An earlier version of Turnitin.com. (Click for a related article.)
Another Tool in the Toolbox
The high school has bought us all subscriptions to Turnitin.com, so let’s experiment with it as a tool in our makerspace. Read on for a quick overview and the directions you’ll need to register for your class.
The original purpose of Turnitin.com was to check against plagiarism, which it still does better than any other site. The full suite of features is here: Turnitin for Secondary Education.
We’ll test some of these when/if you are asked to submit a writing response to Turnitin. The peer review options are especially interesting, although they may be redundant with Google Docs.
Regardless, you need an account to get started. Follow these instructions:
If you have an account, enter the login information, click “enroll in a class” and enter the Class ID and enrollment key. (If you have an account but have forgotten your password, click “Forgot your password?” and follow the instructions.)
If you do not have an account, click on the “Create Account” tab in the upper right corner.
Click on “Student” at the bottom of the page.
Enter the Class ID and Class enrollment key.
Enter your first and last name.
Choose the first option for how your name will be displayed.
Enter your BHS email address and confirm it.
Create a 6-12 character password and confirm it.
Choose and answer a secret question.
Click the “I’m not a robot” box and click “I Agree — Create Profile.”
The Class ID for each section will be distributed through Google Classroom. The enrollment key is always the same: tardigrade.
If you have any questions about using Turnitin, ask them in the comment section below.
2019-2020: Turnitin.com Registration Info
Reprinted here for 2019-2020. Find your period, copy the class ID and enrollment key, and register at Turnitin.com.
Class Name: P2 English 12
Class ID: 23156813
Enrollment Key: tardigrade
Class Name: P3 English 12
Class ID: 23156818
Enrollment Key: tardigrade
Class Name: P6 English 12
Class ID: 23156822
Enrollment Key: tardigrade
Class Name: P7 English 12
Class ID: 23156826
Enrollment Key: tardigrade
Class Name: P8 English 12
Class ID: 23156834
Enrollment Key: tardigrade
All test prep should be prefaced with a close reading of the following quotation:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
That is one of the two framing quotations on the front page of this instructional site, and it gets at the core philosophy of a makerspace: You learn by doing, and by thinking about thinking — being a “capable psychonaut,” as it’s called in this unit on akrasia and self-control.
Students in New York must pass the ELA Common Core Regents Exam to graduate high school. It’s a comprehensive exam, which means it is not explicitly tied to a single year of ELA instruction; in fact, it can be taken and retaken at any time, with permission1. All but a few of you will take it at the end of your junior year.
Whenever we do test prep, we are really performing triage — score-driven, teacher-assisted triage. We are also identifying strengths in order to promote a better form of feedback.
The practice discussed in this post comes from the ELA Common Core Regents Exam given in August of 2016. We will use Castle Learning.
Castle Learning has already been set up for each of you according to class period. If you are in a different situation (e.g., graduating early and needing to take the exam in January of what would have been your junior year), you will be added individually. You’ll need your Castle Learning login information, which you can get from any of your teachers. Here is the main site:
You will be helped through the registration process, if this is your first time using the service. Once you are registered, you’ll find these tasks have been assigned to you:
8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage A
8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage B
8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage C
8/16 Practice: Part 2
8/16 Practice: Part 3
For each of those, there is an additional CR — Constructed Response — that asks you to be metacognitive about your choices and performance. These metacognitive constructed responses are essential. They turn cursory work into meaningful work, and they force us to identify and analyze strengths and weaknesses.
For Part 1, which pairs close reading with multiple-choice questions, the metacognitive prompt is this:
Use teacher feedback, your peers, and the correct answers that are provided by Castle Learning to engineer an understanding of how these questions and answer choices work. Write metacognitively about the passage, the questions, and your problem-solving efforts.
For Part 2 and Part 3, which ask for writing responses, the metacognitive prompt is this:
Identify and analyze several writing choices you made in this response. You can focus on your use of detail, your arrangement, your central meaning, or your rhetorical manipulation of grammar and style.
