What Does An Apendix Look Like

Notes primary schools: helpful or not?

Twenty personalities, Michel Rocard, Daniel Pennac, Richard Descoings, Marcel Rufo and researchers as Axel Kahn and Eric Maurin, a colleague, among others, have recently joined an appeal launched in September by AFEV aimed at eliminating the use of notes in elementary school. The main arguments are well known, the notes would discourage students, undermine their confidence in them and the conclusion also striking to note how a school cooperation rather than a school competition (see here ).

As a teacher, my view is actually shared personal assessment must be part of the route of a pupil or student, because it takes many elements it needs to be within the absolute respect and possibly all of these comrades. Moreover, this assessment does not necessarily reduce to a note, but can take many forms. I also understand the arguments of Eric Maurin, which probably gives a more sociological reading of the problem, based on factual evidence that is indisputable. As an economist, I must say that incentives have an effect, and the whole issue is whether the incentives from the rating is more effective or less effective for student achievement that the lack of system incentive or another incentive scheme.

Moreover, by the way, striking the notes is also an issue of public policy, insofar as the effectiveness of education policies, when it is measured - is often gauged through the variation of performance Student against those famous notes. Obviously, this approach to evaluation by the notes can be only very partial, and it was said long ago that the effectiveness of education reforms should be judged on multiple criteria other than performance terms of notes, for example through the impact on the general condition and behavior of children and adolescents (health, tendency to addiction, etc.).. I quote including Bowles and Gintis Obsborne in 2001 in the American Economic Review about the limitations of the notes (test scores) for evaluation performance in school and the need to go beyond:

"(Economists) Need Broader Indicators of School Success, Including Measures based On The contribution of schooling to behavioral and personality traits"

It also appears that the relationship between grades in schooling and income earned by people later became active is relatively thin .

From a behavioral perspective, the question that is asked is whether the impact of information that can get people on their performance current levels of effort to come and future performance. Or, put differently, what is the incentive effect of these famous notes on the level of effort in the work of students?

This issue of the impact of feedback is at the heart of the work on the economics of human resources (I do not know better translated "personal economics," but said it may be just the economy of staff), which is little or my specialty. The empirical literature, especially experimental, has been important in recent years on this issue. I already

mentioned in this ticket problems there might be trying to establish a system of incentives in a context of education, the perverse effect is that extrinsic motivations substitute for intrinsic motivation and the Total net effect could ultimately be negative. Mutatis mutandis, the effect of motivation related to the notes could oust the taste of staff work and effort.

particular, the question of efficiency scores (feedback in general) can be approached from two aspects: the fact that the level of my note gives me information Absolute on my performance, and secondly, the relative level of my grade compared to other students, if this information is public. If it is public, it can take many forms, my grade can be compared to an average possibly coupled with a standard deviation provided by the school, show up to a perfect knowledge of the distribution of ratings.
From an economic standpoint, feedback on past performance can affect my performance standard either directly, as past and present performance are substitutes or complements in the utility function of the agents, or indirectly by revealing to the individual information on the performance of its effect (signaling effect).

This controversy is timely, since the literature on this issue is booming in the experimental field. Recently, Azmat and Irriberi, 2010 published the results of two studies that focus particularly on the impact of feedback in part on performance, but also on the welfare assessed. They focus in particular on the impact of feeback on the performance of individuals. They observed a significant effect on scores on the final performance of students, and therefore their level of motivation, on the occasion of a natural experiment. They confirm these results in this paper , but also highlight the negative effects on the well being of students below the average of a measurement system relative to an absolute measurement system.

