Adjusting Effort to Barely Meet Standards
There is sometimes an observed inverse correlation between a student’s inherent talent/intelligence and the amount of effort expended. The trend is one that I see everywhere in high school. Smart students just sort of shrug and coast by to get an acceptable grade. Or, on the other side, students that don’t grasp material as quickly give it an extra push, knowing that it will take some work in order to get the grades they want.
The similarity between the two is that both types of students are adjusting the amount of work they need to put in, based on the given standard. Given an average, or a benchmark to aim at, they just figure out how much work they need to put in. Students find the equilibrium, the balance between their intelligence and the work they have to put in, that allows them to scrape by.
For students that have less inherent talent in a particular subject, this may be an incentive to improve. But for the students that are never challenged in school, who easily fly through classes that do not provide the adequate learning environment, this drills into their minds that they don’t need to work hard.
And this lesson is definitely not desirable to teach to bright students. Some are never exposed to anything besides the monotony and apparent irrelevance of schoolwork (When will we ever use this in the real world?) and fall into the habit of filing everything new under the “pay attention only enough to scrape by” category of their minds. So, when faced with something like, say, global existential risk, the weight of the subject is ignored.
Of course, there are many other factors involved. It isn’t that everyone has been trained to adjust to put in minimal work based on an average. If that was the case, then all smart students in public school would be slackers. On a larger scale, then there would be no deviations on either side—everyone would just fall exactly on the average line.
So there is clearly something that lets some people ignore the average. Most motivated and thoughtful people probably don’t pay attention to what is considered typical or the standard, anyway. But for many students, a certain test score is a signal to just stop.
Back to the larger scale, now. The problem of using an external standard doesn’t apply only to high school students. There are a multitude of other areas in life, areas in which it is easy to reach a certain point that serves as a mental stopping point.
This may help to account for people that find themselves in an unsatisfying job, wondering why they’re unhappily stuck – based on the standards of salary and stability, the job could look fine. One level further, if meeting a standard is the sole basis of effort, then the job certainly could be done – but without creativity or innovation.
If the goal becomes to reach a certain average, then you could go checkmark, checkmark, checkmark down the row of criteria, without really getting anywhere, or doing anything meaningful. Who creates those standards in the first place? Are they actually a good measure of effectiveness, usefulness, or mastery? Basing work and effort on external stimulus will not compare to having the internal source of motivation, desire, or cause.
One last note: the TED talk and this post have focused on the concept of hard work, or “grit.” It is worth pointing out that there is a difference between just working hard, possibly ineffectively and working smarter. It doesn’t help to do the same thing over and over again and wonder why the results aren’t getting better. Real improvement takes some reflection—identifying weak areas, prioritizing, etc. Though this is probably commonly known, it is a vital distinction to keep in mind with the subject this discussion.
Edit: The links to this TED talk (and an older version here) were originally featured at the very beginning of the post. Since the talk wasn’t relevant in any way, except for a single remark, I removed the links from the prominent focus to increase clarity.
Besides just boring smart kids to insanity, and frustrating dumb kids into giving up, this is the real problem. Kids learn to compare themselves to a standard, instead of learning how to make use of themselves. That’s what a kid needs to learn.
In addition to learning what they learn easily and what they have difficulty learning.
That’s a good point. I’d generalize it and combine it with what I previously said, to finding out what you can do with yourself, and getting good at it. Learn how to make use of themselves, and find the uses their particularly good for.
There is probably a difference between internal goals and external goals. If I must do something merely because someone else says so, then adjusting effort to barely meets standards is the optimal strategy.
When I do something for myself, meeting someone else’s standards is irrelevant. For example if my dream is to make computer games, but at the computer science lesson writing a bubblesort gets me the highest grade, I will not stop at barely writing the bubblesort.
Even when I make the computer games, because I want so, there is a difference in what exactly motivates me. If my goal is to make people happy, I will focus on improving quality, fixing bugs, new ideas, a lot of content, etc. If my goal is to make money, I will focus on selling, advertising, networking, making things addictive, etc. By watching where I try really hard, and where I barely meet standards, you will see where is my passion.
So it seems the best teaching strategy would be to change the students’ point of view, to align their internal goals with the external goals. Which is million times easier said than done. In some environments it’s actually impossible.
(And perhaps this is a useful tool for introspection. If you have problem finding your goals and passions, ask yourself: In which situations are you doing more than barely meeting standards? This is where your heart is.)
This is a useful distinction. I only stressed the difference between internal and external motivation, rather than goals.
And yet, the problem with aligning goals is one that you recognized. From what I have seen, students are bombarded with external goals, which are usually measured by an emphasis on grades and test scores. This tedious and rigidly structured experience creates a “treat everything like it’s tedious and therefore unimportant” field. Then when introduced to a new area, even outside of an educational environment, people fail to recognize that it is a topic that they might even enjoy or have a passion for. The ability to develop internal goals is basically extinguished.
Indeed, since research shows that adding external goals sometimes tends to actually destroy the students’ internal motivation, if they already had any...
That is the paradox: If your students have internal motivation, don’t give them external motivation, because that would harm their internal motivation. On the other hand, if your students don’t have internal motivation, you have to give them external motivation, otherwise nothing ever gets done.
Most people when talking about education understand only one part of it, and then they suggest techniques which work well in some environments, and fail in different environment. And usually instead of realizing their mistake they insist that if you just did more of the same thing, it would work everywhere.
