University of Kentucky student assessment guru Thomas R. Guskey is back on the Canadian Professional Development circuit with a new version of what looks very much like Outcomes-Based Education. It is clear that he has the ear of the current leadership in the Education Department of Prince Edward Island. For two days in late November 2018, he dazzled a captive audience of over 200 senior Island school administrators with has stock presentations extolling the virtues of mastery learning and competency-based student assessment.
P.E. I’s Coordinator of Leadership and Learning Jane Hastelow was effusive in her praise for Guskey and his assessment theories. Tweets by educators emanating from the Guskey sessions parroted the gist of his message. “Students don’t always learn at the same rate or in the same order,” Guskey told the audience. So, why do we teach them in grades, award marks, and promote them in batches?
Grading students and assigning marks, according to Guskey, can have detrimental effects on children. “No research,” he claims, “supports the idea that low grades prompt students to try harder. More often, low grades lead students to withdraw from learning.”
Professional learning, in Guskey’s world, should be focused not on cognitive or knowledge-based learning, but on introducing “mastery learning” as a way of advancing “differentiated instruction” classrooms. “High-quality corrective instruction,” he told P.E.I. educators, is not the same as ‘re-teaching.’” It is actually a means of training teachers to adopt new approaches that “accommodate differences in students’ learning styles, learning modalities, or types of intelligence.”.
Guskey is well-known in North American education as the chief proponent for the elimination of percentage grades. For more than two decades, in countless PD presentations, he has promoted his own preferred brand of student assessment reform. “It’s time, “ he insists, “ to abandon grading scales that distort the accuracy, objectivity and reliability of students’ grades.”
Up and coming principals and curriculum leads, most without much knowledge of assessment, have proven to be putty in his hands. If so, what’s the problem? Simply put, Dr. Guskey’s theories, when translated into student evaluation policy and reporting, generate resistance among engaged parents looking for something completely different – clearer, understandable, jargon-free student reports with real marks. Classroom teachers soon come to realize that the new strategies and rubrics are far more complicated and time-consuming, often leaving them buried in additional workload.
Guskey’s student assessment theories do appeal to school administrators who espouse progressive educational principles. He specializes in promoting competency-based education grafted onto student-centred pedagogy or teaching methods.
Most regular teachers today are only too familiar with top-down reform designed to promote “assessment for learning” (AfL) and see, first hand, how it has led to the steady erosion of teacher autonomy in the classroom.
While AfL is a sound assessment philosophy, pioneered by the leading U.K. researcher Dylan Wiliam since the mid-1990s, it has proven difficult to implement. Good ideas can become discredited by poor implementation, especially when formative assessment becomes just another vehicle for a new generation of summative assessment used to validate standards.
Education leaders entranced by Guskey’s theories rarely delve into where it all leads for classroom teachers. In Canada, it took the “no zeros” controversy sparked in May 2012 by Alberta teacher Lynden Dorval to bring the whole dispute into sharper relief. As a veteran high school Physics teacher, Dorval resisted his Edmonton high school’s policy which prevented him from assigning zeros when students, after repeated reminders, failed to produce assignments or appear for make-up tests.
Teachers running smack up against such policies learn that the ‘research’ supporting “no zeros” policy can be traced back to an October 2004 Thomas Guskey article in the Principal Leadership magazine entitled “Zero Alternatives.”
Manitoba social studies teacher Michael Zwaagstra analyzed Guskey’s research and found it wanting. His claim that awarding zeros was a questionable practice rested on a single 20-year-old opinion-based presentation by an Oregon English teacher to the 1993 National Middle School conference. Guskey’s subsequent books either repeat that reference or simply restate his hypothesis as an incontestable truth.
Guskey’s theories are certainly not new. Much of the research dates back to the early 1990s and the work of William Spady, a Mastery Learning theorist known as the prime architect of the ill-fated Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) movement. OBE was best exemplified by the infamous mind-boggling systematized report cards loaded with hundreds of learning outcomes, and it capsized in in the early 2000s. in the wake of a storm of public and professional opposition in Pennsylvania and a number of other states.
The litmus test for education reform initiatives is now set at a rather low bar – “do no harm” to teachers or students. What Thomas Guskey is spouting begs for more serious investigation. One red flag is his continued reference to “learning styles” and “multiple intelligences,” two concepts that do not exist and are now considered abandoned theories.
Guskey’s student assessment theories fly mostly in the face of the weight of recent research, including that of Dylan Wiliam. Much of the best research is synthesized in Daisy Christodoulou’s 2014 book, Making Good Progress. Such initiatives float on unproven theories, lack supporting evidence-based research, chip away at teacher autonomy, and leave classroom practitioners snowed under with heavier ‘new age’ marking loads.
A word to the wise for P.E.I. Education leadership – look closely before you leap. Take a closer look at the latest research on teacher-driven student assessment and why OBE was rejected twenty years ago by classroom teachers and legions of skeptical parents.
