badges as they’ve been operationalized in various ways by the Khan Academy, among others. As I started thinking through motivational issues, I kept bumping up to the fact that both research and theory suggested that on the whole, there is a very real risk to intrinsic motivation when badges are used in learning.

Mitchel Resnick blogged about this issue again this week, in anticipation of his DML 2012 panel entitled “Are Badges the Answer?” Resnick outlines the same issues that I discussed in my earlier posts:

The problem, for me, lies in the role of badges as motivators. In many cases, educators are proposing badge systems in order to motivate students. It’s easy to understand why educators are doing this: most students get excited and engaged by badges. But towards what end? And for how long?

I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game. Simply engaging students is not enough. They need to be engaged for the right reasons.

 

As I dug into motivational research and theory, I think that this a very real issue. Consider this post about using Khan Academy in a Grade 5 classroom in the Los Altos School District, and these observations are coming from the students themselves:

A few months ago, Khan Academy added badges to motivate younger students to learn. However, the students now have ignored the exercises and videos, only to focus on badges. There are six types of badges, the Meteorite Badge, the Moon Badge, the Earth Badge, the Sun Badge, the Black Hole Badges, and the challenge patches. The Meteorite Badges are common and pretty easy to get. The Moon badges are slightly harder to get, but still are pretty easy. Earth Badges are much harder to get. The Sun Badges are increasingly hard to get, and the Black Hole Badges are pretty much impossible to get. In our class, most of the people already have Meteorite, Moon, and Earth Badges, but only 6 have Sun Badges. Many students corrupt their learning in attempt to gain a badge. [italics added for emphasis]

Out of the mouths of babes, indeed. So what’s the answer? Do we abandon badges altogether? I am not sure that’s warranted either. I think we just need to tread carefully, especially as folks get their badge systems up and running. I am great admirer of the Stackexchange communities, which often distribute badges based on community involvement rather than on discrete, lower-level skill sets (like watching X amount of videos or getting X number of questions correct in a row). I believe that if badges are used, they should be operationalized in a way that incentivizes social learning and community involvement. Community-designed badges are one way of doing this. The structure that the badges surround seem as important to me as the badges themselves: if we are using badges in a thoughtful way in conjunction with good pedagogy, then I could see it working. Still, the attendant risks make me queasy. For those of you designing badge systems now, God speed. Consider the risks as you go. What concerns me more is the rising use of Khan Academy in K12 schools as a replacement for (or as a supplement to) face-to-face instruction. It really might be doing more harm than good.

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.