Assessment and Critical Digital Pedagogy

Assessment calls the bluff of assignment design, exposing any deception. For instance, we might say an assignment is intended for a public audience, or to give students experience practicing a skill. But if we then assign a grade to that activity at the end, students see that we were the ultimate audience, and the task was a test, not practice. As much as we talk about student agency developed through critical digital pedagogy, our assessment methods reveal how much we actually trust students.

A Quick Assessment Analogy

Think back to the middle of your teenage years, around the time that getting a driver’s license became a possibility. For folks living outside major cities, getting a license opens possibilities for an unprecedented level of freedom — and risk. It also provides an opportunity for teens to practice their assessment skills. Consider:

When did you know that you knew how to drive?

For most folks, a lot of practice driving in a variety of circumstances eventually led to a sense of confidence, comfort, and acceptance. Those feelings reassure people that they are competent drivers and ready to take the driving test and obtain a license. In most cases, people self-assess and determine that they are ready to pass the driving test before making the attempt.

When did you know that you are a good driver?

After obtaining a driver’s license, people continue to gain confidence through experience and practice. As they spend more time behind the wheel, people learn how to better manage more driving situations. Over time, the gained confidence translates into a self-image derived from self-assessment, and many people start identifying themselves as good drivers.

When did you know that most other drivers are bad drivers?

Our experiences learning to drive, improving our driving, and assessing our own driving skill inevitably spills over into how we think of others on the road with us. In essence, we start applying our assessment skills outwardly, making determinations about how other people approach the same process we engage in. Our own experiences make us feel qualified to assess the performance of others, despite getting no further certification or credentialing beyond our initial driving test.

Grading | Assessment | Feedback

Distinguishing these three basic concepts helps us understand their purposes.

Though the word grading might be the most commonplace of these three, it’s also the most abstract and least helpful to students. Grading allows institutions to sort and rank students, but it reduces the information students gain down to a single letter or two-digit number.

By contrast, assessment refers to the process of evaluation and the act of determining quality. Assessment works to weigh merits. As Starr Sackstein says in Hacking Assessment:

Assessment must be a conversation, a narrative that enhances students’ understanding of what they know, what they can do, and what needs further work.

That brings us to feedback. Focused on getting information to whoever is doing the work, feedback emphasizes information exchange and learner benefit. The value and importance of feedback cannot be overstated. For a fun example, go listen to the first 90 seconds or so from the 99% Invisible podcast episode “The Steering Wheel.” If you’re like most people, you’ll discover in those 90 seconds just how much you rely on visual feedback to safely and successfully drive. You might think you know how to drive, but it’s the feedback that makes it work.

It’s Like Riding a Bike (No, Really)

It’s said that one cannot forget how to ride a bike. Once you learn, the lore tells us, you’ll always know.

Why is that, though? For something to be learned that well and that unforgettably, there must be a monumental curriculum honed through decades of neuroscience research that makes bike-learning such an effective process, right? Hardly.

When children learn to ride a bike, we don’t start with a lecture on the conservation of angular momentum, follow up with a worksheet asking children to label force vectors, then conclude with an exam for which they write a research paper on the history and development of bicycle models, 1800 to present, citing at least five peer-reviewed print sources (and never Wikipedia).

No. We give the kid a bike and help them ride. We keep bandages on hand for the inevitable skinned knees, and we let the kid learn through trial, error, and experience. In other words, the kid learns through productive failure and self-assessment. Aside from a bit of guidance (and tissues after the big falls), parents don’t really provide much instruction.

Assessment at Its Worst (and Funniest)

In the Pixar short film Lifted, we see a perfect example of the negative effects assessment can have on learners. The film’s alien protagonist struggles to work the complex controls used to abduct humans. The inexperienced alien tries time and again to achieve the goal, each time without success. Frustration builds. Victory seems impossible. Yet the little alien really wants to get it right.

Until this happens:

The moment the instructor clicks that pen and prepares to write on the clipboard, everything changes for the little apprentice. From that moment forward, every action the learner takes — and every expression the learner makes — work to please the instructor, not to achieve the goal. The learner no longer wants to succeed; it’s now all about not being seen as a failure. In effect, assessment ruins the learning process here. Many students arrive to my classes already in this mindset, believing that it’s more important to please me (and get good marks on that clipboard) than it is to actually learn.

Grading is the Problem

In “How to Crowdsource Grading”, Cathy N. Davidson quips,

“I can’t think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning.”

Grading came under scrutiny with the advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs), when institutions struggled to understand how they could credential such courses. The labor of grading scales poorly. Graders, schools say, should be experts in whatever they’re grading. How else do we know whether something is right? Insisting that work be evaluated only by experts underestimates students and ignores the assertions of the original Bloom’s taxonomy. According to early Bloom, the highest level of learning happened with evaluation. That taxonomy argued students had to first know, understand, analyze, and synthesize before they could ultimately evaluate. If the act of evaluating something shows the highest level of learning about that thing, why aren’t we teaching students how to evaluate everything in our courses?

For that matter, when so many teachers had grading papers and homework, why aren’t we teaching students to do it, instead? Evaluation is a skill — and a complex one, at that. We should teach students that skill as often as possible.

Assessment in Critical Digital Pedagogy

Our assignments should move students outside the confines of our course/classroom. Further, our assessments should give students opportunities to improve their own evaluation skills. Classroom activities should be spaces for practice, and students should lead the exploration. Critical digital pedagogy calls us to set aside grading and instead provide feedback to help students self-assess.