What’s really new about Dr. Thomas Guskey’s latest project known as Competency-Based Assessment? What is its appeal for classroom teachers concerned about time-consuming, labour-intensive assessment schemes? Will engaged and informed parents ever accept the elimination of student grades? Where’s the evidence-based research to support changes based upon such untested theories?
A very sharp educator sent me a piece on the State of Maine’s ill-fated experiment with “Proficiency-Based Assessment” — a variation on Dr. Guskey’s CBA. Facing stiff resistance, the state has delayed the initiative and will likely be going back to traditional student grades. Wondering if the news has reached Charlottetown.
http://www.themainewire.com/2018/03/proficiency-based-education-failing-maine-students/
First, it is important to realize that a commitment to mastery learning is nothing more than a commitment to evaluating the impact of instruction, and, if some students have not made enough progress, the teacher does something to help those students learn what they need to. Students do learn at different rates (in a class of 30, the fastest learners may learn five times faster than the slowest) so the question is what you do with that. You can teach all students the same, and assess only at the end, in which case you will get a bell curve of results, or you can find out what your students have learned, and, if necessary, make instructional adjustments. I think the former is morally wrong, but it is logically coherent.
What this means is that a commitment to mastery learning entails no commitment about what students are to learn, what it means to know, what happens when learning takes place, or how to get students to learn. It is just a response to an unpleasant fact about the world: some students, even though they have done nothing to deserve it, get given brains that soak up school stuff, while others have to work much harder to reach the same level of achievement.
So, for example, it doesn’t matter what you think students should be learning. If you think history is facts and dates, then because students learn at different rates you need to find out if they have had enough reinforcement for the required learning to “stick”. If, on the other hand, you think students construct their own knowledge, then you still need to find out what they learned, because different learners in the same class construct different knowledge on the basis of the same instructional experiences.
Second, it is important to note that grading practices involve trade-offs, particularly between the meanings and consequences of school assessments. Awarding zeroes for missing work, deducting points for tardiness, and so on makes no sense in terms of the evidential basis of assessment, but in terms of the consequences, are much more justifiable. And if administrators are going to tell teachers they cannot award zeroes for missing work, they had better give the teachers other ways of ensuring that students do the work that is required.
Third, as I said in my earlier Tweet, how assessments are interpreted (in terms of norm groups, cohorts, shared constructs, criteria, or students’ previous achievement) is quite independent of how we report those assessments (in terms of qualitative descriptions, scores, grades). So, for example, we can grade students on a curve, and describe what they can do qualitatively, or we can report student proficiency on a state standard on a 100-point scale.
Until these basic ideas are understood, the considerable power of assessment to improve learning is likely to be unrealized.
You have just demonstrated what this Blog aspires to — a thoughtful response that runs deep. A much appreciated contribution.
Perhaps the worst bit of this is that it will be rolled out for all students at the same time. There will be no experimentation or control groups (for better or worse) and very likely an attempt to measure its effectiveness with a view to deciding whether or not it represents an improvement. I wish Gurskey would save us all the trouble and produce some research based evidence.
My commentary on Dr. Thomas Guskey sparked quite a lively and fiery series of exchanges on social media. Student assessment expert Dylan Wiliam weighed in with the comment that “both Guskey and Bennett are wrong.” That really stirred a reaction. Here’s a Tweet from Dylan Wiliam explaining why:
“How an assessment is interpreted (norms, criteria, constructs, student’s previous level) is independent of the way it is reported (qualitative descriptions, ranks, scores, grades). Most writers don’t realize this, which produces much confusion.”
That’s a comment worth digesting and one that cuts through a lot of the discussion.
I really like Dylan’s tweet! I am going to digest it, as you suggested, Paul, and maybe offer my two cents worth.
Be sure to look at Dylan Wiliam’s more detailed response. It came in last night while I was on a social media respite.
Do grades distort the actual learning? The evidence that they affect learning positively seems clear though studies are not as many as I would like.
Do we put too much stock in grades as summaries?
If you must summarize for identification and placement purposes, and at some point we do, what are legitimate gradations?
– % may be problematic, simply because of the phenomenon of measurement error
– 4/5 grade levels as in Ontario may be too broad
– at one level in our minds, the difference between 49 and 50% or 79 and 80% (a threshold for an A in many places) is large compared to one %age difference elsewhere on the scale.
And then there is the question of the actual criteria behind a particular learning “summary” as Wilian notes.
Grading came about 150+ years ago as a way to summarize learning from the massive increase in students as mass public compulsory education came into effect in western Europe and North America. And from the outset, there have been critiques of every system devised. But grading in some form is not going away. So we do what we can which should be better than what we do now.
I meant to say re evidence above The evidence that they affect learning positively is NOT CLEAR though studies are not as many as I would like.
A version of my Commentary appeared December 3, 2018 in The Guardian, the PEI daily newspaper based in Charlottetown, PEI. You will see that I added the pushback in Maine to the initial piece. Be sure to consider Dylan Wiliam’s detailed response because it adds immensely to the depth of discussion.
https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/opinion/opinion-schools-without-marks-264830/