Part 2 and Part 3 will be assigned to students through Castle Learning. There will be no corresponding Google Classroom assignment; scores and feedback will be given through Castle Learning itself. To receive feedback (and credit), the following five steps must be completed:
Write Part 2 and Part 3 by hand in the provided essay booklet.
Type Part 2 in Castle Learning, revising it as you type.
Write a thorough response to the metacognitive prompt about Part 2 in Castle Learning.
Type Part 3 in Castle Learning, revising it as you type.
Write a thorough response to the metacognitive prompt about Part 3 in Castle Learning.
The last step we will take is to look at exemplary student responses, which are provided by New York:
Additional Notes
Use this post to ask questions about the August 2016 exam. These questions can be related to procedure or to the passages, questions, and prompts. These comments will be used now and in the future to save students time.
Remember that this is a grade-abated assessment. Your score on each part of the practice exam is important, and you will be given that score. It does not factor into your GPA, however, because that score is not nearly as important as understanding the how and why of that score. Those of you who struggle on tests will focus on collaboration, growth, and metacognitive insight. Those of you who excel will focus on using metacognitive insight to help others reach your level.
Later this year, we’ll talk about score conversions, final scores, and the gamesmanship necessary for high-stakes exams. Here is a preview:
Our school has experimented with a few different options. For a couple of years, we gave the exam to sophomores, even having some sophomores take it in January. That was before the test was overhauled and brought in line with Common Core, though. ↩
Starting Wednesday, December 12, there will be a moratorium in our classroom on the use of any all devices (e.g., phones, tablets) except district-issued Chromebooks and personal laptops. There will also be a moratorium on choosing your own seats1.
We’ll review this together — hands-on, with liberal use of a whiteboard to define and detail certain points — but you may have questions or comments that require an interstitial forum like this one. Remember, too, that this site is for all stakeholders, not just students. Our conversation about technology is an inclusive one.
The most important note is probably this: moratorium refers to a pause or delay in action. It’s a temporary suspension. It isn’t a permanent ban. The second most important note is that you can be part of the conversation about technology use and learning. Start in the comment section here by asking questions, making observations, etc., so that I can reply to you.
Moratorium on Phones
Since smartphones are the most common distraction, “phone” is a placeholder for any device except district-issued Chromebooks or personal laptops.
If you want context for this moratorium, you’ll find it in the unit we did on self-control and self-discipline:
Self-control is one of the most important skills you can develop, so we’ve used the flexibility of the makerspace to give you opportunities to test your focus and discipline. Many students failed those tests.
That’s okay, at least in a larger sense. The purpose of that akrasia unit is, in part, to normalize the problem as a decidedly human one. In other words, we all struggle with self-control, distraction, procrastination, etc., and we all need to improve.
In a more immediate sense, we have to get these phones out of students’ hands. There are, of course, academic reasons to have a phone, and this site is designed to be read on the smaller screens. But those academic reasons continue outside of school. You’d use your phone interstitially, as intended, when you are making the choice to learn, create, question, etc., in an academic sense.
In class, the phone is too much of a distraction. We’ve tested it for three months now, and the rate of improvement is too slow. I imagine that this moratorium will remain in place for a long time.
All we’re doing now is keeping you in those start-of-period assigned seats until the bell. You need the separation to get work done. We’ll obviously make exceptions when it comes to group projects, but this is otherwise about isolating you from distractions.
It needs to be clarified that collaboration is the stuff of growth, which is why we start the year there; simply being in a group, however, is not proof of collaboration. Being in proximity to other students is just being in proximity to them. Collaboration refers to what you produce. When members of our group fail to stay on task in their chosen groups, it helps to assign seats.
We Have Work to Do
All of this is predicated on the obvious: You have work to do. You are in a makerspace, and that means there is always more work to do. Even that last link proves its own point, because it would take a while to read that entire lecture and process its ideas.
Right now, as the winter holidays approach, you need to be more focused than ever. In every course, the end of your first Pareto Project process requires the following:
Below is the version of our grade abatement profiles that was affixed to each workstation earlier this week. The color-coded tiers may help you to maintain focus. You shift into the red by ignoring directions and disengaging from the work, and the more you resist, the more you build evidence of those lower tiers. In other words, refusing to focus, especially in the particular way you are being directed to focus, is enough by itself to lower your profile and grade.
