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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Students
Never
Assessments
Assessment
Compare
Performance
Performances
Expectations

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
Alfie Kohn
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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.
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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
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To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
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The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.
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Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
Alfie Kohn
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To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
Alfie Kohn
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In education, parody is obsolete.
Alfie Kohn
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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
Alfie Kohn
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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Alfie Kohn
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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
Alfie Kohn
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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
Alfie Kohn
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If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.
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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
Alfie Kohn
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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
Alfie Kohn
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
Alfie Kohn
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Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.
Alfie Kohn