Teachers know that report cards have one function, to convey how a student is performing in school. Report cards are known to be a magic amalgamation of “grades” and “subjective observations,” not fact. Or, at least based on facts grouped with so many other arbitrary factors they could easily be called mere opinions. Needless to say, a child’s report card today is an abstract indicator of learning progress and success (or not) —a set of very brief symbols attempting to represent a whole person.
Can you sum up a student in a few symbols? That is the question we have to ask. The answer is resoundingly, no, of course not. But is it necessary to have some measurements and communication that parents and students understand.
All of corporate America has been into measuring things since, well, always. And because of this, moms and dads since the Boomers expect to see their kid measured by our education systems in the same way, especially since this generation of learners is the most tested in the history of U.S. public education. How else can they know their child is succeeding, or not?
It’s time to revisit the “report” of the report card.
In this age of technology and our transition to digital curriculum in schools, let’s take a look at a fresh way to measure our students. Why, you ask? With a digitally enhanced ability to measure things, and the human interpretation of the significance of things, it is time to implement a system to give a true and accurate report card. One that is a logical balance between these two factors of human/teacher interpretation and a standardized, performance-based measurement of results garnered through interaction with systems of digital curriculum and content.
Digitally Enhanced Measurement
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Human Interpretation & Significance
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Workability of Report Cards
With greater sophistication of the intakes—all the ways a student can be followed and measured and observed—we can see the argument for common sense plus humanity. Without that, what do report cards become? Just one big confusion of numbers for children, thus leaving parents to simply hope the system is working.
No, the answer is to come up with a measuring system that works, utilizing the technology and advanced analytics we have at our fingertips.
To do this, let’s start by first taking a look back.
History of the Report Card
Originally, report cards were accountings of the number of memorizations done in school. Later, a scale of satisfactoriness versus unsatisfying behavior were given check-marks by subject and the teacher made exhaustive comments on each student. SeeYoutube video on History of the Report Card for a history from LearningMatters.tv.
Still later the scale went missing and a more black-and-white checkmark was given either to Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. A student was either/or and there was no in-between. Or comments by teachers.
In the early 1900’s, in some trade schools students were not allowed to get their diplomas until they demonstrated proficiency in their field. See: History of the Report Card - Tradeschool in New York.
Jump forward to the 1980’s and report cards had become machine-generated and barely-understandable. Scores were being handed out in some places that had little actual meaning except to insiders in the school. What these cards did do was at least give the impression of some sort of learning occurring and that the student showed up enough to get scored by the machine. Now in the 2010’s, parents are viewing this same non-informative information, just via the Internet.
Common-Core and Modern Grading
Today we have come full-circle and the whole of the Common Core and standards in general are aimed at the idea of proficiency. Does a report card speak to proficiency? Does it show learning? Does it show anything demonstrable?
The question is, do we have a way today to make the report card more valuable to all concerned? Is there a way to show achievement of proficiency in a way that communicates student achievement when it arrives as a report to the student and their family?
Why Question the Value of our Current Report Cards?
Translating effort-in-learning into an abstract does not convey the amount of time, effort, advancement of skill, or the ability to apply a subject in real life. Everyone knows this and yet it still goes on – why?
We are still doing this as a society, because teachers, who are only human after all, are not universally capable of writing summary comments for all students while appearing helpful and not derogatory. Additionally, parents are not universally capable of receiving criticism, even when it is helpful for their child. The answer to this conundrum has been to simply boil everything down to a number or letter, or “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory.” It’s less personal.
In this fantastic age of technology and potential of human advancement, we’re madly driving towards more personalization of learning for students while remaining as impersonal as possible on the outcomes. And, given the high stakes associated with these impersonal outcomes, such as making it into the college or university of your dreams, shouldn’t we grow a better system so that we allow true human potential to show through 13 years of education rather than just an overall average of effort?