With the possible exception of the AP classes. This is based on group dynamics, which is really about a kind of herd immunity, and AP students have earned a few days to prove they have the requisite discipline to choose their own seats. The moratorium on phones applies to everyone, though, which says something about the addiction we’re dealing with. ↩
I want to be completely honest and open. I am absolutely BAFFLED by this SWOT Analysis. I have no idea what my strengths are, I don’t know how to organize this information, I don’t know what questions to answer because the article that was given is mostly work related and it confuses me.
Even if I could come up with my strengths, I don’t know how to word them properly. I don’t exactly understand how I can explain my own strengths and weaknesses, I think sometimes my weaknesses are that I do not use my strengths to the full extent that I can. Why I do that? I don’t have the answer to that. What strengths am I limiting myself in using? I also don’t have the answer to that.
Every website I look up only further confuses me, and they are all ad-ridden and barely load. I am truly baffled, that is the only word I can use to describe my current state. I really don’t understand this at all. I think one of my weaknesses is SWOT analyzing.
Thank you for reading in advance,
[Anonymous]
My Reply: 8:09 AM
One of your strengths is amenability, which includes asking for help like you have here. You’re also self-aware enough to admit when you’re confused or lost — a real strength, especially when so many folks feel pressure to be perfect all the time.
To adapt a SWOT analysis to academics — to student life — you need to think about school as a company. Its products are the students themselves. More specifically, it’s about work to produce that student. Your job is to make yourself.
Think of strengths and weaknesses in terms of GAP skills and traits. Those are universal. They apply to everything — so much so that we were able to draw analogies yesterday, using those universal skills and traits, between our work and everything from soccer to waitressing to playing in a band. Use that language. Look at your amenability, assiduousness, self-efficacy, etc., and recognize that you absolutely have strengths from that list.
Then recognize that strengths and weaknesses are elements you control. That’s the distinction that works best for me: a strength can be honed, and a weakness can be mitigated. We control those, at least to a certain extent. Opportunities, on the other hand, are of our control. So are threats. All we can do is prepare for them, taking advantage of opportunities and navigating threats.
In our class, you have the opportunity to write me like you have here, and you’ll get immediate feedback. That’s outside of your control; if I don’t check my email, or if I never invite you to work interstitially in the first place, you can’t force it to happen. But you can take advantage of the opportunity that is there. Similarly, you can’t do anything about this holiday break. For five days (since today, Wednesday, isn’t a full day of school), you don’t have face-to-face time with your peers and me in this makerspace. That’s a threat to continuity, momentum, and the best kind of feedback, which is always given in person. You can’t change the calendar. But you can reach out, as you have, for interstitial help.
Which brings me to your most obvious strength: critical thinking and metacognition. Look at the set of universal skills and traits, which pair those and frame them in terms of “problem-solving in an authentic context.” It also says that “you strive to make that thinking as transparent as possible.” That’s what you’ve done by sending an email: You’ve made your thinking transparent, asked the kinds of questions that lead to helpful feedback, and opened yourself up to further critical thinking and metacognition. That’s a real strength! It is, in fact, the most important strength to have, when you feel lost or confused. It’s easy to dodge responsibility — out of embarrassment or frustration or fear — and blame others. It’s much harder to do what you’ve done, which is to communicate effectively in writing in order to get help.
And just look at that last sentence: You’ve demonstrated strength in effective communication, writing (especially the idea of “mak[ing] thinking clear”), amenability, and self-awareness. All through a single email.
If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take your name off of your email and use it, alongside my response, as an example for all students. That, too, gets at a strength: collegiality and empathy. You have strength in both, and this would be another way for you to demonstrate, as anonymously as you choose, the “[e]mpathy [that] animates and facilitates the collaborative environments that drive innovation.” That, too, is from the list of universal skills and traits.
Thank you for reaching out,
Mr. Eure
Student’s Reply: 8:16 AM
Thank you very much for your timely response!
