Does Assessment Stymie Curiosity?

Susan Engel, in her 2011 piece, “Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools,” describes what seems like an interactive, hands-on classroom experience:

A group of twenty-one boys and girls, all around ten years old, were sitting behind their desks. The teacher, Mrs. Parker, was explaining that the students were to form small groups and work on an activity to learn about how the ancient Egyptians had first invented wheels for transport in order to carry stones for their huge pyramids. She then organized the children into groups of three and invited each group to come up and get the materials they needed — a flat piece of wood with a metal eye at one end, some round wooden dowels, and a small measurement device that records Newtons, the amount of force required to pull an object at a given speed for a given distance. The device had a string with a hook attached to it so that children could hitch it to the bar. She also gave each group a worksheet to fill out, which included step-by-step instructions about what to do with the materials and a series of questions. Each group was to try pulling the wood piece along the floor, measuring how easily they could drag it both with and without dowels underneath it. By this time, it had become clear to me that the idea was for each group to “discover” that pulling the board was a lot easier with the dowels serving as wheels.

As students worked, to keep them accountable for their learning, the teacher had her students answer questions on a worksheet to track their understanding of how wheels help to move large objects.

As Engel discusses, at first glance, this activity seems to be just what educators are told makes good learning — engaging activities, students working together to problem solve with teacher guidance from the side, yet, as Engel notes, when one group of students began to experiment on their own, away from their teacher’s learning objective and began making their own systems from the manipulatives they were given, the teacher intervened.

Why?

In this class, students’ curiosity moved them past the teacher’s lesson plan and into one of their own. To this teacher, the students’ off-script activities looked like off-task behavior. These students were not going to meet her lesson objective — so she stopped them.

As teachers, we know that structure is vital to good classroom management. We plan meticulously, we set our objectives, and we set our students up for success by programming the exact steps that will engage their thinking to meet our objectives. I am an English teacher, so I may design a lesson that allows my students to work with, say, a poem to get them to understand the thematic meaning the author developed. I teach students the literary terms I see in the poem, I show students the rhyme scheme of the poem, and I ask them how the author brings the reader to meaning. It’s a solid lesson, and I know that at this point in my career, I can deliver that beautifully.

Yet, that is my plan.

By structuring my lesson to get to my point, have I limited other paths my students might naturally take? What curiosities have I stymied? What wanderings have I unintentionally roadblocked?

Part of the structure in my teaching connects to what I believe my students should be able to do with a text, especially as I know what they will be expected to do next year. I want to ensure that I give my students every tool to be successful in their study of literature, so I plan, pre-teach, re-teach, give time to write in response to reading, and I try my best to provide them with opportunities to explore what they love. But, am I engaging them to explore their curiosities? I’m not convinced yet.

I believe part of our conditioned reluctance for curiosity to sit front and center in our classrooms is the idea of constant “accountability”, often confused or conflated with the idea of “rigor”. Teachers must regularly provide evidence of learning, submit data, collect exit tickets, and correct worksheets that either confirm or deny student abilities to correctly answer our questions designed from our learning objectives.

But, is that true learning?

When we design lessons, we often think to ourselves: “Ok, so what will I have my students do with this new knowledge, and what will they hand in to prove that they indeed have learned?” Perhaps this is where we are unintentionally interfering with children’s curiosity-driven learning. I believe that when students know their thinking is constantly monitored, and that there is a right way, and a wrong way — they freeze up. No one wants to be wrong, and when we give worksheets and questions that we grade, we are asking students to tell us what we want them to say. The point of the science lesson Engel observed, for most of the kids in the room, was to complete the activity and come to the conclusions the teacher had already planned for them. The children who went their own way had a consequence: they were told to stop.

Yet, as teachers, we struggle with the very real need to mark student growth with evidence of their ability to answer questions correctly. But, has this created a wag-the-dog situation? Is the test driving our instruction, or is learning driving the car?

Alfie Kohn has written about the ways in which assigning grades harms students. In his 2011 piece “The Case Against Grades”, Kohn argues three points about assigning letters and numbers in traditional grading systems:

Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.

Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.

He goes on to add:

…to these points that grades quash curious thinking. Performance-based assessment asks students to constantly keep up their guard and to attain; as we parents know, sometimes at all costs.

When my youngest child was learning to walk, I never assigned her a check-minus for falling; I watched her push herself back up and continue. When she was learning to play the violin, she would play multiple strings really fast, then pluck the E string, then go back to a slow, steady pace. She was listening to the way her instrument responded to each technique. She was absorbed in the experience, and did not look to her father or me for affirmation that what she was doing was “good”. Yet, she most certainly was learning and growing.

All of this is not to say that classrooms with mayhem at the helm are what I propose — but what I am proposing is that we place curiosity at the center of our instruction. We must ask ourselves to differentiate between producing work and demonstrating growth and learning. I can spend hours writing the answers to someone’s questions, but how does that demonstrate that I have learned? Have I been asked to create my own questions? Have I been asked to look beyond the text and the ideas contained within in order to make connections of my own design? Piaget tells us that students expand their intellectual repertoire when they encounter something that challenges the way they believe the world works. Am I offering those spaces in my instruction?

Admittedly, I have far to go. I believe I foster a space for my students to be curious and to follow paths that elevate their heart rates and make them sit up in their seats, but I will continue to ask myself if I am allowing assessment and accountability to interfere with my instruction. I continue to reflect on Susan Engel’s words that curiosity is “not a nicety but a necessity.”

And I keep learning.

Works Cited:

Engel, S. (2011). Children’s need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.81.4.h054131316473115

Kohn, Alfie. “The Case Against Grades.” Educational Leadership, 2011, Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Piaget, J. (1969). The psychology of intelligence. New York: Littlefield, Adams.

Scott HK, Cogburn M. Piaget. 2023 Jan 9. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan–. PMID: 28846231.

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