What badges taught me ... so far

My first open badge

Mozilla's Open Badges project has implications for how K-12 classroom teachers like me think about our students' online compositions. In my pre-internet teaching days, for example, assessment was more of an individual thing – writers' were formatively and summatively evaluated on their own work. But now that students are composing in online spaces like Youth Voices, composition is more social. With this in mind, I've read a number of instructive conversations that have sprung up after the announcement of the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition winners.

One of the biggest things I learned is that there are a lot of ways people are approaching badging systems, and Barry Joseph's document provides a helpful overview. If you're not up to speed on the whole badges movement, I recommend the Mozilla badges wiki. I should also note that many have cautioned that badges aren't for everyone and that there are other types of legitimate assessments that still need to be explored regarding participatory learning. That said, here's my first take on how reading about badges has helped my thinking about my students' online compositions.

1. Badges can help distribute assessment. Sure, I'm a classroom teacher, and I still have to assign grades at the end of the course. However I shouldn't be the sole issuer of badges. One of the things that underpins a lot of the badges movement is that some assessment should be done by peers, and this seems especially appropriate in online communites. Cathy Davidson expresses her enthusiasm for "peer-driven systems as an alternative to some of the rigid, limited, standardized forms of evaluation." Henry Jenkins is "deeply skeptical" of the massive push for badges going on right now because, among other things, "many young people have deep ambivalences about the kinds of 'credit' adults choose to give (or withhold) around their activities." Still, I can't help thinking that with some peer-driven systems, we could see, as Dan Hickey describes,"self-evident examples of learning ecosystems that have been fundamentally transformed or entirely created by digital badges." My challenge: handing over some of the assessments to the peer community of students.

2. Badges can recognize individual and social achievements.  For example on the individual level I think there's something valuable when a student posts a discussion that is well-crafted and results in a meaningful conversation, even if it's only with one other person. But just as valuable is a discussion post that results in a robust conversation among many members of the community, even if the original post is not all that well crafted.  David Theo Goldberg writes that badges work "within contexts that socially support them and where their users are invested in their significance." Andrea Zellner says that badges "should be operationalized in a way that incentivizes social learning and community involvement." My challenge: finding the balance between recognizing individual contribution and significance to the community.

3. Badges can make learning objectives visible. John Martin comments that "many of the standards we follow are rather nebulous and abstract for learners, particularly in the younger levels. With badges we can track and reward achievement as a progression rather than having students wait until something big like a report card to identify how they are performing." Barry Joseph, who through Global Kids and other programs has implemented badges for a number of years now, feels that if we offer badges to learners we have to be clear about how to earn them. Barry writes, "Our learning objectives, previously invisible within our lesson plans, are now made visible, empowering the youth to hold us accountable." My challenge: being more explicit about the steps students can take to becoming more effective communicators.

My web navigator badge

Henry Jenkins warns us that if we decide to adopt badges we need to do so only if "it's the right thing for your group." So with Youth Voices in mind and as a way to address each of the challenges I laid out above, I have a few initial thoughts about experimenting with badges.

1. Students could be involved in the distribution of assessment through something as simple as a "Like" feature for discussion posts and comments. But in addition to a simple "Like" or "Thumbs up" icon, I'd like to see an accompanying text box where the user gives a quick explanation as to why they like or don't like a post, comment, or reply. Archived, these rationales could be used for more reflective writing later on.... I also think judicious use of user stats could help distribute assessment too.
2. Base some badges on roles like the curator and moderator roles in the Scratch community Mitchel Resnick writes about. I could see additional roles like mentor and editor working in the Youth Voices community.
3. How can I make learning objectives more visible? (to illustrate I'll use something from Paul Allison's "Youth Voices Badges and Quests" document). One of the learning objectives I have for my students is that they become effective at collaborative argumentation, but how might I make this more visible to students? Example: here's some text from the Common Core about argumentative writing that speaks to this learning objective: "Engage in authentic conversations using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence" (second part of EA Writing 12.1). One way to do that is to "reply to other people's comments on a discussion that you started on Youth Voices or one that you commented on earlier." But even here, there are different ways to "level up." For example, a student might directly quote from another so that it's clear what they're commenting on; I think directly quoting another is important because oftentimes writers aren't sure what it is exactly in their discussion post that people are commenting on. However directly quoting another writer may or may not further the conversation. If I just agree with you by repeating what you wrote, there's not much more to say – end of conversation. But if I agree (or disagree) with you and provide new evidence to support my point of view, we are likely to enter into a robust conversation.