This helps a lot, especially with comparing a school to a company. That makes the questions on the link you provided in the instructional post make much more sense. I would be okay with you using the email as an example, I always find that others student’s emails and your responses help me understand things more clearly and I would want to be able to provide the same for my peers.
To create the best version of you, you must become an expert in your own learning. You’ve done a considerable amount of metacognitive work already, but there is always more to do. This time, we’re looking to expand your “network of possible wanderings,” a term used by Teresa Amabile to define expertise:
If you’re reading this as a student, it’s likely because you are being asked to complete an activity like a SWOT analysis or a blueprint for a passion project. There is sometimes a question about when, in our makerspace, we will get to the so-called “real work” of English. This is a response to that question, and it is written to help even those who already know the answer.
The TL:DR is that the makerspace is dedicated to building habits and developing substructural skills and traits. English is about reading, thinking, and writing; you’ve been immersed in the Humanities since you entered the room. We must occasionally focus on a skill or trait in order to better read a novel or write an essay. We must dedicate the time to putting those skills and habits of mind into practice.
When any teacher using the makerspace remarks that a student’s work is insufficient, that really means that the work is not substantial enough to garner feedback. Often this remark is made in person; occasionally, it is flipped online as part of general feedback.
The trick, if there is one, is that students don’t need to be told when work is insufficient. They need only self-awareness, integrity, and a post or two like the one you’re reading now.
Time Enough
The point of a makerspace is to create something meaningful. Look at this section of our skills and traits:
This is the reading/thinking/writing of all learning. Many assignments in English, of course, focus on writing, and with good reason:
Writing gets us at the truth, and sometimes the capital-T Truth, while making our understanding clearer and our learning more permanent. The writing must be substantial, as a result, which is why students are always given enough time, in and out of class, to do their work.
This goes hand-in-gnarled-hand with the lecture-as-instruction-post on working harder, because all work in our space needs to reflect the time allotted to it. This isn’t subjective. In a grade-abated course, it’s more like a sorites paradox: when a heap becomes a heap. It’s obvious when the work is substantial.
What follows are examples based on common English assignments.
Example: Essential Questions
Essential questions are a staple of English classrooms. They invite us to consider timeless issues, personal beliefs, and societal norms. The most common assignment, at least at first, is to respond freely to the questions — to write, for a class period or more, without worrying about anything but getting ideas down.
Here is a set of essential questions used in several units in our space:
To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us? In other words, would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable?
To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
In what ways are any of us ever truly alone?
To what extent are people naturally self-destructive? What does it mean if we are?
At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?
These seven questions were assigned to a junior-level English class on October 31, 2018. Students had three days in class to write, with encouragement to expand on their ideas at home.
Here is an example of insufficient work:
Here is another example of insufficient work:
It is not obvious to every student, without context, that these responses are insufficient. The questions are answered, and the assignment is checked off. But a single response to those questions ought to be this long:
Notice that writing more led this student to something interesting. That’s the power of an essential question: Writing more almost always leads to something more interesting. Writing more almost always justifies the effort.
Example: Short Essays
What if the prompt asks for an essay? In October of 2018, students in various classes were given a series of prompts based on this instructional post.
Here’s what is possible with one day of writing and a day to finish at home:
The point of an essay, sometimes, is to practice the act of writing. It’s to prepare for a discussion. It’s to freeze understanding. 850+ words is possible, and the more often a student pushes toward saying more, the more possible it becomes.
This is also acceptable:
That’s the comment I left, too, to highlight this point: A short essay can be 800 words or much shorter, but it has to look like an essay. It has to have a purpose and a shape. It needs to have a reason to exist beyond the assignment.
This is not an essay:
There is one original sentence in that. The rest is quoted material. That quoted material could be turned into something, though, and that’s the real loss: More substantial writing would almost certainly produce an opportunity for feedback. That the subject of these essays is akrasia and procrastination just highlights the problem.
