Tough Graders Make Children Learn More
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Anonymous
Sure! Here are two of the more spectacular papers: "How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?" looks at a massive dataset of North Carolina students and teachers from third to eighth grade. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12828/w12828.pdf See section starting page 32 "Graduate degrees One of the most counterintuitive findings to emerge from the basic models is the small or negative effects of having a graduate degree. Most of those degrees are master’s degrees that generate higher salaries for teachers. A negative coefficient would suggest that having such a degree is not associated with higher achievement. Thus, if the goal of the salary structure were to provide incentives for teachers to improve their teaching, the higher pay for master’s degrees would appear to be money that is not well spent, except to the extent that the option of getting a master’s degree keeps effective experienced teachers in the profession..." The authors of the paper goes on to say that they think that master's degrees have no effect, and they think the negative trend is either due to selection effects or small sample sizes. Which is a rather hopeful interpretation. This next paper uses a huge data set from Florida. There is a somewhat positive effect for middle school math. But the results in table 12 show a slight negative impact of master's degree on elementary school math performance and the huge negative impact on HS math performance, which was twice the size of the positive impact seen in MS. A degree also causes a negative impact for MS & HS reading, and the authors caution that there's further potential for negative effects while the teacher is obtaining the degree, as it takes time and energy away from the classroom. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509656.pdf "We consider the impact of advanced degrees in Table 12. Since our model includes teacher fixed effects, post-baccalaureate degrees earned prior to the period of analysis wash out when we demean the data. Thus our approach measures the impact of changes in the possession of an advanced degree (for a given teacher) during the period of study.20 [Note 20 The estimated coefficient on the advanced-degree variable measures the average productivity differential between the time before and the time after receipt of the degree. Before the degree is received some knowledge may have already been acquired through coursework already completed, thus biasing the estimated effect toward zero. However, work toward an advanced degree may take away from time available for class preparation and other teaching-related activities, which would tend to lower productivity before receipt of the degree and upwardly bias the estimated impact of the degree.] Our results indicate that obtaining an advanced degree during one’s teaching career is positively correlated with teacher productivity only in the case of middle school math. For elementary teachers there is no correlation between receipt of an advanced degree and performance. For middle school reading teachers and both math and reading high school teachers there is actually a significant negative association between attainment of an advanced degree and measured productivity. This may be because graduate degrees include a combination of pedagogy and content and our other evidence suggests that only the latter has a positive influence on teacher productivity. Other explanations for the graduate degree results arise from issues of methodology. Most previous studies suffer from selection bias, as noted earlier, and our solution is to study the effects of graduate degree attainment within teachers using teacher fixed effects. However, this approach imposes the implicit assumption that the receipt of the graduate degree reflects a sudden infusion of new preparation. In reality, the receipt of the degree is the culmination of several years of graduate courses whose influence may already be reflected in the teacher effects, especially for those teachers who take graduate courses over many years before receiving a graduate degree. Another possibility is that teachers load up on courses in the academic year preceding the receipt of the degree and therefore have less time to devote to their students. We found evidence above of such a contemporaneous decline in productivity when we considered the effects of other forms of professional development" Now, it's definitely possible that there are specific programs that are actually useful, instead of null-to-bad. Mississippi, for example, had a huge bipartisan push to drag its education schools kicking and screaming away from three-cuing/balanced literacy and into phonics, and some middle/high school math education programs (WGU?) make it seem like the boost to content knowledge they provide would make up for any terrible instructional techniques that might be on offer. But that is speculative. |
Anonymous
Once you have children, you quickly realize that much of what you learned in your MEd was complete bs. |
Anonymous
Can you link some? |
Anonymous
Do you what other evidence he's referring to here? |
Anonymous
| I’m the PP who posted about having learned the opposite while in grad school. I actually do not believe in grading at all, and much prefer students and families having an awareness of what they know and what they’re ready to learn next. My program was not a traditional education program, and I’m very happy with the philosophy I learned, I also agree that in order to be a good teacher, you need actual in classroom experience. I didn’t get my masters until I had been teaching for many years, and it only helped solidify my understanding of what I already suspected. |
Anonymous
| I wish the master's required for teachers was a MS in Education Psychology as that is a more research-based field about general learning, cognition and motivation principles as well as measurement skills for creating good assessments and analytic skills for understanding what data tells them about student learning. The research base is more cumulative and teaches you to read and evaluate the full range of research. |
Anonymous
You are conflating 2 things. People learn better when it’s not for grades, more creative. People learn rote information better when grades are hard. It’s the different between knowing it and understanding it. |
Anonymous
And teacher education programs don't influence what schools pick for their curricula! Schools have autonomy on that. |
Anonymous
Somehow missed this comment before. I do have children, and I got my MEd after having them. I found it actually aligned with my parenting choices and helped me realize what was developmentally appropriate for age 0 - 3, which made me the best parent possible. |
Anonymous
| Schools don’t care what’s developmentally appropriate. They usually do the opposite. |
Anonymous
You get a Best Parent Possible mug. |
Anonymous
You would be shocked at how many teachers think grades should be eliminated all together... |
Anonymous
If there was adequate time to write narratives for every student then eliminating grades would be very worthy of exploration. But that's a fantasy! So grades are needed, for better or worse. -teacher |
Anonymous
I have to laugh when I read these kind of comments. Children in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and part of the 70s were in large classes, practicing rote memorization in their younger years, "wasting" time on things like spelling and penmanship, etc. and being graded with bell curves, etc. but managed to propel the United States into the tech age and had plenty of creativity. No, you can't "understand it" if you don't first "know it." Try having a political debate with kids in college now. They have little factual knowledge/context to back up their "critical thinking." Would it be better if kids were all internally motivated to learn as much as possible? Sure, but you are in dreamland if you think that will motivate the bulk of the population. |
Anonymous
I’m from the first page saying I learned a lot from tough graders I think maybe I should rephrase: I learned a lot from teachers with high expectations. Some of them were known to be “harsh graders” some didn’t give grades at all until the very end of the semester just written feedback. But the key was that the work was set at a level that no one in the class could reasonably be expected to do it perfectly and thus all of us were sufficiently challenged. These were also teachers who were endlessly excited about questions and explaining things many ways and things like that. The key is the high expectations of their students; most of us rose to meet them as best we could and came out more confident in our skills. The grades were a side issue. |