WHILE I WAS writing this book, I had the opportunity to present the ideas I was working on to faculty groups on different campuses. In those presentations, I would begin by describing some of the background research that you have read in Part One, designed to provide participants with the historical and biological contexts for distraction. I would argue that we can’t hope to wall off distractions, which are endemic to the human condition. Then I would ask them to turn to their immediate neighbors to discuss a simple question, one that changed the focus from distraction to attention: When students were fully engaged and attentive in their classrooms, what was happening? In other words, what were they already doing in their teaching that captured their students’ attention? The second time I posed this question to an audience of faculty members, at Cleveland State University, physicist Thijs Heus raised his hand from the back of the room and offered this simple explanation of when his students were most fully engaged in class: “When they are taking an exam!”
My immediate reaction to this comment was “Of course!” It had not occurred to me to consider an assessment as an attention-focusing experience, but a moment’s reflection will likely confirm for you, as it did for me, that students are highly attentive to the course material when they are taking an exam or completing almost any assessment that contributes to their course grade. That includes when they are giving presentations or taking quizzes, and even when they are completing a low-stakes activity like a worksheet that will count toward their participation grade. Activities that contribute to students’ grades usually have the powerful effect of focusing their attention on the course material.
At least those were my thoughts in the immediate wake of Heus’s comments. After the workshop, when I had time to reflect on the experience, a different reaction followed. Many smart thinkers in higher education over the course of the past several decades—people whose work I deeply admire—have been arguing that we should de-emphasize the role that grading plays in the learning process. Some of those thinkers trace their concerns back to the research of psychologist Edward Deci, who conducted some seminal experiments on motivation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Deci and his colleagues had students complete tasks that they could either pursue for their own interests (which meant they were driven by intrinsic motivation) or for an external reward (which meant they were driven by extrinsic motivation). They found consistently that giving people an external reward for the completion of a task could damage their initial, self-generated interest in that task. In other words, let’s say I invite you to kick some soccer balls into a goal, an activity you find satisfying and enjoyable. If I pause you midway through the process and offer you a reward for every ball you get in, it turns out that, at least according to some research, your motivation to score goals will actually decrease. The conclusion drawn from this research is that external rewards, and the extrinsic motivation they foster, can damage deeper, internal motivation. As a result, many educational thinkers and teachers have argued that we need to eliminate extrinsic motivators like grades in our teaching, as they can harm the intrinsic motivations that students might bring to their learning.1
In what follows, I will draw from research on grades, motivation, and attention—not in order to make the case that graded assessments focus attention, as that should be obvious enough to anyone who has ever taught a credit-bearing course of any kind. Instead, I will focus here on the ways we can take advantage of the attention-focusing power of graded assessments without the collateral damage that grades can cause. To do that, we have to make a distinction between assessments and grades. Assessments are those activities that students complete in order for you to measure their learning progress. They provide both you and the students with information about that progress, and create opportunities for you to give feedback to the students on how they can continue to improve. Assessments typically (though not always) contribute to student grades. The positive effect of putting a grade on an assessment is that it can amp up attention, which in turn can heighten learning.
But it will only do so if we fully understand the potentially negative effects of grades, and build in structures that mitigate those effects.
Graded work is ubiquitous in higher education, in spite of the fact that most teachers would likely prefer to teach without it. I had a colleague who used to quip at departmental meetings that he taught for free but got paid for grading. The discomfort that many of us feel around the enterprise of grading may arise from an instinct that aligns with what educational theorists like Alfie Kohn have argued about grades. In his books and essays about the detrimental effects of grading, Kohn asserts that many decades of research have produced three core findings that should make us skeptical about grading our students. In an overview of that research, “The Case Against Grades,” he explains:
• Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning. A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related and, as far as I can tell, every study that has ever investigated the impact on intrinsic motivation of receiving grades (or instructions that emphasize the importance of getting good grades) has found a negative effect.
• Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task. Impress upon students that what they’re doing will count toward their grade, and their response will likely be to avoid taking any unnecessary intellectual risks.
• Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. They may skim books for what they’ll “need to know.” They’re less likely to wonder, say, “How can we be sure that’s true?” than to ask “Is this going to be on the test?”2
These are serious criticisms that will likely resonate with anyone who has ever wielded a red pen, spoken with students about grades, or fielded requests for one extra point that will improve a student’s grade from a B- to a B. Grades absolutely have the power to narrow students’ focus to performing well on tasks, rather than encouraging them to learn.
Cathy Davidson’s overview of the history of grades, in her book Now You See It, can help us resee the strangeness of our standard practice of stamping letters of the alphabet on documents as a way of measuring the quality of someone’s learning. The omnipresence of this practice in American schools makes invisible the fact that in earlier decades and centuries, and in many other cultures, students were evaluated in more personalized ways, with teachers assessing their learning as a result of direct interaction. As schooling became the norm (and often mandatory) in Western countries and students were packed into increasingly large classrooms, teachers needed more efficient ways to assess learning. At the same time, a corporatizing world wanted mechanisms for sorting children according to their intellectual abilities, and grades became a language that communicated skill levels not only to the student, but to future employers. But while grades can help teachers manage workloads and communicate student achievement to the outside world, stamping a letter on a complex piece of writing, or project, or even a test has always been a blunt way of assessing what someone has learned. The impact of that bluntness, according to Davidson, is that “our classrooms are generally among the most intellectually straitjacketed environments our students enter.”3 Davidson echoes Kohn’s arguments that grading narrows the focus of students to performing well on tasks, rather than encouraging them to learn.
In response to these arguments, creative teachers have developed an array of alternative ways to think about grading. All of them acknowledge that, in the end, institutions ask us to assign letters or numbers to student performance at the end of the class. But what happens prior to that final imposition of the grade doesn’t have to look the way it always has. For example, in “specifications grading,” the instructor articulates clear standards that tie each grade mark (A, B, C) to a specific quantity and quality of work, and students decide which grade marker they wish to work toward. The responsibility then falls entirely on the student to complete that level of work, and they have as many opportunities as they want or need to get there. If their first effort at a paper does not meet the specifications for the grade they are seeking, they take it back, revise it, and keep trying until they reach the level they have identified as their goal. Some teachers might know this system as “contract grading,” in which students contract to produce a certain amount of work and receive a specific grade in return. One important feature of these systems is that they reduce the pressure students might feel to perform perfectly on any individual assessment; if the students’ performance does not meet the standard on any given assessment, they can keep trying until they achieve the goal they have set for themselves. Such systems also make very clear the standards according to which student work will be evaluated, something that teachers are not always great at articulating. Overall, alternative grading models like these encourage individual responsibility, ask students to take ownership of their grades, and put the emphasis on achieving long-term mastery of course content over short-term performance.
Teachers who use these systems advocate for them passionately, and I always encourage faculty members who are frustrated with grading to explore them and see whether they might fit in their courses. But I will once again pronounce myself an agnostic when it comes to grading systems, because I have never quite been convinced by the arguments of Kohn and others who view grades as universally antithetical to learning. In my view, that argument represents what I believe is a partial reading of the full literature on this subject. There is no doubt that grades should not be our primary method of motivating students or providing feedback on their work. We should inspire them with curiosity and purpose, and we should provide them with plenty of substantive feedback in both oral and written forms. This chapter assumes you do those things. But as we guide students toward the deeper goals of our courses, they will need smaller incentives along the way, to nudge them to stay on track when they hit roadblocks, get frustrated or bored, or become distracted by their lives outside of the course. Graded work can keep them on track or get them back when they falter. Grades can also orient students toward fundamental learning tasks that are necessary but hard. I have never met a writing student, or a student in any course, who loves to do the hard work of mastering the grammar and mechanics of formal writing. Much of the writing we do in class can be informal and doesn’t need to follow those rules. But at least some of the writing does, since mastery of those rules will enable them to succeed at college and professional writing tasks. Grades can keep the attention of students on whatever the equivalent of grammar might be in your discipline.