Here’s another example:
I’m using this to highlight my response to the student. They’ve taken issue with the number, as you can see, but that number has context only through the copious instructions and explanations here. This is also a common refrain: that substance ought to trump length, and that writing just to pad the length is a bad practice. It is. But for most of us, there’s a simple truth: Substance almost always comes from length.
Writing succinctly is a goal. Brevity with precise insight is a goal. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to reach that goal. A half-page essay that mostly summarizes an article has not reached that goal. Writing more, when the assignment asks for it, is a way to garner more feedback and better direction for the writing. The point is to get feedback, improve, and work toward being succinct and precise. It’s the rarest student who excels at that from the start.
If this is not the first time you’ve read that instructional post, read it again. Notice that reading it carefully takes a while, even though it is relatively short. There are hyperlinks, handouts, reviews of course fundamentals, and so on. If you’re reading it during class, that post alone might take you half the period.
That’s the point. In fact, that’s always the point: This takes time. And I’m going to keep saying and writing this, because no theory developed in this space has ever been more solid and more substantiated:
If you work from the moment you enter the room until the moment the bell rings to send you somewhere else, you will be successful.
First Reason: Your GAP Score
The most obvious reason for this is that you are assessed every three weeks or so on on how well you focus. That expectation is all over the profiles and skills and traits we use, and it’s been made even more transparent in the GAP scoring guides updated each year . The first thing you self-assess is your in-class focus.
In fact, every aspect of the GAP scoring process is simple and straightforward, and it all ties back to using your class time effectively. It is not a complicated idea, and it cannot be made any more straightforward for you. It’s also not a particularly unique request. You should be working hard when you’re in every classroom.
That said, let’s be clear that I am not saying that you must have perfect focus. No one is asking you to work so hard that you collapse. What we’re talking about is the really obvious foray into being off task. Not for a moment, but for a lot of moments. Significantly. Obviously.
And if you can’t do your job on a particular day, you need to advocate for yourself immediately so that accommodations can be made. That’s the other thing. If there’s some reason you’re not able to do the work required of you for these 40 minutes, that’s okay. All it takes is a little transparency and respect. You just have to ask.
Second Reason: A Self-Fulfilling Loop
Now let’s talk about the deeper purpose behind telling you to work from bell to bell. If you know that you have to keep working, you’re going to have to find something to keep working on. You’re going to have to fill the time productively. The quest to fill the time will lead to success.
Example: You’ve started an in-class writing response that should take the entire period and probably some time at home. You finish after 10 minutes. You wrote something. You submitted it. You’re done.
But you’re not done. You know that, because you know you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what. If you don’t know what else to write, ask for help. Solicit feedback from your peers. Print a copy of your writing and edit its grammar and mechanics.
It’s a simple but profound shift at how you look at “finishing“ an assignment. With the same example: It takes you 37 minutes to finish writing, and you have only three minutes left. You decide to pack up, because you just wrote for 37 minutes. You check social media and load a game, because you’ve worked hard enough.
Instead, you should spend the last three minutes looking over your work for typos. You could do a cursory edit of the piece in 60 seconds. Or you could plan out the evening. You might spend three minutes organizing what you want to look at that night. You keep working, because you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what.
However long you think you’ve needed to finish, you must fill the rest of the time productively. The second you disengage from the class and do literally anything else, you have failed the most basic requirement of the room.
Again, and I say this with empathy, it’s not open for debate. You have such extraordinary freedom to navigate the requirements of this course that — including the ability to advocate for a break! — that you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what.
If you remind yourself as you walk in that you have to be productive for the entire 40 minutes, you will be more vigilant. Your focus will follow, and your work will improve exponentially. You’ll be asking more questions, working with more peers, writing more, reading more, constantly seeking the next step.
This is how you fit the top profiles. In fact, the default action when you truly have no idea what else to do with yourself is to reflect and be metacognitive. You could do that with any assignment, any bit of feedback, any post, any central text — anything, at any time, is open to that kind of writing.
Those are interactive or instructional guides to how students should spend the class period. Face-to-face time is strongly correlated with whichever profile is eventually correct. To a sometimes surprising extent, staying actively engaged in class is all it takes; the rest of the learning process is almost a logical consequent of that investment and focus.
