Take the numbers off their pedestals
Figures are losing popularity. Lecturers give them less or sometimes even no more. "I saw students flourish."
Picture: Nina Maissouradze
Unsatisfactory. But also enough. Sanne Blauw (31) became insecure of both as a teenager in high school. Sevens weren't good enough for the perfectionist in her. Figures became an obsession for Sanne, a confirmation of her ability or a punishment for her failure.
Partly for this reason, the journalist and econometrician argues in her book The best-selling book ever for, attach slightly less importance to numbers. In society as a whole, including in schools, where it all started for her. Her mission: to put figures back in place. Not on a pedestal.
Less numbers
After the publication of her book, she received enthusiastic responses from teachers who had the guts to give their students fewer grades and make it less important.
Ingrid Berwald, maths teacher at the Lebanon Lyceum in Rotterdam, has recently started giving fewer grades. She used to give six figures per period, now there are three more. “We have quite a few students with one laid-backattitude, so we thought: Something has to change ”, she says. “We started it as a school in one fell swoop. It worked out really well for my subject: I saw students who normally all failed to pass grades flourish. Suddenly it was no longer a 5 or a 6. That was a relief to some, especially the insecure children. ”
Suddenly it was no longer about a 5 or a 6. Especially insecure children found that a relief
She also confesses that not all pupils and subjects were successful. “It started quite shockingly. The first test week, when grades were given for the first time in months, things went wrong. Many failures. Lots of crying children. Now we are trying to look at how we can better organize the lessons, so that in the end better grades are obtained, but those grades are still less important and are given less often. ”
Emotions
Speaking of crying children: that is exactly one of the effects that Saskia Bruyn, motivational psychologist and author of the book Of course, learn!, of horror. “In the perception of students, grades have two functions: a good grade is a reward, an unsatisfactory grade is a punishment, a settlement,” she says. “You can imagine what it feels like for a child who works very hard to continuously reach fours and fives. And even children who score high, such as the gifted and the perfectionist students, become insecure about a grade. Also of a satisfactory. "
Because if a 10 pass means that you understand everything, then an 8 or 9 says that you can do better. Even a 10 can evoke negative emotions. “With a 10, the bar is set super high, and next time you have to prove again that you are really that good. Figures have been made so important in education that children are stressed. ”
If a 10 pass means you understand everything, then an 8 or 9 means that you can do better
Motivation
We try to provide insight into the learning results with figures, says Bruyn. “Figures provide guidance to teachers and students. But with that a lot of information is lost. They say something about the outcome and not about how that outcome came about. While that is important for the student and teacher, it can be continued. Moreover, learning will only start making mistakes through trial and error. If your performance is always graded, then there is not enough room for those mistakes, which are so instructive. ”
Bruyn is convinced: both low and high grades lead to low motivation quality. "They both provide external motivation: the student's focus shifts from what he has to learn, to the grade that has to be achieved in order to achieve a pass mark and to eventually pass."
Tilt
Dominique Sluijsmans, professor of professional assessment at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and author of the book Test revolution, slowly and very slowly sees a shift in education. “Teachers see that motivation only follows success and that they lose students who score unsatisfactory after unsatisfactory. They can hardly be kept on track, while those children need extra support. ”
Teachers lose students who score unsatisfactory after unsatisfactory
But how do you do that: use fewer numbers? “You can't just ban grades at a school,” says Sluijsmans. “It doesn't work like that. Something like that goes very slowly, see it as a culture change. There is a different way of teaching in its place, in which grades are more indicative for teachers: that is how the students stand for it. The figures do not necessarily have to be communicated to the student and it depends less on it. ”
Delay
Sluijsmans does not argue for the abolition of figures, but for reducing them. “If your students take a test about new material to which a grade is attached after just two weeks, something is immediately at stake for them. While learning is a change in long-term memory. So you have to postpone the evaluation, a pass or fail, and let them make mistakes. ”
This happens with formative teaching. The teacher does not use tests or inventories to assess students, but formative, that is to say constructively as feedback to clarify which lesson material they still have to work on. Clear success criteria are important here, says Sluijsmans. “And you look at the quality of the work. Then it is not about numbers, but really about content. In this way, students find out what they don't know yet. ”
The feedback is not given at the end of a class period, but in the middle or at the beginning. At an evaluation moment an inventory is made: what do you know now, what do you want to know in four weeks? After that, in four weeks' time, the student will be checked again to see what the current situation is. Without a grade, but with substantive feedback. Not a quantitative assessment, but a qualitative one. In the form of words.
To repeat
Repeat a lot. Evaluate a lot. This is how math teacher Berwald describes her formative way of teaching. “The first ten minutes I always start the lesson with the question: What do you remember? And then we repeat that a few more times. ” Berwald mainly thinks that repeating works. “I have slightly higher grades, especially in my senior classes, while they had to learn and be able to do more for the test, because there were fewer interim tests. My students knew exactly what would be asked, while that test was not at all central in the lessons before. ” Formative teaching is also more fun, says the teacher. "You are more of a coach and less checking."
Berwald also feels that her students are less nervous about a test. “I always ask children to put a big Z for 'nervous' on the corner of their exam paper, if they are. And maybe it's a coincidence, but I really saw fewer Z's during the last week of testing. That is already profit for me. ”