In contrast to the single-minded view that grades always damage student motivation, other research suggests that the ideal approach to motivating students is a mix of intrinsic motivators (like deep goals) and extrinsic ones (like grades). It should be noted here as well that the simplistic dichotomy of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation offers only one way to understand the relationship between motivation and learning. The authors of How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, for example, identify the key sources of motivation as triangular: goals (which include both performance and learning targets), values (the importance of the goals to the student), and expectancies (the extent to which the student believes the goals are achievable). The authors’ conclusions about these different elements of motivation would apply to almost any theoretical scheme we could imagine: “No single variable is universally deterministic with regard to motivating students.”4 In other words, nothing works—or doesn’t work—for everybody. This, of course, matches very well what we know about teaching in general: that no particular strategy works for every student. We’re humans. We are all different. Some students love listening to lectures, and some love having discussions. Some love group work, and some hate it. In the end, this leads to the only teaching principle that I have tried to put into practice over the course of my entire career: vary your methods. Sometimes students should love what you are doing, and sometimes they should be challenged by it. The same is true for motivation. If teachers try to lean too heavily on one form of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic, values or expectancies), we will always be orienting our courses toward a subset of students. Mixing different motivational approaches provides us with the most comprehensive approach toward inspiring our students to join us on a learning journey, stick with it when times get rough, and leave with substantive new knowledge, skills, or values.
I’ll finish by noting that at least some research demonstrates a positive link between extrinsic motivation and the kind of sustained attention we want in the classroom. Researchers from the Boston Attention and Learning Lab have a standard test that they have developed to measure how long people can sustain their attention to a computer-based task. In an article that featured the lab’s work, cognitive psychologist Mike Esterman explains that he and his colleagues ran an experiment with that test in which they told college students that the better they performed on the attention tasks, the more quickly they would be finished with them—at which point they could leave the lab and get on with their day. The promise of finishing the experiment as quickly as possible is a classic example of extrinsic motivation (by contrast, a participant would be intrinsically motivated if she found the attention tasks fascinating and wanted to learn from them). The result of this experiment showed that the presence of an extrinsic motivator substantially increased people’s attention to the experimental tasks. As Esterman explains, “The extra motivation increased the person’s ability to sustain attention by more than 50 percent… We were kind of blown away by the size of these effects.”5 Esterman’s lab mate, cognitive neuroscientist Joseph DeGutis, argues that “one of the things we’ve realized is that it’s hard to separate motivation from sustained attention… If we’re not looking at motivation, then we’re really missing the boat in terms of attention.” The conclusion of these researchers supports the notion that extrinsic motivators (like grades) should take their place among the strategies that we use to sustain attention in the classroom, even though we should be using them in conjunction with strategies like building community and cultivating curiosity.
The three recommendations of this section argue for a mixed motivational approach to sustained attention in the classroom, one that includes the use of graded assessments. What unites these recommendations is that they draw on the power that grades have to foster attention in the classroom, and to orient students toward the course material and intellectual skills that will prove most helpful to them in earning the grades they seek. In other words, I’m not advocating for these strategies just because they focus attention; I’m advocating for them because they focus the attention of students in ways that will help them learn.
In Chapter Six, I argued for a modular approach to the classroom experience, in which you are doing several different kinds of teaching activities throughout the period. In Chapter Seven, I argued that signature attention activities should have a regular place in your rotation. Some of those activities, whether they are signature attention ones or more conventional classroom activities like writing or problem-solving, will produce a concrete outcome: a piece of paper, a slice of the whiteboard, a poll response, a post to the learning management system. My experience has taught me that students don’t always engage willingly in these kinds of activities; some view active-learning moments as opportunities for distraction. One of the most frequent comments I get from faculty at workshops concerns this problem: “I design these great learning activities for my students, but they don’t want to participate. They just sit there and don’t do anything. They would rather sit and listen to me lecture.” We could spend a long time discussing why this happens, but here I am going to offer a very simple solution: identify the most important engagement activity that you want your students to complete each day or each week—such as your signature attention activity—collect it on paper or electronically, and have it make a minimal contribution toward the students’ grades.