These correspond to posters on the walls and handouts available throughout the room. If your question is, “What should I do next?” there is a way to answer it for yourself. You could also use the explicit, still-relevant outlines in this instructional essay.
There’s always more to read, something to re-read, and a chance to learn. What I will add now is an answer to the question of what to do next that focuses solely on what is available online. What to do:
Read any and all recent instructional posts again and again, looking for something new to learn each time.
Ask questions about those instructional posts online, in a way that will bring other students back to see the answers.
Do the same things — read carefully and repeatedly, ask questions — with our ongoing discussion posts.
The point of all this interstitial content is to invite you into an ongoing interaction with your overall learning habits, not just the content of this course. That’s why the third option in that list — a list that is just a fraction of what you can do to fill your time — refers to these posts:
When in doubt, go back to those discussions. They are ongoing. They should bridge courses, grade levels, even entire school years. Those are the discussion we need to have, repeatedly, to understand ourselves and our learning environment.
Students who attend class regularly, complete their assignments, and listen to feedback can use that document for an evidentiary evaluation of their work. One of the only additional lectures or texts that is emphasized is this clarification of the process:
The rest of this post more thoroughly explores grade abatement, offering the history and reasoning behind the shift. There is a Guide to Stakeholder Involvement that covers feedback and instruction; this post is more specifically about assessment, although every aspect of the learning environment is involved.
This is an attempt to explain how we accomplish the “collective human judgment informed by evidence“ that Tony Wagner has described as fundamental to 21st-century learning. It’s an explanation of how we can transform assessment so totally that the toxic effects of grades are almost entirely gone1.
You can learn more about what a Humanities makerspace is, and how it helps prepare students for their futures, through any of the menus and pages on this site, Sisyphean High. Most of what you’ll find is ramiform or branch-like, too, by design; so you will see the same links and materials repeated.
The primary inspiration for grade abatement, again, is Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades,” which can be read here. Dozens of other folks much smarter than me further inspired it, but it was that 2011 article that started the shift.
Early iterations of grade abatement discuss the impossibility of eliminating grades. Over time, the process has evolved from using one profile to reflect an entire quarter to using a metaphorical triptych, or three-panel picture, of the student:
Each “panel” corresponds to three weeks of a nine-week quarter, which is roughly 15 class meetings. The assessment process used every three weeks is outlined here:
This is, in essence, another TL;DR. That step-by-step guide includes the skills and traits we evaluate, the profiles that collect evidence into a picture of each student’s growth and progress, and directions for evaluating the evidence we collect. A lengthier breakdown is below (including even more copies of that document).
The GAP Assessment Process
All profile-based, grade-abated assessment starts with self-assessment. Students complete a form that guides them through an evaluation of the evidence they have produced in the indicated time frame. That self-assessment is then checked against the teacher’s observations and the evidence gathered through normal assignments. Then the teacher and student collaborate on selecting the appropriate profile.
The process is evidentiary and precise, because the profiles, skills, and traits are evidentiary and precise. It is about fact-finding and analysis, not “giving” a grade, as one of the earlier clarifications of the method explains. There is an objective reality to a student’s work. We can find it, if we are honest and collegial enough, and sometimes the process of becoming honest and collegial enough is just as important as the accuracy of that profile.
When a form is posted at the end of an assessment panel to Google Classroom, it can be completed by the students in or out of class. The necessary knowledge and understanding (e.g., the profiles, skills, and traits) are included as links or images within that form itself. In addition, the most important handouts are always posted alongside the self-assessment assignment and photocopied in class:
Those three are the crux of ongoing self-assessment and self-understanding. The middle one (which is helpfully bolded) is, again, the step-by-step process, and it is nearly enough by itself. If I had to add any more documents to the list of what is absolutely necessary, it would be these:
Those are interactive or instructional guides to how students should spend the class period. Face-to-face time is strongly correlated with whichever profile is eventually correct. To a sometimes surprising extent, staying actively engaged in class is all it takes; the rest of the learning process is almost a logical consequent of that investment and focus.