However, the study's most interesting because the nearest of the question is that of Todd Cherry & Larry Ellis, in an article published in 2005 in the International Review of Economics Education . These authors compare the impact of an absolute evaluation system (my my grade or rank on a scale of 1 to 10 for example) compared to a rating system on. In the evaluation system on my score (my final) is determined on the performance of other students. For example, if I answer more questions than 90% of my class, I get an A. If I say better than 75% of my class, I get a B, etc.. This system is particularly strong competition in front of students.

is precisely the effectiveness of any scheme of assessment on the final performance students they wish to measure. As they have 4 classes in an introductory course in macroeconomics, they set up for two of these groups on an assessment (rank order grading) and the other two absolute evaluation (Criterion-referenced grading). The chart below shows the distribution of scores finally obtained in the examination according to the two incentive schemes by Notes:

Source: Cherry & Ellis, 2005

As it is difficult to draw a clear conclusion, these authors make an econometric analysis of the score through the treatment as an explanatory variable "rank order grading 'treated as a variable dummy. The results are quite explicit: the average score of students is better in the scheme which provides an assessment on the student rather than an absolute assessment. They are cautious, however, and insist that this kind of rating system is not necessarily appropriate if the goal is to promote cooperation among students, the evaluation system is absolute, in these conditions, probably better.

To conclude this post, this is not the rating itself appears to be a problem but how this notation is used by teachers and students to compare themselves to others. That can backfire. However, the effects of competition are not always bad (I'm sorry to remind so obvious, but many get carried away in a big discussion about the perverse effects of competition, forgetting some of his indisputable merits). Finally, I borrow from this week's Telerama conclusion that I found beautiful. A French teacher told a student collapsed by its note of 7 / 20:

"You are not what 7 / 20. This 7 / 20 is what your work was worth last week between 8 am and noon. Made the difference. "

is one who has all inclusive pedagogy. More reason not to break the thermometer too fast and think of a weighted potential consequences of the abolition of the notes.

The Best Unblocked Games

Facebook, gas prices and the role of approving

I read the newspapers very rarely. I always more or less hated this, perhaps in response to this period of my childhood when, during the rainy vacation days spent in my native Morvan, my only resource to fight against boredom was reading the Superman strips taken by the newspaper La Montagne ...

More generally, I always vaguely challenged this view the news through the small end of the telescope, which is more interested in the boules competition Petaouchnouk friendly-sur-Sevre that the conflict in Darfur, and these newspapers in which the major interest of many readers is to consult obituaries if his neighbor will be included.

[I am a little moody, probably disrupted by the switch to winter time]

However, there are few, having at my disposal one of the bibles of Breton medium (outside The Holy Bible of course), namely the newspaper Ouest France, I came across this little story present in the edition of 27 October I am going to narrate.

Once upon a time, in a small town of Ille-et-Vilaine, a nice head of station, named Eric. This was exposed, like all his fellows, the recurrent difficulties of fuel supply due to deposits blocked by hundreds of trade unionists - a dozen police said, opposed the pension reform.

Being of a generous nature, he said it would be desirable to inform all those poor motorists wandering like lost souls in search of the Grail container, not the blood of Christ, but good and heavy diesel. He then had the idea to inform them in real time (?) Via the Facebook page of the large area which holds the gas station. Alas, far from stopping there, noting that competitors' prices soar during this period of shortage, the margins from his post of about 1% to 6% for certain, he courageously decides to lower fuel prices it provides and, icing on the cake, to increase its capacity by hiring extras to limit the length of queues.
Result? dozens of messages of encouragement and appreciation for this welcome improvement and these generous prizes on the Facebook page of the supermarket. Eric, moved to tears (well, there I am a bit of a film) decides to organize a challenge : If before 8 am Tuesday, October 26, one hundred were clicked "love" on the popular Facebook page, the price of fuel down. But Eric goes further, if in addition to that, 800 Internet users say they are fans of the aforementioned page, diesel oil is sold at cost. Apotheosis: If the page has over 1000 fans, all fuels are at cost.

In fact, at the end of the period, 109 people said they "liked" it, and suddenly Eric, overwhelmed by an emotion that one can not declare legitimate decided to provide all fuel cost all day going far beyond its initial commitment. Therefore predictable supply disruption from 17.45 on the same day!

player, do you doubt that what I'm interested in here is to give a little economic sense in this paradox: a manager who agrees to sell at cost upon the fact that anonymous users have served him in sufficient numbers they were nice! Notes that many users may have said the friendly, it does not cost much and moreover, they may actually find it really unpleasant, but that's all that matters, is that ultimately, a sufficient number of people have reported finding its sympathetic action.