Digital Potentials
Today’s technologies can review a student’s timing and recognition of concepts at a speed and depth that individual teachers just cannot do because of myriad responsibilities that do not allow them to measure with such unbiased accuracy. With higher technology we are now capturing eye movement and using “neurodeterminism” to figure out how much or how little active concentration is occurring. This is used to adapt lessons to each individual student.
In fact gaming programs—both consumer and education oriented—use human input for direct adaptation of programming all the time. The intentions of these things are positively directed at aiding a student in real time, in a risk-free environment where repetition is an expected outcome for mastery of skills needed to advance. Learning occurs, skills are acquired, and all in a positive, non-punitive, measurable and virtual environment.
New technologies in educational curriculum and content provide such game-like environments. These digital learning environments are offering insight into student effort that are not subjective and give greater depth of insight. Thus, reports of progress can have greater contextualization and color about the outcomes of student effort when learning.
It is important to remember, also, that all measuring and testing is subject to spoofing. As chronicled in the book “The Report Card,” a 5th-grader gets all students to intentionally fail and get bad grades, apparently because she was super smart.
To summarize, the problems are over generalized amalgamations that do not communicate specifics and are impersonal. Instead of the checklist of random attributes or a meaningless “average,” digital curriculum and content systems could offer a personalized commentary on a students’ achievement by actually “showing it.”
New digital solutions for these problems can be found in:
1. Open and frequent interfaces,
2. Machine generated timing and attention statistics,
3. Grades/Numerals as per usual, but now with more meaning such as percent
of time demonstrating consistent mastery of a standard,
4. Snap-shot video to “show” proficiency and engagement.
One of the ways to give students and parents more confidence that learning is happening, and feedback on exactly what is happening, is open access to online student information systems. Parents and students can confidentially access real-time dashboards to monitor progress.
Reminders of this should go out with the Report Cards.
Our New World of Opportunity
School districts transitioning to greater use of digital curriculum and content have a new opportunity and ability to gather information about student learning. Rate of work, rate of progress, benchmarks achieved, words read, words written, time on task, accomplishments, barriers to progress, are all types of measures that can reported by sophisticated digital learning platforms that are on, or coming into, the marketplace.
These types of learning/student accomplishment data are what teachers see when their students interact with a learning system. If systems include pre-testing as to things like reading levels and counts of books being read and minor measurements of time-spent, a more complete “picture” can be delivered in graphs and statistics. This is the theory that “more is better” and where students and parents are concerned, it has definite value. It would give a feedback loop showing a routine stream of information and progress based on variables from educational research benchmarks.
One can easily argue that such systems still beg the fact of the quality of the education. But at least grades at the end are shown to have had some foundation in fact that can be followed by students and parents. In addition, this new system of reports would create a basis for which parents and students could positively argue for better grades if need be.
A View of the Future
Seeing is believing, so capturing the good works and bad-works of students with potentially the same “tagging” of faces just like Facebook does to label pictures with your friends’ names could be put into video clips to create automated compendiums for parents and students. This may be the way to remove the onus of student evaluation comments by teachers that have nearly died off completely due to the low-acceptance level of parents.
Discretely done and minimized into short recounting, this “showing” instead of telling could be the thing that helps ensure parental involvement. The trick will be using these clips to reinforce the good and minimize the bad. We will need to remember that we get far more from our children and students the more we validate, the more we reward the positive.
If we “reward” bad behavior with too much attention, we will get more of it. Studies will have to be done on that exact crux – what ratio of “show” for time in any video Report Card is dedicated to the “good” and how much time to the “bad.” That ratio should be a matter of science.
Initially it is probably the same ratio a good parent would spend with any child they love:
At least 90% is spent on validation and building up of the child and
10% or less is spent on correction and pointing out what needs to change.
In other words, the indicators of student learning and progress inside the classroom are evolving and can evolve further for the digital transition to be complete. But the “Report Card” mechanism for conveying progress may not be tied in to these technologies.
We have a great future in front of us with the opportunity to use technology for better reporting and evaluating student’s progress in learning.