The guides and posts that follow are most useful to stakeholders who want an even better understanding of how this all works and why it is so important. All students need an understanding of at least what precedes this sentence to be successful; what follows will only deepen that success, as all investment in the learning environment does.
Skinner Unboxing
For most students, the greatest difficulty is controlling the Skinner-box part of the brain:
That post is from 2017, but it applies, still, to all students. There is no judgment here. We are all wired to react to immediate gratification. It’s human nature. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), a person’s ability to delay gratification early in life is strongly linked to success later in life.
That last link is to a study published in 2018. Similar studies are done each year. The most famous exploration of this theory is probably the “marshmallow test” first conducted in 1972:
That video documents a recreation of the original experiment, and it makes the conclusions obvious. We all feel like those children, to some extent, every time we face a test of our self-control.
Of course, the marshmallow test isn’t a perfect study. It’s more useful as a metaphor: We all struggle with delayed gratification, and we all benefit from self-control. That might be no more obvious than in school, where traditional grading doles out a reward or punishment almost immediately. School weaponizes that desire for immediate gratification. Students are trained early on to motivate themselves in reaction to threats and prizes, so to speak.
Experimentation and risk are more difficult habits to develop in that kind of Skinner box. And it seems that what students learn most in the system is how to game that system:
Her story is common in a system built on instant gratification. What’s less common is how honest and self-aware Elif Koc is in detailing how the pursuit of grades — of instant gratification — forced her to be dishonest and insincere about her learning.
What does grade abatement do to combat this? First, it delays the score enough that students need perspective and self-awareness to make sense of the number. Second, it bases that score on profiles, and the profiles on objective evidence of universal skills and traits. Third, it lets students make their learning choices in an environment of ongoing, collaborative feedback. The elimination of the immediate grade moves all stakeholders into a better state of mind, psychologically and academically.
New Numbers
It’s also very much about using the traditional, 100-point number system in a new way. Those scores can’t be eliminated from public education, which means we’re always going to end the assessment process with a number.
I recognize, by the way, that there needs to be systemic change, but it’s nearly impossible to believe there will be systemic change. The system is too bloated with mandates and political money, and that all happens far away from the frontlines. So it’s about using the lingua franca here — 100-point grades — and forcing those numbers to mean something different. We can abate the toxic effect of grades by gutting them and building in more authentic and meaningful machinery.
And we can do that because the surface-level heuristic can stay. High scores indicate success in ways we all agree matter; low scores indicate failure in ways we all agree matter. What changes is the specific feedback the number conveys to folks willing to invest in unpacking it. Low-information stakeholders still receive useful feedback, but high-information users are able to unpack a GAP score precisely and consistently. That’s what even this early guide explains. There is no black-box logic.
What’s most interesting, actually, is that the guide hyperlinked in that last paragraph makes the mistake of leaning too much into the heuristic. The profile indicated for a GAP score of 10, for instance, which was converted into a gradebook score of 100, isn’t clear or actionable. It indicates only that a 100 is perfection, which makes the pursuit of a 100 the pursuit of perfection. The sixth section of notes from this update talk about why that had to change.
We can’t base our reasoning and feedback on the number. The final number is, instead, code for the more meaningful and consistent profile. That’s the most important thing: The score is what unlocks other, more useful feedback. The score can be unpacked into a profile, and the language of that profile is precise enough to be unpacked and connected directly to the universal skills and traits we value.
Then it’s a simple matter of going over the formal work that was assigned, the informal steps taken to finish that work, and the collaborative, metacognitive, and individualized efforts we can identify and corroborate. All of that evidence-gathering is made 100% transparent through Google Classroom, the instructional website, and many other online and interstitial mechanisms.
Which means that a student’s accurate GAP score every few weeks provides actionable feedback all by itself. There is other feedback, of course, but the number is now useful. To an extent, we’ve turned the system against itself; the number now tells us something consistent and actionable, which means it should lose most of its Skinner-box shock.
Moreover, any stakeholder can use that number to enter the learning environment, because there is no weighting, no shifting percentages, no question of how many points were lost here or there. The number tells us exactly how to decode the experience.
