on 12/6/04 4:58 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > My son ended up at a "progressive" public high school, where students were > judged by their portfolios, the more elaborate the better - rather than by > test. > > Nothing like that existed in my time. > > He barely got by. I was told at one point that his graduation was in doubt. > > He made his way to a large somewhat institutional college - where he is judged > by performance on exams. And he is excelling.
I admit that 1) we're pretty off topic and 2) generalizing from individual anecdotes is only slightly better than pure speculation. Having said that, I of course have an anecdote to contribute related to Arthur's comment. My son is currently a high school senior and has done very well. Although math/engineering oriented, his education is well-balanced by available measures. He's attended both private and public schools--public since 6th grade, at a well-regarded school that uses both traditional exams and portfolios. This is not a complaint against the strategies used in his school. However, I have noticed differences in his education and mine (in the 60s/70s): - Creation of "displays" rather than plain written papers tends to be emphasized, up to the senior high school year. These range from brochure-style pages to standup trifolds to flat posters and bulletin boards. I think the theory is that these work products are more interesting to the students than written papers, that the manual work of putting them together somehow consolidates the involved knowledge in at least a subset of kids, and these kinds of exercises teach kids about communication (or marketing, maybe?). - Education materials are more often professionally-produced or created from templates (e.g., the use of Powerpoint in class) and therefore look more "professional" than the typewritten, hand-lettered or -drawn materials that I had (though the actual content doesn't differ markedly). - Students very frequently work in groups and turn in collaborative projects. The theories behind doing this are probably well-known to this group and I'm not going to discuss it further except to mention that in my observation, one or two students will actually do the assignment, one will contribute at a lower level, and the rest will ride along uncommunicatively on the coattails of the others. My impression is that students tend to serve similar roles across multiple projects (the writers write, the artists do the artwork). I don't know if these behaviors could be gender-related. I don't doubt that these strategies do some good, but they also have effects that I don't think were foreseen. For example (here comes the anecdote), when my son was in middle school, he was assigned to create a class bulletin board as a work product for a book report on a Carl Sagan biography. He produced about 4 poorly hand-drawn notebook pages with minimal text, a trivial effort. As it developed, most of the boys had done similar work. I asked the teacher whether my son could create a Sagan-oriented web site as an alternative work product and was surprised to get an affirmative response. Given that opening, over two days he created a hand-coded interlinked site with 5 well-written essays on different aspects of Sagan's life, embedded images from NASA's planetary server, and hand drawn navigation icons. The teacher was amazed. So what's going on? Based on my observations of similar brochure- and display-oriented assignments and other situations through the years, I think this: 1. The attractiveness of the display/brochure approach is not universal. Some kids thrive with it and others feel that it is trivial and/or that their available talent and tools cannot produce something that they regard as worthwhile (or at least non-embarrassing). Thus they spend little effort on it. The production quality range of a typical assignment is very broad (I have no idea whether this could be gender-related). 2. The almost exclusive use of professional materials and templates for in-class teaching tends to reinforce the above feelings in some students. That's not to say that these materials are bad, but there can be an interaction if you're asking kids to produce brochure- or presentation-like assignments that resemble their classroom materials (including those created by the teacher) but are necessarily at a much lower production quality. 3. The emphasis on brochures and displays necessarily focuses some attention on the quality of formatting and graphic art rather than content. To produce something that looks like a quality product requires a fair amount of time and effort in an area that is likely not related to the information content of the assignment. This probably piques the interest of some kids but to others it trivializes the core of the assignment or may even provide barriers to fully engaging the material. 4. What if it takes a significant amount of time and effort to produce an assignment that will impress the class and teacher, there is the risk of working hard but creating something that you and others don't really like, and it's also "uncool" to be seen as trying too hard? Under those circumstances you trivialize the assignment and punt it. This was what was going on with my son and most of the other boys in the class in the anecdote above. When I changed the rules so that he could create something "cool," he engaged the content of the assignment. This is a particular set of circumstances that might not be generalizable. I also would not accuse the educational activities mentioned of being "anti-boy." However there are aspects of the way these activities are set up that appear to conflict in some ways with the typical middle-school and younger high school male dynamic. Jim Harrison Univ. of Pittsburgh _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
