Quantitative Minimum
Will students always gravitate to doing the least work for the greatest reward? I often entered my undergraduate face-to-face courses and joked with students on the first day that if I “gave them all an A right now, then can they remove all extrinsic motivation like being perfect and getting an A versus engaging in the rich experiences of failing, sharing, digging in, reflecting and growing as a learner.” Most students would laugh and semi-get the drift concerning the notion that I genuinely cared about their growth and what they retained from my courses versus the grades they earned. Unfortunately, the over-testing and emphasis on P12 students' assessment scores and the battle for college entry based on standardized tests have created a mindset that rewards success. The system has created learners who strive for an “A” over truly learning and committing the content to memory, let alone recall and application (Galla et al., 2019; Long, 2023). Moreover, how can we blame P12 educators who have primarily focused on successful high-stakes test scores perpetually the loss of their jobs and focusing on tests as if their lives were dependent upon it (Barksdale-Ladd & Thomas, 2000; Baker et al., 2010; Lazarin, 2014)? I realized that the stress of testing and a no-fail mindset had created severe issues in my university course. There was no motivation for authentic learning and growth, only for the extrinsic reward of getting the A and keeping the scholarship(s).
Campbell’s Law (1976) posited that “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor” (p. 34). Far before the era of online education, Campbell originally proposed the concept in response to the burgeoning field of program evaluation (Olt & Jones, 2024). Therefore, when program evaluations and standardized assessment outcomes were used for high-stakes decisions, those being measured would tailor their efforts to satisfy the quantitative metrics being applied to appear strong without necessarily being so - much like P12 teachers that taught to the test versus utilizing more robust methods to achieve enduring understandings through hands-on, project-based learning (Brown et al., 2014; PBL Works, n.d.).
Indeed, such simple, clear quantitative metrics are attractive as they provide concrete expectations for our students. However, quantity over quality does not solicit what we commonly seek from students’ responses and interactions in both face-to-face and online settings. The driving force in supporting engaging and quality student responses and interaction is removing instructional verbiage and rubrics that value quantity (e.g., respond twice to your peers) versus more organic and genuine conversations. In my first five years of teaching online, I often reflected on the lack of depth regarding students' discussion(s). However, moreover, I observed that the majority followed the instructions (“Respond to two peers”) and engaged in two responses at what would be considered a very “surface level” response. A colleague and I discussed the phenomenon that we were observing, and both changed our prompts regarding discussion boards, along with our rubrics, to reflect a culture that supported more interaction and true discussion (“I do not count the number of responses. Instead, I value the organic and genuine discussions you have with your peers.”). Part of the shift regarding student expectations was developing a quality rubric that supports the students' understanding of what the instructor expects, combined with instructor interaction regarding feedback and praise for genuine engagement, combats the students' tendency to post surface-level responses and genuinely engage in peer sharing and interactions. The student’s sense of autonomy to feel safe, the discussion becomes collaborative, and students sharing ideas in a space regarding their experiences has potentially played a large part in the overall students’ experience concerning discussion boards (Hillen & Paivarinta, 2012).