Philippine Basic Education

I gave my last lecture this semester via Zoom yesterday morning. With a large class, I did not really have a chance to see all of my students' faces on one screen. After teaching this class since the beginning of the Fall semester, it was difficult to say "farewell" given the circumstances. My students were mostly aspiring to become physicians. Did I actually prepare them for the Medical College Admission Test specifically, its Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems section? Did I provide them with the skills they need for next year's Organic Chemistry course? It was not straightforward to answer these questions when all of us were learning at the same time, and perhaps, for the first time, how to cope with a pandemic. Lessons on resilience and self-discipline were simultaneous with lessons on coordination compounds of the transition metals. We covered the chemistry and physics behind climate change while our planet was in a dramatic pause in its use ...

With COVID-19 and education going mostly online, we now have to grapple with how to assign grades. At Georgetown, students now have the option to take a pass/fail grade in the courses they are taking instead of the letter grades; A, B, C, D and F. I still continue to give assessments in my class. After all, both instructor and student still need feedback. Still, it may be a good time to reflect on this question: What are grades for? Some claim that grades motivate students. Without a carrot or a stick, we apparently think that students are not going to be engaged in their learning. Being engaged obviously depends on what we do in our instruction yet we still cling to this notion of grades pushing students to learn. I had an experience when I was in my teens of attending a summer school without grades. It was a summer session at the Ateneo de Manila University when I just finished third year high school. The Ateneo Junior Summer School, Class of 1980 The individual circled on the se...

It is that time of the year. Some students are taking standardized exams and it is near the end of a school year so students are about to receive their final grades. Getting admitted to a college depends on these two so it is important to know what information one really gets from a student's score in a standardized test and from a student's grade point average (GPA). These two measures are already known to correlate with a student's graduation rate from college. This can be seen from a graph drawn by Preston Cooper in Forbes Magazine  based on data presented in a study by Matthew Chingos . Above copied from Preston Cooper, Forbes magazine. "What Predicts College Completion? High School GPA Beats SAT Score" From the above graph, it is clear that high school GPA is a much more discriminating tool and is a better predictor than scores in a standardized test when it comes to success in college. Except for the fact that students who score less than 800 are ...

The former principal at Mason Crest Elementary School, Brian Butler, sent me a link to an article in Solution Tree that addressed the question, "Should formative assessments be graded?". It was an article written by a former school administrator, Tom Schimmer. I almost did not continue reading the article since it started with this response, "The short answer to this question is no ." But I did continue and later in the article Schimmer changed the response to a maybe . Still, the article seemed to dwell unnecessarily on the difference between orthodox and reality. While citing that research had shown the importance of feedback supposedly in the absence of grades, Schimmer was trying to make the point: "With all of that said, classroom teachers don’t live in the orthodoxy of anything, and while there are important lessons and cues research has bestowed upon us, many of us have also learned that assessment is often context-dependent and nuanced." We often ...

Two months ago, I posted on this blog an article entitled " What do my grades really mean? " Recently, I just received evaluations from my students. I guess these evaluations were my grades for my teaching. Since the evaluation was online, less than half of my class participated. Less than a quarter of the class bothered to write comments and going through what they wrote, it seemed like there was only one complaint: I did not give partial credit. Although these gripes are coming from a few, their remarks appeared loud and clear. Apparently, these students not only did not know what their grades really meant. They also did not know what "partial credit" meant. To me, these students seemed to be expressing that receiving partial credit was their right. Such disconcerting attitude reminded me of an essay a Physics professor once wrote in Newsweek : Wiesenfeld lamented about the students' "indifference toward grades as an indication of personal effort an...

Going through school, we really have learned the ABC's. And I am not talking about the alphabet. I am talking about the letters commonly used for reporting our grades. Based on these grades, we are able to compare ourselves against each other. With grades, we leap into labeling each other as either "good" or "bad" student. We even go further by comparing grades we obtain in one subject against another subject. I got an 'A' in math but only a 'D' in reading so I must be 'smart' in mathematics. We have even gone to the far end of equating grades as requirements to either enter an exclusive school or getting a job. In reality, the letter grades do not really mean that much. An 'A' in math does not really tell us what a student has learned. Math is too broad of a category and unless we have access to the quizzes, exams, homework, and other tools that are incorporated in this final grade, we really cannot tell how much a student has le...