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Thanks to +Sheryl Grant for sharing the reading list below with me to get me started:

• Cathy Davidson's Can Badging Be the Zipcar of Testing and Assessment?
• David Theo Goldberg's Threading the Needle Between Skepticism and Evangelism
• Henry Jenkins' How to Earn Your Skeptic Badge
• Mitch Resnick's Still A Badge Skeptic
• Dan Hickey's Open Badges and the Future of Assessment
• Dan Hickey's Digital Badges as Transformative Assessment
• Andrea Zellner's Pretty Sure Badges Aren't the Answer to our Motivation Problem
• Andrea Zellner's Badges as Goals: Achievement Goal Theory
• Judd Antin and Elizabeth Churchill's Social Psychology of Badges

What I would add to Sheryl's list:

• Phillipp Schmidt's Let's Make Badges Not Stink
• Gene Koo's Games, Badges and Learning
• Alex Halavais' Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist
• David Wiley's More on Badges and Assessment

Getting students to appreciate what's taught in school

Photo by [a]clark

One of my favorite questions a student can ask is "why are we doing this?" If students aren't shown the practical value in what they're learning, many of them will tune out. We can have the most organized curriculum, gather fascinating resources, and create an optimal learning atmosphere, but if students don't value what's going on in the classroom, it's all for nothing. That's the problem that Jere Brophy addressed in his 2008 article.

Brophy railed against curriculm that is mile-wide but inch-deep, and rightly pointed out that a lot of students aren't engaged because much of school learning doesn't have "significant life application value." Brophy notes that John Dewey saw it coming long ago – that "most K-12 content originated as practical knowledge derived through situational problem solving, but as it got systematized within what became the disciplines, it got formulated more abstractly and separated from its situated origins." Therefore, although teachers may see the value in what we do in K-12, it's not always so obvious to our students.

Brophy goes on: "If a curriculum strand has significant value for learners, it will be because its content network is structured around big ideas that provide a basis for authentic applications to life outside of school." Similarly, in How to Get – and Keep – Someone's Attention, a 7/25/12 Time magazine article, Annie Murphy Paul advises us to bring our ideas down to earth by "explaining how they connect to your listeners' lives" if we want people to listen. The same holds true for the classroom.

When students are autonomously motivated to engage with K-12 content, they do so voluntarily because they see good reasons for doing so and then activate schema networks for valued purposes. Brophy makes a point of saying that it's not just simply a matter of connecting with students' interests. Instead, he believes that the valuing of school learning begins with curricular aims, an articulation of the knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, and appreciations of what it is being learned. He argues that our curriculum shouldn't just about the what and how, but about why anybody ought to learn it.

The kinds of qualities he emphasizes: absorption, satisfaction, recognition, making meaning, self-expression, self-realization, making connections, achieving insights, and aesthetic appreciation.


Whether it's the subjects I teach or the rewards learners receive, I'm taking a critical look at my own intended outcomes to make sure (in addition to knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions) that I'm including appreciations of why what is being taught is worth learning.

Motivation to learn

Do Badges Kill Motivation, second in a series

Photo by Sloanpix

One of the things that got me delving into this topic is the idea that badges could ruin any intrinsic motivation students have. The idea of intrinsic motivation in school is worth exploring. Whether it's Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory or Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, I have seen plenty of instances of intrinsic motivation in my career – when a student is completely absorbed in reading a book, when a photographer is shooting a series of portraits in our classroom studio, or when a student writer is putting the finishing touches on a story they care about – yes, I'm happy to report that I've personally seen quite a bit of intrinsic motivation in my time.

