4 ms·

The problem with mistakes is that there are at least two kinds of mistakes that happen in school: 1) Mistakes where a student genuinely tries but fails because

by HEmanZ 5y ago

The problem with mistakes is that there are at least two kinds of mistakes that happen in school: 1) Mistakes where a student genuinely tries but fails because they didn't quite find the right solution. 2) Mistakes where a student gets it wrong because they put 0 (or even negative) effort into learning or trying to solve the problem. Mistakes of the first kind should be celebrated, mistakes of the second should be harshly scorned. Unfortunately, as I remember most of my classmates in school (lower, upper, and especially university) the vast majority of mistakes were made in #2. I don't know what the school system can do about this. How can you differentiate between the two with the information available to instructors?

HKH2 5y ago
In Math, you can tell students to show you how they got the answer to a problem. I think the bigger problem is that '100%' is often the goal, yet it is far from optimal; get students out of the 'all or nothing' mindset, so they don't become cynical.
- SamBam 5y ago
  In my English schooling system (GCSE and A Levels), if a math question was worth ten points, the correct final answer would be worth exactly one point. The other nine points were for the steps, and, indeed, were a hint that there were probably ten distinct steps (although usually you could combine several steps and still get full marks so long as it was clear). Among other things, this also allowed for error-carried-forward: if you made a stupid arithmetic error on step 3, and all your subsequent steps had the wrong values, you would only lose one point, though your final answer was completely wrong. This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work."
  - xpe 5y ago
    I would love to see this approach used in more schools.
    - kmstout 5y ago
      Back in the 2000s, a variation on this was used in the US navy's technical schools. Correct answer? Full points, regardless of showing work. Incorrect answer with work shown? Points off for the error, but allowance for errors carried forward. Didn't show work? No points for you!
      - zeruch 5y ago
        This was also the 80s and 90s approach (at least in Catholic schools when I was a student)
      - rolph 5y ago
        this reminds me of the error biased marking scheme get an answer right = +1 point get an answer wrong = -2 point via subtracting the number of wrong answers from the right answers. so the plan that was advised is if you are not 100% sure of the answer then dont answer, and you only lose 1 point for not answering
  - joppy 5y ago
    This is the same as my experience growing up in Australia - right the way from primary school up to university-level subjects, mathematics working is marked and you get almost full points if you solve the problem correctly but just make some clerical error somewhere. Even if you can show progress towards a solution but can’t quite get the last bit, you’ll often get 7 or 8 out of 10.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      At Caltech you'd get partial credit for getting partway to the correct solution. But, if you got a nonsense result (like negative energy), you'd get negative credit unless you included a note: I know the answer is absurd, but I don't know where I went wrong.
      - pertymcpert 5y ago
        Negative credit? You mean you lost marks vs not answering the question at all?
        WalterBright 5y ago
        Yup. That was institute policy, not the professor's discretion. They were pretty clear about thinking whether the answer was reasonable or not.
        SamBam 5y ago
        Makes sense, with the situation that if the student includes the note then they are not penalized. It's pretty important to be able to recognize if you fat-fingered a calculator and got something ridiculous or not.
      - joppy 5y ago
        I think this is a good policy, and have often been annoyed that I can’t (rules of the university) mark my students down for such absurd answers.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work." Random point or two? As an American I think it was usually worth most of the points for the math I did... But this is still aiming for 100%. Being challenged is dangerous to your grade.
danenania 5y ago
You won’t get genuine effort with “harshly scorning” either. If a kid isn’t motivated to learn, punishments and fear aren’t going to solve the problem. They may well make it worse.
- HEmanZ 5y ago
  That's possibly fair. I honestly don't know much about motivating kids to learn, and I never saw successful examples growing up. Do you know of any basic theories about it or places I could read more? My problem is that I remember seeing lots of different attempts to motivate students while I was in school (every teacher had a different approach), and I never saw one that worked at all beyond "If you don't do this I will punish you." (bad grades, principles office, some formal punishment system)
  - serverlessmom 5y ago
    Can you imagine if we lived in a world where we gave young people the room to follow their passions instead of being forced to grind the same repetitive material, stealing the joy of learning from them? Not every person needs to be good at everything for a society to flourish, or for that person to be successful, healthy, and productive.
  - danenania 5y ago
    Punishments just make kids (and adults) do the minimum to avoid punishment. They are counter-productive to developing real intrinsic motivation. Motivation issues probably need to be worked out individually with each kid, which to be fair is not really possible for a teacher with 20 students in their class. But fear and punishments are at best just a band-aid for the problem. At worst, they can ruin a kid’s self-image and cause them to give up on school entirely. I’m speaking from my own personal experience mainly, and what I saw happen to friends while growing up.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    I think a lot of it is just about making it fun. Gamification. Story telling. And tying the learning to stuff they are already interested in. It also helps if the teacher is genuinely passionate about the subject taught. And knows way more than is in the curriculum so he can go on weird tangents and answer curveball questions. Oh and keeping difficulty just right. Not so easy that it is boring, but not so hard that it makes students despair.
aaomidi 5y ago
"harshly scorned" Please don't be a parent.
- dang 5y ago
  You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. Would you please stop that? We ban accounts that do this repeatedly and I don't want to ban you. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29617722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29617722 also.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    I know you're busy, so I don't expect you to do this, but if you're interested I'd like to talk 1:1 with you. I kinda agree with you on this one, but I don't agree with you on the thread re: diabetes. Some sentiments are harming people, right now, and not being allowed to call them out seems wrong to do. If this was also about the name of the person, I just picked the name that they had on their HN profile. Either way. Apologies to you for creating more mod-work-load. I'll keep this in mind and I'd like not to get banned either.
    - dang 5y ago
      I appreciate the kind reply! There isn't really a tradeoff here, because even when people are so wrong about something that harm could result from believing them, the best way to respond is to patiently provide good arguments and correct information. If you slip into the flamewar style and/or the online callout-shaming culture, you won't reduce harm. You'll only provoke and reinforce the people who disagree, and the resulting conflagration won't help undecided people decide. Worse, you run the risk of discrediting your own position, and if your position happens to be a correct one, that actually causes harm in its own right, because it somehow ends up discrediting the truth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So happily, I would say, the cause of not having flamewars, of sticking to the site guidelines, and of giving the truth the best possible advocacy, more or less coincide. That doesn't make it easy. It's far from easy, but that's because it's hard to handle the emotional torque it places on you when someone else is saying something that is (or that you feel is) totally wrong on a topic. Where by "you" I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us.