What’s It Take?
What’s it take to implement grade abatement? For students, it really only requires accepting the idea that the score is based on evidence. There is nothing subjective about it. Errors in collecting or reporting evidence will occur, but those can be fixed; this is a fact-finding mission, not an argumentative one.
Each profile corresponds to a period of time, and we want a clear, collaborative assessment of that period. It takes self-awareness and amenability to do that:
Discrepancies between a student’s self-assessment and their actual profile happen because of human nature. It is human nature to avoid uncomfortable truths. The Dunning-Kruger effect happens for almost all of us at some point in our lives:
For others, it’s a constant battle against imposter syndrome:
That’s why grade abatement leans on Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” We are after truth, nothing else. The profile and its attached number have to tell us that truth, because that is the only way we can continue to grow and learn. If we could eliminate numbers entirely from the equation, that would be perfect; because we can’t, we have to weaponize those numbers as another way of confronting our assumptions, our expectations, our egos, and our fears.
This is also why the delay between the work students do and a score is such a critical delay. It’s no longer about immediate reward or punishment. Learning is now about each choice, the context of that choice, and the student’s ability to understand and react to that choice. This quotation, from the first guide to grade abatement, puts it like so:
The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up
with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:
Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn
through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?
That’s from Part III of that guide, which is worth reading in full, and not just because it’s the first attempt at codifying grade abatement. It’s also worth seeing that the early guides were written for college-level classes, which makes them somewhat less accessible to all levels now. There is also a more negative tone at work in the writing. Because it’s not just about “disrespect, disengagement, or failure”; the good choices we make build up over time, too, and make us into better versions of ourselves. Those good choices matter. The true purpose of a Humanities makerspace is to build ourselves into better people.
Old Ones
I’ve mentioned “old” guides to grade abatement a few times. This process started with what Alfie Kohn calls “de-grading” back in 2010, so there are hundreds of essays, handouts, posts, etc., about grade abatement. Every iteration is instructive, and most of the philosophical and even practical components have stayed the same over time. This is, to a large extent, about the evolution of the idea, not just its current form.
This history is probably most useful as a guide for how to shift away from traditional assessment. It contains attempts to counter misinformation, for instance, like this early explainer that was written for interested stakeholders. I don’t know that it’s necessary for every stakeholder to invest their time into reading all of it, but there’s value in the process. With that in mind, the materials below weave together a picture of what grade abatement does and doesn’t do.
These three guides are somewhat outdated, but they’re also foundationally important:
The following two posts are examples of iterative assessment and changes over time — i.e., of how grade abatement has changed in response to feedback and student needs:
That last one is a likely candidate for a complete rewrite. We need a static place for questions about grade abatement.
Here is another post that, while locked in time to a particular set of expectations and a particular set of students, provides a good example of what we continue to do:
We could continue for a while, unearthing old posts and essays, but we’ll end here, with a particular detailed look at how much evidence goes into every profile:
That post has a wealth of data — really, just an ungodly amount of it — as an example of how deep the assessment process can and often does go. That’s also the post to read for a sense of the potential for responsive feedback. When a student asks for it or needs it, that’s the level of feedback available; and as this post carefully details, that kind of student investment and student responsibility is critical
In fact, responsiveness might be the operative word for grade abatement. A stakeholder who reads only the TL;DR at the top of this post would still be able to suss out a student’s performance, especially with the importance placed on in-class focus and feedback. But the more any stakeholder invests in learning about the process, the more the learning environment will open up. That goes for students, of course, but also for parents and other stakeholders.
This is precisely why an older version of this website used the term umwelt in its URL: Each individual experiences the same environment in different ways, and that is by design. (Read more about the concept of umwelt here, through the medium of a particular smart webcomic: 1037: Umwelt – explain xkcd.) The folks who push themselves to learn more do learn more. Grade abatement honors that without requiring it of all students.
And since I always link to Alfie Kohn in these explanations, here is another article on the subject. Head to Google for more. There are plenty, because the toxicity of grades is among the most obvious problems in public education. ↩