These kinds of activities should be the intellectual sandbox in which your students get to play, or the rehearsals where they warm up for the higher-stakes performances. Allocating a very low-stakes grade on such activities sends a signal to students that exploration and rehearsal are important to their learning. You can view the use of grades on such activities as infantilizing, forcing students to do work in class, and I understand how some teachers and students might take that view. But if the activities are well-designed ones that promote learning, you can instead view the grades as rewarding students for doing the work that will prove most helpful to their studies. Think of all the extrinsic motivators that people give themselves to exercise—online badges and stickers, reporting their results on social media, joining communities of support, signing up for a 5K—even though everyone knows perfectly well that exercise is good for you and you shouldn’t need such extrinsic motivators to undertake it. But those small incentives seem to give people the extra nudges they need. Low-stakes grades on in-class activities do the same. Without that incentive, some students might check out and angle toward their distractions. Those students are likely to be the ones who have trouble in class, or are disconnected from it, and are more likely to fail. With the small incentive of the grade to motivate participation, those same students might decide to attend more carefully, and their work on that activity might connect them to their fellow students, help them see the course material as worthy of their attention, and give them the practice they need to succeed on the upcoming exam. Your most prepared students don’t need the incentive of a low-stakes grade to participate in your engagement activities. They’ll do just fine without it. Adding the grade provides an incentive for those students who are less well prepared or academically oriented to engage with the valuable learning activities you have created for them.
These kinds of low-stakes graded activities can also be used in lieu of participation grades, which are frequently given to students on an eyeball basis and hence are subject to all kinds of biases. You might be more likely to give a high participation grade to a student who spoke recently, or the students you like, or the students who remind you of yourself, and so forth. Open-ended participation grades also tend to incentivize and reward a few dominant students who like to raise their hands and talk, which can shut out those who need more time to process and think, or who might not be as confident in their abilities in the classroom. Sociologist Jay Howard has documented this well-known phenomenon in the college classroom, referring to it as the “consolidation of responsibility.”6 A few vocal students do most of the participating in class, shutting out others, and those students earn the participation points that others are then denied. By contrast, when you incentivize participation with a low-stakes grade on signature attention activities (or other in-class work), you are drawing everyone into the conversation, even students who might be initially reluctant, or who would prefer to check out. You might well find, as I have, that sometimes those students have terrific insights and ideas, and that they were checked out or distracted less from laziness or boredom and more from the feeling that they did not see a meaningful way to enter the class conversation. Low-stakes grading on classroom activities provides them precisely the entry point they need.
As a final practical point, whatever grades you put on in-class activities should fall into the category of what composition theorist Peter Elbow calls “minimal grading.”7 Give full credit for good faith efforts, or step it up occasionally with slightly higher stakes (for example, Excellent, Satisfactory, or Incomplete). You’ll need to keep it minimal if you don’t want to add lots of new grading time to your schedule. If I have students complete the kind of poetry worksheet I described in the last chapter, working in groups of three in a class of thirty, I get ten worksheets that I can scan quickly for completion in five minutes or less. I don’t need to comment on them because we would have followed the worksheet activity with a whole-class discussion in which they told me what they wrote and I recorded and evaluated their ideas with them in class. I can’t say that using this low-stakes, minimal grading approach won’t add any extra grading time to your workload, but you should find that the small extra effort is more than repaid with a greater expenditure of attention from your students.
Higher-stakes assessments, especially in the form of tests and quizzes, can play an equally important role in promoting both attention and learning in your course, in spite of the negative perceptions that many of us have toward them. Teachers usually see their job as introducing new content to students and helping them process or encode it. But a long line of research, dating back more than a hundred years, argues that the challenge of long-term learning is retrieving knowledge or skills from our brains after our initial exposure to them. According to this research, we are very good at “learning” something new for a very short period of time, and then forgetting it. But to count something as truly learned, we should be able to retrieve it from our long-term memories weeks, months, or years after our encounter with it. “We typically focus on getting information into students’ heads,” write Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain in Powerful Teaching. “On the contrary, one of the most robust findings from cognitive science research is the importance of getting information out of students’ heads.”8 When students have truly mastered something, they can recall it in different contexts and use it to tackle novel problems or challenges. You wouldn’t count your students as having learned your course material if they did well on a test on Friday and couldn’t recollect any of it, or use it in the service of some task, on Monday. But we all know how often that happens with students who spend all of their learning time trying to cram knowledge into their brains.
