As students, taking tests that can make or break your future is part of the experience. It is usually those tests that affect you emotionally depending on how you performed in it. In just a matter of weeks, students in the state of California will go through that. However, it won't just be a couple of "true or false" type of questions, students will also be made to answer survey statements like "I usually finish what I start," or "I can do anything if I try."
The one that started this trend is a big-city district group that wants to measure students' self-control, empathy, and other social and emotional skills. They then hold the schools accountable for whatever answers the students give.
NPR informed the public that the new federal law requires states to incorporate at least one non-academic outcome in their accountability formulas, so it is more than likely that more and more tests like this will become more common across the United States. However, according to researchers, the ideas they believe in for years are catching on and being taken so seriously, even before they're ready.
No, of course you can't judge schools on students' grit. We're trying anyway. https://t.co/K1dixyquwa via @slate
— Laura Moser (@lcmoser) March 28, 2016
Angela Duckworth, a psychologist and MacArthur Fellow who is well versed with the concept of grit said, "The enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science." Grit refers to character traits like stamina and conscientiousness and self-control, in short, the "passion and perseverance for very long-term goals," as Duckworth defined it. It can't be measured using pop quizzes, but it can predict long-term success more than just intelligence.
Although Duckworth also mentioned that the most surprising thing about grit is that people don't really know much about it, or science, not even about how to build it, it actually came from education-reform circles. Charter-school networks like KIPP have always focused on building characters, which they have solely believed serves their students far better than just letting them memorize Shakespeare's love sonnets, Slate reported.
The question now is, how do you score students based on a very complex metric? Duckworth said that students should not grade schools on grit. She also said that she gets nervous thinking about this. She wrote, "I worry I've contributed, inadvertently, to an idea I vigorously oppose: high-stakes character assessment." So while teaching kids social-emotional skills is good, grading them-and their teachers, and their schools-on mastery of those skills is not so good." She continued the article writing,"We're nowhere near ready - and perhaps never will be - to use feedback on character as a metric for judging the effectiveness of teachers and schools. We shouldn't be rewarding or punishing schools for how students perform on these measures."
