Grading - Part 3
Aside from problems surrounding the issue of grading in relation to reliability, validity, relevance to learning, labeling, and the viability of the student-teacher relationship, there are several other features entailed by the process of grading which undermine any claims to the pedagogical value of this practice. For example, the process of grading completely fails to take into account the reality of differences in learning style and life circumstances among learners.
In the terminology of computer technology, this issue - involving learning styles - is known as the 'user-interface' problem. Since the advent of computer programming, a major difficulty confronting the development of software has been the fact that users approach the use of software from their own perspective and not necessarily that of the people who have put the software program together.
Trying to come up with a set of standard protocols which will allow all kinds of users, irrespective of abilities and circumstances, to be able to interface with a given piece of software as the latter was envisioned to be used by its creators, is a very tricky problem. What is obvious to programmers is not necessarily obvious to users. What is 'intuitive' to people who are computer literate is not necessarily intuitively clear to the rest of humanity.
Users engage a software program from a wide range of intelligence levels, background experiences, interests, expectations, fears, resources, needs, home environments, skills, abilities, aptitudes, motivations, pressures, personalities, and so on. Some of these people will be able to figure the program out on their own, while others will need help, to varying degrees, through books, courses, and friends.
For some people, even when assistance, of one sort or another, is available, this may not be enough to enable them to operate a particular program properly or to realize its full potential. However, this is not necessarily because these people are inherently computer-challenged, but quite often is because the help which is accessible to them may not be able to present the material in a manner which fits in with their style of learning - that is, in a way that fits in with how their minds, emotions, personalities, talents, aptitudes, and patterns of motivation merge together to acquire and understand information concerning the world.
Despite an extensive amount of clinical and experimental evidence in, for example, psychology, education, medicine, and information technology that steadily has been accumulating over the last fifty years, or so, which indicates, among other things, that there is tremendous diversity in the manner through which individuals experience, think about, linguistically frame, react to, learn about, and process information concerning the world or life, nonetheless, modern education - in its infinite wisdom - has largely ignored these findings because they don't harmonize with schooling's tendency to insist, for the most part, on treating all students as if they were the same and, therefore, capable of being force-fit into a, more or less, standard learning package.
The reason why most schooling systems try to operate - very unsuccessfully, one might add - on the basis of a fiction that all students are the same is because its instructional orientation demands this. The system has hired teachers, so all students must accommodate themselves to the limitations, personalities, quirks, biases, theories, and understandings of those people in whom school money has been invested (and this is true even of 'good' teachers - whom, unfortunately, are in the minority).
The system has bought textbooks, so all students must accommodate themselves to the limitations, biases, understandings, values, and theories of these materials on which school money has been spent (and this is true even of 'good' textbooks which are far fewer than one might hope for). It has built facilities so all students must accommodate themselves to the presuppositions, limitations, architectural biases, and educational theories which are given expression through the structures that constitute a large amount of on-going capital expenditure.
At considerable expense, the school system has devised a curriculum, so all students must accommodate themselves to the lacunae, mistakes, weaknesses, assumptions, and biases entailed by the curriculum in which money has been invested. And, quite often, since many school systems are caught up in pursuing one educational fad after the next, students are continually having to adjust themselves to the path which such spent money is forcing them to follow.
In professional sports, even though it is not the coach or manager who goes out on the field and makes errors or does not produce in game situations, nevertheless, because so much money is tied up in player contracts, firing a manager or coach is much less problematic than is getting rid of a team of players. In education, just the opposite is true - that is, because so much money is tied up in coaches (teacher contracts), managers (principles), and facilities (schools and equipment), the players (students) are expendable, despite the fact that the real problem with schools can be laid much more at the feet of the faulty teachers, principals, facilities, and theories of education that regulate school functioning, than such problems are either created by, or the responsibility of, students.
If students aren't learning, it is because schools haven't solved the aforementioned user-interface problem. Moreover, as long as schools insist that the user-interface problem is either non-existent or is the student's responsibility to solve, then, they will continue to fail their students, and, as a result, many students will go on failing.
The nature of schooling is what needs to be, and can be, changed. Human nature is what it is, and schools must accommodate themselves to bringing out the potential inherent in that nature, not vice versa.