What I mean by that is that the power of retaliation by the Internet in case of non compliance with the floor manager is relatively limited. These are not 100 Internet, which, moreover, are not necessarily regular customers of the resort, which will be able to punish the manager by boycotting their station for example. Furthermore, one might think that an objective of building a reputation by the manager to its clients is probably real, but not necessarily the main motivation for his behavior.

The question is whether this type of reward ("I" on Facebook) or punishment ("I do not like") has a symbolic effect on the behavior of individuals. This idea is as old as the world or almost one of those who argued so serious as for example the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

These penalties / rewards are said to be immaterial (also known as positive or negative feedback in the experimental literature) in the sense that they do not affect the material welfare of the officer punished or rewarded, but only his emotional state. The examples are numerous, both possible expressions of approval and disapproval verbally and facially are many insults, social ostracism (see the sweet process of excommunication), humiliation (etc.) but also the applause the encouragement, smiles and other expressions of individual or collective enthusiasm with regard to the conduct of a person.

Initially I thought count by tens experimental studies devoted to this simple question, and it is clear that it is not so easy to find items which directly address this issue in the field of experimental economics or behavioral economics in this precise sense. Many studies exist on the impact of sanctions / reward material, also on the question of the impact of sanctions on symbolic contributions (including a paper known to one of my colleagues and co-authors, David and Masclet in Masclet al., 2003). However, feedback suggested - some level of disapproval of such non-material is always ex post, once the actual decisions of individuals made public for the whole group.

The only study to my knowledge on this subject is that of Perez-Lopez & deliberateness in 2010 in the Journal of Economic Psychology , the question raised by these authors is precisely my opinion the main outcome of the enigma of my sympathetic manager behavior gas station. How the presence of an approval or disapproval of a non-material can influence the choices?

To study this, the authors, after building a model of aversion to the disapprobation, compared three treatments based on a prisoner's dilemma game played once (one-shot game ") in order to test the theoretical model constructed initially. In this game , need I remind invented by Dresher and Flood in 1950, and contextualized by Tucker in 1952, two players must decide to cooperate or not cooperate (these terms are not used in the game instructions) The choice is simultaneous. If both cooperate, they each earn 180 points, and if both do not cooperate, they each earn 100 points. If one of them cooperates and the other not, one who earns 80 cooperates and who does not cooperate earns 260 points. The Nash equilibrium is obviously a mutual defection.

The first experimental treatment is a control treatment, participants are paired with two randomly and anonymously play the prisoner's dilemma. In the second treatment, made in particular to test their model aversion to disapprove, the subject must say this before choosing their strategy, what they think their opponent will think of their choice in all possible configurations of game, if they turn clear or approve each possible strategy. For example, assuming that the other cooperates, the fact that I cooperate myself should be overwhelmingly approved by my partner. This information will be the opponent, each player having access to this hypothetical judgment actions of the other by himself.

In the last treatment, players have the opportunity, once made their decision to send a message to their partner expensive ("Feedback"), this message saying that the choice made by the other was either good or bad or neither good nor bad. The treatment that interests me most is obviously the second treatment, based on the hope of being approved or disapproved by the partner.

The results are summarized briefly: the rate cooperation is higher in the treatment feedback (which is in line with the existing experimental studies on the impact of sanctions on non-material cooperation) than in the control treatment. Treatment "expectations" - expectations about what my opponent will think of my action - is intermediate, that is to say that the cooperation rate is slightly better than in the control treatment, although the difference is not statistically significant (on the graph below, the rate of participants who chose "cooperate" in terms of treatment, control treatment blue, orange treatment "expectations" and feedback processing in yellow).

Source: Lopez-Perez and deliberateness, 2010

Thus, only certain players are showers in disapproval, but clearly this is not the overwhelming majority of participants.

Finally, drivers of large area have been lucky to come across a manager who, fundamentally, is certainly not altruistic, but rather sensitive with respect to the other, motivated by a gesture approval of his peers, which admittedly is the case for many of us.