by HEmanZ 5y ago

HKH2 5y ago

In Math, you can tell students to show you how they got the answer to a problem. I think the bigger problem is that '100%' is often the goal, yet it is far from optimal; get students out of the 'all or nothing' mindset, so they don't become cynical.

SamBam 5y ago
In my English schooling system (GCSE and A Levels), if a math question was worth ten points, the correct final answer would be worth exactly one point. The other nine points were for the steps, and, indeed, were a hint that there were probably ten distinct steps (although usually you could combine several steps and still get full marks so long as it was clear). Among other things, this also allowed for error-carried-forward: if you made a stupid arithmetic error on step 3, and all your subsequent steps had the wrong values, you would only lose one point, though your final answer was completely wrong. This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work."
- xpe 5y ago
  I would love to see this approach used in more schools.
  - kmstout 5y ago
    Back in the 2000s, a variation on this was used in the US navy's technical schools. Correct answer? Full points, regardless of showing work. Incorrect answer with work shown? Points off for the error, but allowance for errors carried forward. Didn't show work? No points for you!
    - zeruch 5y ago
      This was also the 80s and 90s approach (at least in Catholic schools when I was a student)
    - rolph 5y ago
      this reminds me of the error biased marking scheme get an answer right = +1 point get an answer wrong = -2 point via subtracting the number of wrong answers from the right answers. so the plan that was advised is if you are not 100% sure of the answer then dont answer, and you only lose 1 point for not answering
- joppy 5y ago
  This is the same as my experience growing up in Australia - right the way from primary school up to university-level subjects, mathematics working is marked and you get almost full points if you solve the problem correctly but just make some clerical error somewhere. Even if you can show progress towards a solution but can’t quite get the last bit, you’ll often get 7 or 8 out of 10.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    At Caltech you'd get partial credit for getting partway to the correct solution. But, if you got a nonsense result (like negative energy), you'd get negative credit unless you included a note: I know the answer is absurd, but I don't know where I went wrong.
    - pertymcpert 5y ago
      Negative credit? You mean you lost marks vs not answering the question at all?
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Yup. That was institute policy, not the professor's discretion. They were pretty clear about thinking whether the answer was reasonable or not.
        SamBam 5y ago
        Makes sense, with the situation that if the student includes the note then they are not penalized. It's pretty important to be able to recognize if you fat-fingered a calculator and got something ridiculous or not.
    - joppy 5y ago
      I think this is a good policy, and have often been annoyed that I can’t (rules of the university) mark my students down for such absurd answers.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work." Random point or two? As an American I think it was usually worth most of the points for the math I did... But this is still aiming for 100%. Being challenged is dangerous to your grade.

