Re: Motivations

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Little kids running down the block, adults running marathons or biking 
the Tour de France.  Make sure you work this material into your Daily 
Kos session - it'll wow them for sure.

In any event, there may be some advocates of "high-stakes" testing who 
believe that goals themselves are enough - I don't know any - but there 
may indeed be some.  But the model that goals are enough is not the 
basis of NCLB.  NCLB does not say that standards improve schools or 
that tests improve schools.  NCLB says that states and districts 
improve schools and it tells them to get on with the job.  Some people 
aren't motivated to get on with the job because they want to protect 
their own interests, not the interests of parents and kids.  No need to 
invoke little kids running down the block, or marathons, or the Tour de 
France.  Just good old fashioned me-first-ism.  Art

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Sherman Dorn <sdorn@tempest.coedu.usf.edu>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 4:50 am
Subject: [arn-l] Motivations


There's an important point in what Monty says, that learning more 
skills is
motivating to a boatload of teachers, if you can find a suitably large 
boat.
Teachers I know are motivated to learn something that is obviously 
useful or
that gives them a new perspective on what they do. Learning new skills 
or
perspectives is a LOT more motivating than being told you have to reach 
a
goal that you perceive is unrealistic.

And, yes, there's some reasonably good research on goal-setting. When 
goals
are easily attainable, they can motivate fairly well. Tell George's 
young
son or me to run to the end of the block, and we'll fly down the 
sidewalk
(Sam will probably beat me). Running to the end of the block is a 
feasible
goal. Running a marathon is different. Tell me I have to run a marathon 
next
week or ride the Tour de France next July, and I will laugh at you. For 
very
distant goals, goals that someone thinks is unattainable, setting that 
goal
is far less effective than setting a goal of learning relevant skills.

That research surprised me when I was reading industrial-organizational
psychology for one chapter of Accountability Frankenstein. I'm not a
psychologist, but I know how to read research, and what surprised me 
was the
fact that NO ONE was talking about the relevant literature on 
goal-setting
when writing about high-stakes systems. NO ONE includes the usual 
suspects
of various policy advocates and also academic writers on research. One 
pair
of writers on teacher pay briefly mentions the goal-setting literature 
but
not the caveat about unattainable targets v. skills.

In reading this description, you may be thinking, "Another few 
semesters of
faculty town down the drain, demonstrating the obvious," but advocates 
of
high-stakes testing have been relying on another model of motivation, 
that
goals themselves are enough. That claim is plausible. It's just not
supported by existing research.

Sherman Dorn
University of South Florida
http://www.coedu.usf.edu/~dorn/
http://www.shermandorn.com


-----Original Message-----

Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:48:00 -0400
From: "Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Subject: Re: A request for an explanation from a Congressional staffer

I've worked in Chicago with teachers in what have been viewed as very 
fine
schools, ones that served rather typical kids (which is to say 
low-income
and of color). (I've done the same in other places.) They were happy and
eager to learn more about high-quality assessment and recognized its 
value
and that they needed to learn more.








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