This week I am back to thinking about assessment and the disconnect that happen between practice and purpose. Specifically, for this entry, I am focusing on the disconnect that happens between how we talk about mistakes compared to how we act when mistakes happen and how this relates to notions of Mastery and Perfection. We are trying to achieve Mastery for our students, but some of our practices tend to encourage Perfection rather than Mastery.

Ideally when students make mistakes, we frame this as a learning opportunity to explore and correct the mistake then we move on with both teacher and student confident that they now understand the concept better. In this sense, mistakes are welcome and encouraged as it helps us to learn and grow. However, mistakes become much more problematic when they are related to the record keeping of student achievement. If a student makes a single error on formal and recorded assessment, they can no longer get 100% on the assessment (and possibly also not a cumulative average for the course) so we are not really learning from and moving on so much as holding that student accountable for it for the remainder of their year. This is where ideas of Perfection starts to interfere with ideas of Mastery. In teaching students, we should absolutely be helping them to move closer to mastery rather than any sort of perfectionism but we also need to re-frame and rethink our record keeping when it comes to these mistakes. 

To begin, we need to re-teach the concept of mastery. Perhaps that 85% (or some other number)  is what we should be teaching students to aim for and the rest is simply extra (to be clear I am not a fan of percentile scales but that’s another entry) rather than have them aim for the 100%. If we subscribe to the idea that you cannot make a single mistake to demonstrate mastery then we are in big trouble. Shooting for perfection is problematic in many ways. It leads to a host of anxiety issues and other problems when students feel they can’t make a single mistake or they are a failure. It also means that the valuable learning that comes from making mistakes, becomes avoided at all costs. This creates an unhealthy relationship with assessment. 

So this links back to the purpose of why we use assessment, which is to determine if students know the content or not. Ideally, it would also prompt a change in the student, and the teacher, where the student reflects their own progress including knowledge they have mastered or missing, while the teacher reflects on their practice and adjusts accordingly to help them fill those gaps or design appropriate interventions. Oftentimes though, students receive a test back and they don’t go back over it, either because they are disinterested in improvement, or they do not know how to take the information they receive and use it to improve. 

Similarly, the teacher may hand back an answer key or a the corrected test, but then put it to one side and move on with the next thing. The student, and perhaps the teacher as well, are missing the point of why the assessment happened in the first place. The point is not to simply record a number and move on, only to pull it out later to work into an average at the end of the year. This completely misses the purpose of the assessment, which is to continue the learning process and produce a change in understanding and behaviour. Worse yet, for some students who do only view the number (let's say it was 90%) that number may be seen as a source of disappointment in that they missed a couple of questions rather than elation that they demonstrated mastery of the material.

Fixation on achieving a ‘perfect score’ can be a significant barrier to the learning process which requires us to make mistakes and learn from them. If we have students who are so focused on never making mistakes, they lose this valuable learning opportunity. As such, we need to show that mastery is achieved through mistakes, and not through perfection. We can't do this if we continue to penalize these mistakes in our grading scales and frame our assessment and grading practices like a high score on an arcade machine.

We need to re-align our goals and our practices. We need to give students opportunities to show us that they have learned and grown over time and ensure that our achievement reporting reflects this. This helps them to learn that mistakes are to be encouraged as part of learning, rather than have them be too afraid to make them.