Have you ever wondered what types of data elementary students make into graphs in their math classes? As someone who is often called upon to evaluate the quality of questions on standardized tests, I would say I think about this sort of thing probably more than most of my readers. It’s important, after all, to make sure the context of test questions fits into the real-world things many kids experience.
Taking that to the next level, teachers at Dunbar Elementary School in East St Louis, Ill., have decided to have kids make bar graphs of their progress on being able to make bar graphs—and every other math subject they study, the Belleville News-Democrat reports.
As kids get their weekly tests back on whatever they studied that week in class, they plot their own scores on a chart kept in their “data folders.” Each kid has his or her own data folder, where the bar graphs are color-coded: red bars are for scores below 60 percent, yellow for scores of 60 or 70 percent, and green for scores of 80 percent or higher.
“We are working on being a more data-driven school, because that’s the district’s mission,” first-year Principal Carlynda Coleman, of Dunbar Elementary in District 189, was quoted as saying. “These folders not only allow students to take ownership in their learning process, but have gotten students more competitive in their work and give students an idea of the skills they have mastered, and those in which they need more support.”
Does it work? Just ask. “This graph is to help us know where we are and what we need help with,” one fifth grader was quoted as saying. “It pushes me to do my best.”
Awesome. I’m not really in favor of competition when it comes to standards-based learning, but even I have to acknowledge that it can be a powerful motivator for about three-fourths of students.
I reported as such a little over a year ago, here. As long as the goals being set are attainable, which is still unknown under the Common Core—and many corporate forces seem to be working against attainable goals—competition encourages most kids, in one way or another. The notable exceptions are kids whose motivational strategy is characterized as “failure-acceptance.” These students are driven strongly neither to tackle problems nor to avoid setbacks, and competition is more likely to drive them away from learning than to motivate them.
This article in the Washington Post by Valerie Strauss quotes several teachers who say that kids charting their progress can be “humiliating,” especially if the charts are seen by other students or put onto a “data wall” that shows how poorly some students performed. In the case of East St Louis, the data folders need to be kept private.