But the main difference is the perception of the students. It may be the same underlying structure, but it's from a progression standpoint as opposed to the traditional back and forth of grading.
Quote: "This has a number of powerful psychological motivators. One of them is no matter what you do in the class, anything you do is forward motion. As opposed to a normal class, when you get a bad grade or something, it takes you back a step which is very demoralizing. Game designers would never put that in a game, because they know people hate it."
In my experience as a TA, the worst obstacle in teaching someone something is when they think they already know it. There's nothing that can replace a bad grade and the consequent soul searching in these situations. A disagreeable experience for the moment can sometimes benefit you much more in the long run.
Ah but that assumes that grades being awarded correlates to knowledge or understanding. All through uni I would do really well in assignments as I would actually love learning and doing the stuff. Come exams and it was one huge cram session. Pretty silly to see your entire grade hinge so much one pointless and worse out dated activity.
After a while we just realised uni was just another "tickbox" for the next step - work. Only after you get a job would you realise the total discontinuity between uni (or the different modes of learning) and reality.
Do you have any arguments why exams would be pointless and dated out? From meeting lots of students, I found out that their understanding of the subject correlated much better with exam than assignment grades. The way I see it, there are two main proofs that you've really grokked something:
1. You can recall and use it under pressure, without the luxury of consulting books and friends.
2. You can use it in a creative manner, to solve new problems.
Only exams can furnish such proofs. The exam system is not perfect, but the best we have (and incomparably less corrupt than the assignment system). The proper way to see things is that assignments are rehearsals for the exam; and the student who never turns in a homework but aces the exam well deserves his/her A-.
Sorry I should have qualified that with some kind of research. When I say my experience, I mean myself and a few dozen fellow students I had spoken to. I understand that that does not constitute any way close to a majority.
Our experiences were that with the assignments we had undertaken we felt enriched doing the research and learning about the things that needed to be done. Exam time was inevitably cram time. Pure short term memory work (coupled with going over past exams - which coincidentally were templates for the current exams).
Now both your arguments about using something under pressure and doing so creatively would be fair, if it was not the case that most of our exams were based on previous years' ones.
I do agree with you about exams being less corrupt. But I am talking about students who actually enjoy doing their assignments and the whole research process (and students who learns for the sake of learning rather than doing well for exams).
I absolutely agree with #2; using knowledge in a creative manner to solve new problems is a perfect demonstration that you have grokked something. #1, however, just proves the ability to cram, which is frequently the same as cram-and-forget.
I agree with you until your last sentence. Especially in upper division courses, the material is more complicated and problems that really test understanding are too ambitious for an exam. This means that if you want to see the student solve interesting problems, they have to complete problem sets or a project. (The corruption of the assignment system means that you're still stuck with exams until the students reach a certain point, though.)
Of course, my experience is only with math courses, and your mileage may vary.
"...it takes you back a step which is very demoralizing. Game designers would never put that in a game, because they know people hate it."
I agree that people hate this (I know I do, at least), but game designers put that in games all of the time, regardless:
You just died ten minutes into the level with the finish line in sight--start over again at the beginning of the level.
OR
You are only allowed to save at particular save points. These are spaced out just far enough that you are likely to lose significant amounts of progress every time you die.
The type is the same, but the implementation is wildly different these days.
Save points in particular are far more numerous and well-placed in today's games. Notably, challenges are now intentionally separated by save points, so that a single skill-type is in focus during each unit.
That way someone who has trouble with, say, a vehicle section won't fail and be faced with five to ten minutes of run-and-gun before they can even attempt (and thus practice) the vehicle portion again.
Essentially, that's precisely what the OP's approach to education is: adding more save points and breaking up the challenges better by type: solo vs group, oral presentation vs written proposal, etc.
Further, failure penalties are only really used in games where the player has an open-ended amount of time to defeat the challenge, precisely to encourage learning and/or mastering of a technique or skill. In a setting where the player has a time limit (such as in education) it would be unnecessary and inappropriate to additionally penalize failure as "repetition + luck" wouldn't be a valid strategy in the first place.
Mass Effect 2 auto-saves seamlessly before every battle, before most non-battle challenges, and at regular intervals when navigating or collecting resources. It even saves at different stages of boss battles. You hardly ever lose progress--yet it's a runaway success, both critically and commercially.
I took a course in high school that used that grading model before (minus the gaming terms ofc). It was an online, at-your-own-pace class in one of those subjects I find interesting but would absolutely hate to learn about in a traditional classroom environment. The grading scheme was indeed awesome and motivating. Completing the next exam/assignment ALWAYS meant your grade went UP, so let's do it now and see what grade I have then! IIRC I finished the course far before the end of the term, which was an additional reward as it allowed me lots of goof-off time in the computer labs.
Of course, it can be a bit awkward to explain the F on your first interim report card, but if this kind of grading became standard that wouldn't be a problem. :)
Oh, I thought I should also mention that the class started at 0% and you could only reach the top grade if you got 100% on all quizzes and assignments, so it wasn't quite the hippie "everyone's a winner" deal some people might be thinking. Your current displayed grade was simply whatever you would get if you didn't do any more work until the end of the term. Also, there were many exams instead of just one big one at the end. I did do quite well in the course, so I wasn't just motivated to rush through the material, just motivated not to laze around instead of doing work.
Calculating the grades in that way just seems to make the interim grades seem more meaningful. When you have 35%, that means you have mastered 35% of the course material. Traditionally, if you have 73% at some point in the term... what does that mean in concrete terms? It doesn't mean you've mastered 73% of the course material, not even "so far", because chances are good that you've only received dinky assignments, labs, quizzes, etc., for a large portion of the material you're supposed to have learned so far. You won't be truly tested for mastery on chapter 1 until the midterm or sometimes even the final.
The forward motion idea is very interesting. I wonder how it plays out in a student's mind. A main issue with regular grading is that a lot of students end up caring more about the grade and their performance rather than what they are learning. It sounds like the forward-motion model is a better representation of the learning process. Dropping from an A to a B doesn't cause you to lose what you have learned, while being up 10,000 XP points (B) instead of 12,000 XP (A) is still up 10,000. Is this differentiator enough to take focus off the grade and cause more students to focus on learning?
I guess an important question could be: What would the feedback from a teacher mean to a 10,000 XP student who is desiring an extra 2,000 XP?
Does anyone know of a good resource to read on game design? I'm not interested in the programming aspects, but on the psychological mechanics game designers use to make games fun (or, if you're Zynga, addictive).
This TEDxUniPittsburgh talk speaks to this concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tg55pdNMxw&feature=relat...
Quote: "This has a number of powerful psychological motivators. One of them is no matter what you do in the class, anything you do is forward motion. As opposed to a normal class, when you get a bad grade or something, it takes you back a step which is very demoralizing. Game designers would never put that in a game, because they know people hate it."