Growth > Performance

By Joe Halpern ’82, August 20, 2020
Math professor prioritizes mastery of concepts over test scores.
figures of people on a screen

An image from an instructional math video modeling repeated sampling from a population.

An image from an instructional math video modeling repeated sampling from a population.

Math professor Aaron Weinberg said he won’t be any giving tests this fall.

“Tests are problematic for many reasons,” Weinberg says. “They emphasize performance (in a brief window of time) over developing a deeper understanding of the concepts, students experience test anxiety and stereotype threat, which impacts their performance, and tests also aren’t very authentic measures of understanding — there aren’t any times in the real world where you’ll be given 50 minutes to sit with paper and pencil and regurgitate facts.”

“I want my students to have a positive relationship with math and to come away with a better understanding of problem solving and how it all relates to their lives.”

Professor Aaron Weinberg

Instead, he will grade his students on final portfolios that demonstrate their ability to meet learning goals throughout the semester. He feels that giving his students until the end of the semester to revise their portfolios is the fairest way to give final grades. This is particularly true at a time when students’ lives have been upended in many ways.

“In this way, I am trying to emphasize mastery over performance and encourage a growth mindset,” he said. “I want my students to have a positive relationship with math and to come away with a better understanding of problem solving and how it all relates to their lives.”

professional headshot of Aaron Weinberg

Professor Aaron Weinberg

And that’s not all. He has also developed a series of instructional videos for his students in Calculus 1 and Statistical Analysis featuring interactive graphics and charts that students will view between class sessions. Weinberg said the videos are designed to help students better visualize and understand complex math concepts and serve as jumping off points for class discussions.

“Students will not be hearing me do a lot of live lecturing this semester,” said Weinberg, who’ll also be teaching one section of Pedagogy and Practice for the Mathematics Teacher this fall that helps prepare math students for a career in teaching. “Instead, we’ll devote more time to classroom discussion and working collaboratively in small groups to explore and solve problems.”

Weinberg and Matt Thomas, associate professor of mathematics, studied the impact of videos on student learning through a grant from the National Science Foundation. Preliminary results suggest that students can struggle to realize when they do and don’t understand things being presented in instructional videos, highlighting the importance of carefully structuring the video-watching process and promoting discussion and reflection.