For the most part, the structure of schooling is oriented toward use of reading and lecturing as the primary means of instruction concerning the world. In addition, what constitutes 'correct' understanding, interpretation, and application of what is read and taught through verbal means is a function of rational conceptualizations of the world.
In other words, although reality is not a concept, and although concepts are not capable of either fully describing or explaining the world, nonetheless, all students are required to approach life as if the latter were only amenable to conceptual and verbal representations of a certain kind - i.e., the kind taught through schools. Yet, not all students are inclined, or equipped, to engage, process, or understand experience in the limited modality that is being pushed through most schools.
Some people are primarily visually attuned to the world. Some people use sound to map their encounters with experience. Some people are sensitive to temporal and other kinds of rhythm and tend to organize experience through these metered themes of life. Some people develop a sense of the world through movement. Some people utilize the realm of emotion to parse life. Some people are spiritually oriented toward existence. Some people order the world through tastes and smells.
Art, music, dance, athletics, empathy, creativity, and mysticism - to name just a few - all constitute different ways of engaging, processing, understanding, and organizing experience. Words, concepts, and rational discourse can neither encompass, explain, nor replace these modalities of experiencing and learning about the world, and what is more important, words and concepts are not necessarily superior to these ways of learning about the world.
Yet, schools are largely structured on the premise that not only is the superiority of conceptualization over all other modalities assumed to be undeniable, but that all students are inherently constituted according to this conceptual inclination and orientation (and, if not, they 'should' be) - and, yet, there is little, if any, reliable and valid evidence to prove or demonstrate the truth or correctness of this presumptive bias.
To just take one very simple example with respect to such individual differences, consider relatively recent work that has been done in chronobiology - that is, the manner in which biological systems are rooted in, as well as shaped, colored and oriented through different rhythms of life that temporally help structure phenomenology - for instance, internal cellular processes and hormonal cycles, as well as phenomena like circadian rhythms that run in roughly 24 hour cycles and are linked, in part, to environmental contingencies such as daylight. Experiments have been done which indicate that many people seem to fall into one of two classes of peak functioning during the day.
Some individuals operate best and are most alert during the early hours of the day, and the people in this group are referred to as 'larks'. Other individuals seem to function best during the latter part of the day, and are known as 'owls'.
To demand that 'owls' perform well early in the day, or that 'larks' should function well during the later hours of the day, is to expect people to operate in ways that do not reflect the realities of the manner in which they function either biologically or cognitively. Furthermore, to grade these people on what they do in those times which may not be congruent with their optimal modes of operating biologically and cognitively, is not only inherently unfair, but it is forcing people to learn under circumstances when they are not most receptive to learning.
Similarly, to expect that people who, primarily, may be attuned to experience through vision, sound, rhythm, emotion, movement, and so on, should be able to learn well, or easily, through largely conceptual, verbal modalities is to be in denial about the complexities which are reflected in individual differences of learning style. Moreover, to grade people according to a learning style that may not be conducive to the manner in which such people engage, process, and understand experience is, at the very least, pedagogically foolish and, quite possibly, morally indefensible.
In addition to the foregoing sorts of differences that have considerable impact on cognitive functioning and an individual's ability to learn, there are numerous personal, family, and community factors which have ramifications for the quality of functioning which a child or young person brings to any given set of learning circumstances. For instance, to expect hungry children or young people who come from difficult, if not abusive, home and community environments, to learn in the same way as children who are well-fed or from relatively healthy home environments is totally absurd, and, yet, the process of grading not only ignores such realities, but adds insult to injury by making disadvantaged students pay all their lives (due to the labeling of school records) for learning difficulties that are, for the most part, not of their own choosing or creation.
As long as there are individual differences in learning style and life circumstances - and as long as human nature remains as complex as it is, this will always be so - then, grading will remain an inherently unfair and fatally flawed process, because no human grading system can possibly take into account, and adjust for, in a fair manner, the many differences which affect how, when, or if things will be learned in any given set of circumstances. The process of grading always will be comparing apples and oranges, and, consequently, such a system, inevitably, will be arbitrary, artificial, invalid, unreliable, subjectively biased, and, therefore, inequitable - that is, not only will any grading system devised by human beings be unable to take all essential factors and differences into consideration but, as well, will be unable to weigh each of them in a precise fashion that allows judicious comparisons to be made across individual differences.
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