What usually happens next, however, is that the bell rings, class ends, and the student reluctantly moves on to the next classroom. I've also been on the other end, for example when student artists trudge into my class after leaving a canvas incomplete in their art class, or when musicians wander in fifteen minutes late because they lost track of time in their band class.

The problem with these examples, unfortunately, is that they don't happen often enough. Maybe other educational sites are full of students who are instrinsically motivated all-day, every day, but in my experience the majority of students are not in the zone the majority of the day.

Jere Brophy (in his book Motivating Students to Learn) argued that intrinsic motivation isn't a realistic model of student motivation anyway, since most educational activities are compulsory, at some point the performance will be evaluated, and often situated in very public settings. Instead Brophy argues that student motivation to learn should be the goal we strive for. He believed that intrinsic motivation refers primarily to the affective experience – enjoyment of the processes involved in engaging in the activity; in contrast, motivation to learn is is more of a cognitive response – attempts to make sense of information and master the skills and habits of mind that the activity develops. He wrote: "it is helpful to view motivation to learn as a schema – a network of connected insights, skills, values, and dispositions that enable students to understand what it means to engage in academic activities with the intention of of accomplishing their learning goals and with awareness of the strategies they use in attempting to do so."

Brophy felt that educators should capitalize on students' existing motivation (for example, the inquiry approach to writing), and also make the best of our opportunities to stimulate and socialize their motivation to learn.

He cites expectancy x value theory as a way of approaching motivation, and by extension I think it's a way to approach using badges in education. The expectancy x value model of motivation holds that the effort we're willing to expend on a task is a product of (a) the degree to which we expect to be able to perform the task successfully if we apply ourselves (and the rewards therein), and (b) the degree to which we value both the task and the rewards of that task. It's considered a product because no effort will be invested if one factor is missing entirely.

So what does this have to do with badges? I'll use the idea of "basic or foundational" badges to illustrate. On the one hand, if students recognize the value but don't feel capable of meeting the demands of the task, they're likely to do things to protect their ego (disassemble, in Brophy's words). If on the other hand they're confident in their abilities to do the task but don't value it, they're likely to just go through the motions (evade). Engagement happens when students see value in the task and are reasonably confident in their ability to succeed at that task.

I think I understand the expectancy part of the equation well enough. After all, most career educators are able to choose tasks that are within our students Zone of Proximal Development, but it's the value part of the equation that's a little trickier for me. How do we get students to value learning?

Brophy's 2008 article, "Developing Students Appreciation for What is Taught in Schools," speaks to that. More on that next time.

Do badges kill motivation?

from Knewton.com

As Paul Allison started talking about incorporating badges into Youth Voices, it has me thinking more about the gamification of education in general and badges in particular, and what effect they might have on students' motivation. On the one hand part of me says that badges could stifle students' intrinsic motivation, that students might focus more on getting badges than on learning, and that this extrinsic motivation will ultimately have negative consequences. But on the other hand, it's hard to disagree with the rationale that badges are about "helping people of all ages learn and display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and find new life pathways." And the more I learn about the winners of this year's DML competition, the more of a believer I become. But still I wonder....


Even the people at Mozilla Open Badges on the FAQ section on their wiki are asking "how does introducing badges affect learners' motivations? If learners were already intrinsically motivated, how do we avoid 'crowding out' those motivations with an extrinsic badge system?"

For the next few days I'm on a quest of my own. I'll be reading and writing about what educational research has to say about motivation and how that might inform the use of badges in the classroom, I'll be talking to some people who know more about these topics than I do, and I'll be browsing websites like gamifyingeducation.org and the gamification wiki. 


In the meantime I'm wondering what people think about badges in education: what effect do badges have on learners' motivation?