What they should be doing instead is engaging in retrieval practice, which means that they are repeatedly forcing themselves to draw newly learned material from their memories and put it to work. The power of this kind of practice is perhaps the most thoroughly researched subject we have in education. The more times students engage in retrieval practice with something they have studied, the better they are able to call up that material from their memories in the future. You might object at this point that you want students to do more than be able to retrieve stuff from their memories. In that case, I have good news for you: the more students have mastered foundational knowledge and skills with retrieval practice, the better they are able to do the kind of higher-order thinking we all want from our students. In Powerful Teaching, Agarwal and Bain summarize multiple research studies that demonstrate that “retrieval practice boosts students’ higher-order thinking, application of knowledge, and skills like writing and math.”9 Teachers are sometimes concerned that the kind of knowledge students learn for exams doesn’t transfer beyond the context of the test itself, but several studies on learning transfer show that knowledge learned for tests can and does transfer meaningfully to other contexts.10
This quick overview of the research on the power of retrieval practice helps explain why tests and quizzes not only measure learning but actually produce it. Although we don’t often think of them this way, tests and quizzes are practice memory exercises. They force students to retrieve what they have learned and articulate it or apply it. In so doing, they are strengthening their ability to repeat those steps in the future. So we should not by any means apologize for, or shy away from, tests and quizzes. They engage the attention of students and promote learning. In-class engagement activities can also be oriented toward retrieval practice; for a wealth of ideas about how to incorporate retrieval into activities like the ones described in the last section, see books like Powerful Teaching or my own Small Teaching.
My physicist friend Thijs Heus was correct in noting that students are highly attentive when they are taking an exam, but I am sure that most of us have seen that students are also highly attentive when we link classroom material and activities to upcoming assessments, whether tests or papers or anything else. Nothing tends to make students perk up in class more than when I introduce some new poem or theory with a statement that they are likely to see it return on the midterm or final exam. We should thus be as transparent as possible, letting students know when what we are doing in class will link directly to an assessment. Teachers sometimes deride this kind of thinking as “teaching to the test.” As I have argued elsewhere, though, we should of course teach to the test—or the paper, or whatever else you have created to assess their learning at the end of the semester. If we design great assessments—ones that have been carefully constructed to allow students to demonstrate their learning in significant ways—then what else should we be doing but helping them develop the knowledge and skills they need to succeed on them? Tests and other high-stakes assessments thus become an opportunity for frequent spurs to attention in your classroom. The language and attitude with which we explain it makes all the difference. I can threaten students with reminders about the upcoming exam, or I can call them to attention by pointing out that engaging in this next activity, or paying special attention to these next slides, will give them the knowledge or skills they need to succeed on next week’s exam.
One great way to capture attention and orient students toward an upcoming exam or assessment is by asking them to help you create it. An exam-review day is likely to be a peak attention moment in the semester, but you can also make it an excellent learning activity by having students write questions that you will use on the test. One group of food scientists experimented with having students write exam questions for a course and reported on the results in a 2018 publication. Their experiment was inspired by prior research that had demonstrated that student performance on exams improved when they had the opportunity to write questions or create exam prompts.11 In the food-science course, two of the three exams were created by the instructors; one was created largely from a question bank generated by the students. Importantly, the instructors gave students guidelines about constructing effective exam questions before they started, including exposure to Bloom’s taxonomy and encouragement to ask questions that promoted higher-order thinking. The students performed significantly better on the exams they helped generate the questions for—and that difference did not simply occur because they were answering their own questions. Twenty questions were chosen from a bank of six hundred generated by the entire course.12 After all, explained one of the authors in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, “we figured if they had 600 questions and they sat down and memorized answers to all of them… then how different is that from really studying?” The process of learning from exams can thus begin when you involve students in the construction of the test, which can serve as an excellent review or in-class activity to complete in groups. I have done this myself and seen student attention perk up, and exam anxiety decrease, when they are invited to cocreate the assessments that will determine their grades.