danenania 5y ago

You won’t get genuine effort with “harshly scorning” either. If a kid isn’t motivated to learn, punishments and fear aren’t going to solve the problem. They may well make it worse.

HEmanZ 5y ago
That's possibly fair. I honestly don't know much about motivating kids to learn, and I never saw successful examples growing up. Do you know of any basic theories about it or places I could read more? My problem is that I remember seeing lots of different attempts to motivate students while I was in school (every teacher had a different approach), and I never saw one that worked at all beyond "If you don't do this I will punish you." (bad grades, principles office, some formal punishment system)
- serverlessmom 5y ago
  Can you imagine if we lived in a world where we gave young people the room to follow their passions instead of being forced to grind the same repetitive material, stealing the joy of learning from them? Not every person needs to be good at everything for a society to flourish, or for that person to be successful, healthy, and productive.
- danenania 5y ago
  Punishments just make kids (and adults) do the minimum to avoid punishment. They are counter-productive to developing real intrinsic motivation. Motivation issues probably need to be worked out individually with each kid, which to be fair is not really possible for a teacher with 20 students in their class. But fear and punishments are at best just a band-aid for the problem. At worst, they can ruin a kid’s self-image and cause them to give up on school entirely. I’m speaking from my own personal experience mainly, and what I saw happen to friends while growing up.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  I think a lot of it is just about making it fun. Gamification. Story telling. And tying the learning to stuff they are already interested in. It also helps if the teacher is genuinely passionate about the subject taught. And knows way more than is in the curriculum so he can go on weird tangents and answer curveball questions. Oh and keeping difficulty just right. Not so easy that it is boring, but not so hard that it makes students despair.

aaomidi 5y ago

"harshly scorned" Please don't be a parent.

dang 5y ago
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. Would you please stop that? We ban accounts that do this repeatedly and I don't want to ban you. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29617722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29617722 also.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  I know you're busy, so I don't expect you to do this, but if you're interested I'd like to talk 1:1 with you. I kinda agree with you on this one, but I don't agree with you on the thread re: diabetes. Some sentiments are harming people, right now, and not being allowed to call them out seems wrong to do. If this was also about the name of the person, I just picked the name that they had on their HN profile. Either way. Apologies to you for creating more mod-work-load. I'll keep this in mind and I'd like not to get banned either.
  - dang 5y ago
    I appreciate the kind reply! There isn't really a tradeoff here, because even when people are so wrong about something that harm could result from believing them, the best way to respond is to patiently provide good arguments and correct information. If you slip into the flamewar style and/or the online callout-shaming culture, you won't reduce harm. You'll only provoke and reinforce the people who disagree, and the resulting conflagration won't help undecided people decide. Worse, you run the risk of discrediting your own position, and if your position happens to be a correct one, that actually causes harm in its own right, because it somehow ends up discrediting the truth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So happily, I would say, the cause of not having flamewars, of sticking to the site guidelines, and of giving the truth the best possible advocacy, more or less coincide. That doesn't make it easy. It's far from easy, but that's because it's hard to handle the emotional torque it places on you when someone else is saying something that is (or that you feel is) totally wrong on a topic. Where by "you" I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us.