Teaching Students to Think - Focusing Beyond the Grade

By Chih-Wei Hsu, PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice Resident, MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

With grades being one of the criteria for admission to most colleges and graduate schools, getting student loans, and applying for scholarship, it is hard for students to not to put their attention to grades. For instructors, grading is a pretty straightforward measure to evaluate how well the students are learning and how much they understand the materials delivered in the class. However, this distracts instructors from providing a more positive and effective classroom environment for learning and it also distracts students from focusing on learning and lead them to more studying just to pass the class. But we can’t really blame students on being too focus on getting good grades at school. The reason being although most of the time when you get into real-world work environment, no one cares about the grades, but before getting to that stage grades sometimes matter depending on which career pathway you choose. For instance, if pharmacy students are thinking about getting into residency after graduation, all the programs have minimum GPA requirements!

Grading is definitely still one of the essential tools used for providing feedbacks regarding one’s performance. First. let’s take a step back and look at how grade system developed in the past. The first official record of a grading system was back in 1785 in Yale and it was graded into four categories: Optimi, second Optimi, Inferiores, and Perjores.¹ At some point in the early 1900s, 100-point scale was very commonly used with the purpose of providing a more uniform measure in grading, but it was found that 100-point scale was actually not that reliable and different teachers teaching different subjects assigned grades very inconsistently. That lead us to the A-F grading system that we currently use the majority of the time because researchers thought this provided more reliable communication of the evaluation between institutions and from teacher to teacher. Of note, neither the 100-point scale or A-F grading system were designed to motivate students to learn. With that being said, it is quite concerning when seeing one of the studies found that faculty members who were classified as “easy graders” were given better evaluations by students instead of evaluating from the viewpoint of how much knowledge they learned from the faulty members.²

The A-F grading system instructors currently use to evaluate students’ performance will probably not change in the near future, but what can instructors do to achieve the balance and make students’ pay attention not just to their grades but also why and what they learn?

1.   Come up with their own goals and objectives: This helps students to conceptualize the purpose of their learning and can motivate students to think about the things they are learning or what they want to learn, not just studying for good grades.

2.   Think about how the knowledge will be used before the class starts: An author from one of the articles provided a very good example. There was an instructor asked his students to think about their professional destination, what skills and knowledge they are going to need in a real work environment, and do they have enough of those skills or knowledge? Give students some time to do self-reflection prompts them to examine what knowledge or skills they need to acquire in order to be successful for their future careers and be more responsible for their own learning experience.

3.   Present the topics they are interested in: When people are doing things they like and are interested, it increases their engagement in process. “If you can teach it you know it.” By letting learners prepare their own teaching materials, they would at least master part of the course content.

However, it would be hard to implement these activities if class size is large and could potentially make teaching less effective. Take therapeutics courses in pharmacy school for example, those are required courses that every pharmacy student has to take. This tells you that you are going to have a lot of audiences at baseline, so this is probably the time that traditional teaching strategy and A-F grading system are preferred. On the other hand, for some of the elective classes for specialized pharmacotherapy (e.g., oncology, geriatric, infectious disease, … etc.), the activities listed above could be feasible and more applicable since the class size is usually smaller and most of the students already have baseline interests to those topics when they enroll in these classes. Let’s change the setting a little bit. Preceptors of IPPE/APPE rotations may consider to have students complete activities 1 and 2 prior to their rotations and activity 3 during rotations. This way not only it helps preceptors to know what the students want to get out of that rotation, but it also gives students opportunities to reflect on themselves to see if they achieve their goals at the end of the rotations. Keeping the balance being between evaluation-oriented and learning-oriented is hard. Therefore, when appropriate, use the three activities suggested above to engage learners more and have them take control in their learning process and to shape the learners’ mindset more towards learn to think, not just learn to get good grades.

References:

1.   Schinske J, Tanner K. Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently). CBE Life Sci Educ. 2014 Summer; 13(2): 159–166.

2.    Kidd RS, Latif DA. Student Evaluations: Are They Valid Measures of Course Effectiveness? Am J Pharm Educ. 2003;68(3): Article 61.

3.   Farias, G., Farias, C. M., and Fairfield, K. D. Teacher as judge or partner: The dilemma of grades versus learning. Journal of Education for Business. 2014; 85: 336-342.