Of course, tests and quizzes have potentially negative effects on student learning and your classroom climate. If you are constantly quizzing and testing students, they won’t have the opportunity to encode and process the course material. Tests and quizzes can also inspire fear and anxiety in students, and those emotions can interfere with their learning. To achieve the positive effects of testing and quizzing—and the engaged attention that accompanies these activities—without the negative consequences, consider offering what Flower Darby, the author of Small Teaching Online, calls an “Oops Token.”13 This conceptual token means that students have the opportunity to fail or do poorly at least one time without having it included in their final grade calculations. For example, an instructor can give four tests and count three, or give weekly quizzes and count the best ten. Remember, well-designed tests and quizzes promote learning, so you are not doing anything wrong by adding one that can be dropped if something goes awry for a student. If you don’t want to drop one, instead allow students to retake their lowest-scoring test. Whatever route you might take, this type of thinking makes your exam-giving as compassionate as possible, allowing room for the kinds of failures that we all experience from time to time.
After the workshop in which that physicist first introduced me to the role that tests can play in promoting attention, I mentioned his comment to an academic friend. A wistful look crossed her face. “I loved taking tests,” she said. “They were one of my favorite parts of school. I loved sitting down, getting in the test-taking zone, and knowing that I had a task to complete, a certain amount of time to complete it, and that afterward I would find out how I did.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wish I could still take tests.” Both she and that physicist recognized the way that tests and quizzes can fully absorb our attention and put us in that flow state. If that were all they did, they would still be worth incorporating into our teaching. But the literature on retrieval practice demonstrates that they can also be a potent tool to support learning, and as such deserve an important place in the strategies we use to capture attention in the service of our students’ education.
The final strategy for connecting attention and assessment hearkens back to the last chapter, in which we considered how defamiliarization can help create and renew attention. The first two recommendations of this chapter connect to in-class activities and tests and quizzes. It’s very likely that many readers either supplement such activities with other, out-of-class assessments—like papers, presentations, and projects—or that they rely more heavily on those kinds of assessments. In this section, I want to recommend a strategy for thinking in new ways about out-of-class assessments, which of course can become overly familiar to students, as we ask them to go through the paces of writing a paper of literary analysis, or giving a presentation on a topic of their choosing, or some variation of this kind of work. The more creative approach—one that will defamiliarize these assessments for your students and present them with intriguing new challenges designed to spark their attention—involves shifting one key feature: the audience.
One of the most innovative examples I have seen of this approach comes from David Crowley, a professor of biology who began his teaching career helping students master the basics of his courses, and did so effectively enough to earn tenure at my college at the end of his sixth year. Shortly after he had done so, however, he took a leave from the college to pursue another degree, an experience that returned him to teaching with a greater sense of purpose for both himself and his students. When he returned to his biology courses, new degree in hand, he enrolled in an academy that runs out of the Center for Teaching Excellence that I direct, and that gives faculty the time and resources to think newly and deeply about their teaching. The combination of his time away from the classroom and his work in the academy inspired him to develop a new assessment for his students, one that specifically asks them to notice what has captured their attention in the course and to bring it to the attention of others.
To accomplish this, Crowley presents the assessment to his students as having three core tasks:
• First, the students identify some aspect of the course that has fascinated or intrigued them, or that they have come to care about. What, in other words, has captured their attention?
• Next, they have to define an audience that should pay greater attention to this subject. That audience can be their family members, a sports team, their dorm mates, the local community, or even a single political representative.
• Finally, they complete the project by bringing their course interest to the attention of their defined audience.
The form that the finished project can take is completely open, and the assignment has manifested a range of creative and fascinating projects. One group of students, for example, became interested in the role that water plays in sustaining life and decided that they wanted to educate their fellow students about their water usage. They created a poster campaign that provided key facts about the amount of water used in showers and hung them in the dorm bathrooms around campus. In addition to the actual work they do in the creation of such a campaign, the students write a reflection paper about their work, which provides a comparable product that Crowley can grade.
