Miguel Roig wrote:
> I am, however, a little suprised at the following:
>
> At 07:51 AM 7/16/99 -0500, you wrote:
> >"Although the importance of feedback is generally acknowledged by
teachers, their
> >routine feedback practices have been criticized for emphasizing social
> >comparison rather than some measure of mastery and for failing to praise
student
> >effort as opposed to normative performance" (p. 21). In other words, the
> >authors felt that it is important to the students' development of good
study
> >skills that the teachers' feedback praise effort even when that effort
fails to bring
> >learning in the discipline.
>
> It seems to me as if the authors are (inadvertently?)
> promoting the popularized version of increasing self-esteem: Praise,
praise, praise,
> regardless of outcome. Can praise for effort, even when such effort fails
> to bring desired results, have a positive effect on development of good
study
> skills? This approach doesn't sound right to me. I wonder what you and
> others think.
Yeah, I anticipated that there'd be some questions about that. I don't
think that the authors were saying that (the "popularized version"), but
you'd have to read the whole thing in context to see the distinctions they
were making. They're worried about practices that promote learning to study,
which is not the same thing as learning the disciplinary content, and there
may be some minor conflicts between the two. Did you notice that they also
said that (my words):
--------
Group work, grading "on a curve" when the entire class does poorly, and
grading exclusively on completion (rather than performance) were other
practices held to undercut learning of autonomous learning.
--------
So there's a distinction between grading for effort (which they support)
and grading for completion of work (which they do not). I think that the key
is that the "effort" they propose we reward is effort directed at proper
study practices. In other words, a student might study correctly, yet still
not perform on the assessments. Thomas and Rohwer suggest that teachers
learn to reward proper study practices, even when those practices are not
yet paying off in terms of learning of discipline content. That means a lot
of work for the teachers, in coming to recognize those study practices, and
learning to write feedback aimed that that separately from the feedback
aimed at the course content, and perhaps most importantly, making that
distinction clear to the student (so that the student recognizes that she is
being praised for correct study practices and not for incorrect content
responses.
No-one ever said teaching was easy...
Paul Smith
Alverno College