For example there are creative and motivated students who achieve impressive results when left on their own… and then you have people insisting that every student should be left on their own and that it will magically bring a new generation of super-motivated super-creative superheroes… and instead of that, we mostly get grade inflation and unemployable young people.
Yet getting into the habitual expectation that this amount of effort is not vey great is a bad thing.
Agreed, the formation of this habit and expectation is a main danger of adjusting effort to barely scrape by. If it works well enough, to be rewarded for passing (or even excelling) according to a standard, then it can become the default approach. Though it may be good enough to complete a task, it may not be the optimal approach in other aspects of life. For that matter, the current standard or average may not even be up to the level that we actually want to accomplish.
I’ve seen many different models of effort:
Put in a standard amount of effort initially, and if that doesn’t work, sit down and cry
Put in a standard amount of effort initially, and if that isn’t successful, put in more effort; repeat until success or a failure mode is reached
Put in a standard amount of effort initially, and if that fails, put in the maximal amount of effort; if that fails, sit down and cry
Put in maximal effort initially, and if that fails, sit down and cry.
Apply maximal effort initially, and develop a higher baseline for maximal effort if required.
Put in a standard amount of effort initially, and if that fails, put in the maximal amount of effort; if that fails, develop a higher baseline for maximal effort
The problem with the first three is that they are indistinguishable on ‘easy’ tasks. The problem with the next two is that they are unsustainable. The problem with the final solution is that it’s difficult to practice. A problem with this way of treating the case of effort is that it actively fails against tasks that benefit from less attention. (e.g. some creative endeavors, handling cats...)
In the case of creative endeavours, what you are talking about may be less tension/desperation rather than less attention. For example I do my best art when I’ve gotten into that mindset that I can draw another, no worries—in fact, let’s do another two! I’m still paying attention to drawing, but it’s to expressing my idea and making my idea work, and not in ‘making this specific attempt excellent’ aka technique overanalysis/micromanagement.
From personal experience, this also holds for handling cats :)
Overall I think what I’m trying to clarify is that an effective model needs to include meta-level assessment; not only ‘am I doing well/failing’ but ‘Is my model of whether I’m doing well/failing accurate?’
Trying to exert more effort tends to cause tension/desperation in many people; their solution is to not try so hard.
Likewise, the best way to approach a shy cat is to sit nearby and ignore it.
Maybe you should clarify that one should be cautious regarding the accidental education being provided along with the intentional education. If the system rewards people who correctly determine and perform to the minimum standard, then the system is teaching that behavior; likewise, if the implementation of the rules provides perverse incentives, the rules will be abused.
Now I like the system of narrative evaluations instead of numeric grades even more.
This is certainly true. However I think that that solution is only a workaround for failing to develop the skill of working through your tension. When you let it be there, without buying into it, tension dissipates. Like you are saying with the cat, just be there (and not inside your head).
Not sure what you meant in the third paragraph, despite several rereads. My comment was directed at the generalities of ‘calibrating what is appropriate effort’ you discussed in your comment, rather than the education system.
Barring the inevitable postmodernistic waffling, narrative evaluation does seem the best way to go on the student-facing side of things. (obviously there remains the question of how to translate that into something more quantified for admin/government purposes.)
My third paragraph cautions against doing or rewarding things like students who ask for lots of help from teachers even when they can do it on their own, or vice versa.
I see no need to provide a GPA to students in order to quantify numbers for other processes. What goal is served by more information than pass/fail?
Oh, so you meant external attention, rather than the attention of the student.
And, politics. A mere binary pass/fail system allows for less flexible boasting/excusing and spindoctoring the truth. . Of course we don’t want to encourage that, but it is an existing element that would have to be dealt with somehow.
I have seen the phenomena of intelligent students doing enough just to “get by”. Hell, I was one of them. But I have met plenty of over-achievers, and they were above average intellects.
Besides this, I agree with your post. Grit has a lot to say for it.
I told this to a friend of mine. I was the type of person who happy enough to know that I was the most intelligent and clever person in the room, but not to show it. So I would go into math class, ignore the teacher, and do 4 or 5 problems in the book instead. Once I knew that I knew the subject, I would just kick back and relax, while everyone else was still listening to the lecture.
Sure enough, once the test would roll around, I would pass.
Not get an A, but pass, because I accidently skip a small step, which I wouldn’t have done if I practiced more, or because I didn’t carry a 1, which I didn’t notice because I did not check my work. And when I saw the red marks on my exam, I would think, “Wow, that was a stupid mistake. But I passed anyways, didn’t even try, because I am so freaking brilliant.”
I created these habits at a young age, for various reasons, mostly because I was bored by the material and I saw no point it in.
But now in my twenties, I am trying to overcome those habits and make up for lost time. And I did not think so before, but grit is the perfect word to describe this sediment.
As the saying goes, there’s a difference between ten years of experience and one year of experience repeated ten times.
Here are a few points.
Here is a very on topic article:
Duckworth’s TED talk is just another instance of the “here is an important individual difference that is not IQ [therefore everyone should just forget about IQ already!]” genre, which as far as genres go, is pretty boring; no one has ever believed that conscientiousness/hardworkingness/grit/whatever is not an important individual difference, just that mental ability is an important individual difference too.
You seem to have done something strange with that link. This is the corrected link.