A similarly inspiring project that made creative use of audience was created by biologist Stan Eisen, a faculty member at Christian Brothers University, who has students in his upper-level courses write a children’s book about complex subjects. Eisen’s work was described in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he explained that he views the assignment “as a tool to get students engaged so they see the topic as interesting, fascinating, and worthwhile”—and, I would add, it tackles the intriguing challenge of making that topic interesting, fascinating, and worthwhile to a very challenging audience with a short attention span. The first book produced, Don’t Get Sick, Stan!, was from students in a parasitology course, and focused on the parasites that might sicken students in a school cafeteria. Students in a zoology course produced a coloring book called All Creatures Small and Smaller: The World of Invertebrates. Eisen has a faculty member from the education department present to his students about writing for children, which provides them with needed support for this unusual assignment.14
I argued above that we can view teaching as primarily an exercise in joint attention: calling the attention of our students to the aspects of our discipline that matter. These projects have a similar purpose, now displaced to the students. Having identified what in the course has captured their attention, the students think creatively about how to capture the attention of others. Many kinds of innovative projects in higher education take this form, although we might not explicitly frame them in attentional terms. But when we ask students to write or communicate to public audiences, build websites or create podcasts, record YouTube videos or design pamphlets or brochures—in short, whenever we ask them to create a product that will have a life outside of our classroom—we are charging them with the task of capturing the attention of others and directing it to our course material. So much of the work that students do in higher education is oriented toward what my colleague Carl Robert Keyes once called “an audience of one”—the professor. But if we want students to think critically and creatively about attention and distraction, as we all likely do, we should instead invite them at least once to take on the difficult task of designing a project that identifies something important in our discipline and works to capture the attention of a distracted world.
• Create a category of graded work that consists of in-class, low-stakes activities, and use those activities to hold students’ attention on work that will help them succeed in the course. That work could be writing, solving problems, collaborating on online documents, or whatever else fits your discipline and teaching approach. Grade these assessments minimally, and remind students that they are being rewarded for showing up and practicing, just as they are on their sports teams and in other pursuits.
• The literature on retrieval practice, sometimes known as the testing effect, tells us that the more times students attempt to retrieve knowledge from memory, the more firmly they will establish that knowledge in their minds. Use tests and quizzes (low stakes whenever possible) to help ensure that students have mastery of the basics in your course. Remind students of the value of these assessments, and provide students with opportunities to fail occasionally and still succeed in the course.
• Displace the work of attention to your students in at least one major assessment for the semester. Ask them to identify the aspect of the course that has most captured their attention and to bring it to the attention of others. You can still use your normal suite of tests, quizzes, papers, and so on, but offer at least one opportunity for students to think about why your course material deserves the attention of a wider audience.
Early in my career, I believed it was possible to use teaching wizardry to motivate every student to pay full attention in my courses. I just had to find the perfect combination of intriguing activities that would widen their eyes in awe, engage their brains with curiosity, and incentivize them to engage in challenging intellectual work. I thought I could motivate them all to love English literature and writing if I devised the perfect course. In those years, I avoided things like tests, quizzes, and low-stakes grades in class, thinking I shouldn’t need them to incentivize participation and attention. My students should want to attend and participate because we’re doing amazing stuff in here! But semester after semester, course after course, those ideals bumped up against students who seemed checked out no matter what I did. It took me a long time to realize that not all students had it in them to love literature and writing, that not all students really loved college or learning, and that not all students were going to love everything we did in class. But many of those students, even though they weren’t passionate devotees of British literature, still wanted to succeed in my courses and in college. In recent years, I have come to recognize that grades and assessments, with all of their attendant extrinsic motivation, have an important role to play in ensuring the success of those students.
Assessments have an equally important function in the lives of students who might wish to dedicate more time and resources to my class, or to college in general, but who don’t have the bandwidth for it. We all know that students are increasingly juggling many different obligations and commitments. Their attention is being pulled in a thousand different directions, and not only by their social media accounts and digital devices. They are dealing with family obligations, jobs, sports and clubs, personal relationships, mental health issues, and more. We can’t and shouldn’t expect all of our students to come into our classes with the energy and motivation to just explore and learn. We should do everything we can to cultivate that attitude, but everything we can do will never be enough for every student in the room. What grades do for students is help them recognize what they should pay attention to in a course. When we assign a grade to a piece of work, it intensifies it in the context of the entire course, and thereby piques the attention of students. If they have limited resources—cognitive, emotional, or otherwise—graded assessments can help them identify where to direct their energy. If we do our jobs as we are supposed to, and design our graded assessments so that they promote learning, we are drawing the attention of students to the aspects of the course that will help them succeed.