Do students learn less when they focus on getting good grades?

@Herbarius: Okay

edited 26th Oct '10 11:27:10 AM by GiantSpaceChinchilla

Of course learning is fun, that's why we are here, memorizing thousands of esoteric trope titles, and Gratuitous Japanese terms.

But learning history, math, or biology, isn't necessarily fun for everyone.

edited 26th Oct '10 11:46:13 AM by EternalSeptember

I'm fairly confident that if it was not taught in the way it's taught, I would have a much better understanding of every subject my school teaches me (even math, which I am terrible at).

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

I meant to say in my earlier post, but forgot, that when I got into history class, my grades suffered because 90% of it was memorizing the date this happened or the name of that important person. If I need to know the exact date of Catherine the Great's death, I can look it up. That's what reference materials are for, unless I've got ambitions to be a contestant on Jeopardy.

edited 26th Oct '10 11:53:05 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I actually excelled in my History class last year, because there was so little memorization (my final grade was a 96, or A+, I believe) it was more "this happened here and this is why", kind of thing. It was the only class last year I got a final grade higher than 70 in.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

"I meant to say in my earlier post, but forgot, that when I got into history class, my grades suffered because 90% of it was memorizing the date this happened or the name of that important person. If I need to know the exact date of Catherine the Great's death, I can look it up. That's what reference materials are for, unless I've got ambitions to be a contestant on Jeopardy."

It's rather interesting. We're stuck in a a work program designed for Prussian industiral workers, and expecting it to apply to the modern workplace. This difference is just getting starker and it's going to be fascinating to see which countries addapt fast enough. Compare somewhere like the UK (actually some of the best tests in the world for basing it more on ability to make conections, and lateral thinking - which is amazing to me, because we're terrible at that compared to the focus upon memorisation) to Japan (tremendous focus upon rote memorisation).

We're poorly equiping students for the modern world, and thanks to the increasing focus upon grades we're letting smart kids slip through the gaps, which can put them in dead end jobs. I do some work with gifted and talented kids, and a decent percentage of them get mediocre grades simply because the systems failing them.

The lucky ones get to Uni do okay and get snapped up by certain graduate schemes, which are more after raw talent. Transport for London for example, would be an excellent example of such, who were famous in the post war period for being an equals opportunity employer - and getting and retaining minority (read, not white) candidates who had done merely okay at school - but had great potential.

I would imagine we'll see a move towards this, but little in the education system itself because whilst easy to point out its many, many failures, it's very difficult to come up with solutions - which can be objectivley measured. Just look at how poorly dyslexics for example do (they tend to be much better at lateral thinking), despite a real push to help them adapt to our education system.

"When you cut your finger, I do not bleed." Response of a man who lived on the outskirts of a concentration camp.

^There are a lot of solutions out there promoted by different progressive educators. They're just being ignored in favor of Charter Schools, because semi-privatization is the same thing as pedagogy reform.

@Desetropa: Has Lewsswrong generated something quotable on every topic of nerdy interest?

'''YOU SEE THIS DOG I'M PETTING? THAT WAS COURAGE WOLF.Cute, isn't he?

Grades are okay to show what a person can regurgitate. I'm okay with that because it makes sense to impart a certain amount of knowledge to people and using them properly helps. Class time isn't even close to a good measure of ability because most instructors can barely teach, hence standardization.

Fight smart, not fair.

Dates in histiry are important because after you start collecting them the plots A B C D etc start making sense, and you see interesting patterns emerging. It gives you a lot of perspective on what shit was like at any given time for any given citizen/subject/slave/Talking Poo.

'''YOU SEE THIS DOG I'M PETTING? THAT WAS COURAGE WOLF.Cute, isn't he?

Exact dates aren't that useful. Which is what's most commonly put in the lesson plans. I think the order of usefulness of knowledge is: What, Why  ^*

, How, When, Where, ... Who. I think the phrase "events are important, people are trivial" is an accurate statement on how history books should be written.

Fight smart, not fair.

That's the real problem. As long as we have any kind of standard that school should cover certain topics, which I think we should, there will be someone who doesn't want to be learning about that, and who will therefore not pay attention or participate unless there's another incentive. I don't think holding back the bright, self-motivated students is really the major problem schools face—I was bored as hell in school, so I drew comics in all my workbooks and then wrote a novel.

Did you mean tests? Because a lot of classes have participation grades. And however much one might grumble about grades, you need some way of evaluating whether learning is happening.

Bottomline: You can't just release students into the school and say "Go! Be free as a bird!" and expect the joy of learning to produce an education. There need to be guidelines and standards to make sure stuff happens.

^Nobody has ever argued no standards or evaluations ever. Only that letter grades are less useful than constructive comments, or that standardized tests show a small part of the taxonomy of learning and student-driven projects could show us so much more.

I meant tests. Grades are important to show how far well someone can use their knowledge as well as demonstrate having it. Student driven projects require actual effort to grade, most teachers being the gits they are, this is likely not feasible.

edited 26th Oct '10 11:28:22 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

"did you know that as your eyes are developing learning to read too early screws them up?"

Do you have any evidence at all for that statement? Because I haven't seen any support for it.

"You can't just release students into the school and say "Go! Be free as a bird!" and expect the joy of learning to produce an education."

I don't know, unschooling can be very successful.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

>>I'm aware that the US is pretty liberal in the way its school systems work, but that doesn't help me any.

Uh, no.

WHASSUP....... ....with lolis!

There's an awful lot of [Citation Needed] in that article.

Fight smart, not fair.

I haven't seen any hard numbers, but from the anecdotes I've read, it doesn't sound like the difference between unschooled and traditionally schooled children adds up to all that much by the time they are ready to get their GED. This leads to me the belief, espoused by a lot of unschoolers, that a lot of school is a waste of time.

I was home schooled myself, and while I wouldn't actually recommend it to anyone, (Goddamn, being at home all the time is boring.) there are numbers that show better skills on average among home schooled kids. This is probably self selection bias, since parents of home schooled children are, on average, more invested in their children's education than parents of non home schooled children.

edited 27th Oct '10 10:06:50 AM by Roman

| DA Page | Sketchbook |

Kind of off topic but BLEAP do I ever sound like a idiot in that post, I should have expressed myself better.

Also I was referring to stuff like this. I probably shouldn't have stated that as a fact but, well, it wasn't my best post.

No what?

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

American public education would not be considered more liberal or progressive than that in European nations like Denmark.

I've always been told we have one of the most liberal school systems in the world.

Please elaborate, if you would.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

"liberal" meaning what in this context?

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

If you define progressive as "less focused on grades or tests, less homework when it isn't necessary, etc" then Denmark and company are more progressive than the US. What countries are you thinking of that we appear more liberal than?

Western Europe and Asia.

Which are the only places I've ever heard it compared to, come to think of it....I hate being misinformed.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....