From a Zero Sum to a Win-Win Educational Mindset

 

Back in mid-August, Tom Keene of Bloomberg Surveillance, a morning radio program that offers “daily conversations with leaders and decision makers from Wall Street to Washington and beyond cover[ing] the latest in business, investment, and geopolitics”, had a conversation with a guest analyst about the zero sum approach that seems to guide the operating rules and goals of our current business and geopolitical environments. Their brief discussion in the depths of my summer vacation pulled me back from the slippery slope of a professional summer learning slide (‘the potential decline in academic skills and knowledge that students—teachers too!—may experience during the summer break when school is not in session’*—thank you to AI and my own working brain for this phrasing) and started me thinking about a zero sum conceptualization in education.

 

In a concerted effort to ‘summer climb' rather than ‘summer slide,’ I re-sourced solid academic information to define ‘Zero Sum-ness’ and came across the application of the realist concept that I I teach in International Relations class! This from the accepted authority of the Oxford-English Dictionary, which provides this general definition for Zero Sum: ”In game theory: designating a game in which whatever is gained by one side is lost by the other, so that the net change is always zero. [emphasis added]. More generally: designating any situation in which an advantage to one participant necessarily leads to a disadvantage to one or more of the others.” (Oxford English Dictionary, “zero-sum (adj.),” July 2023)

 

A bit to my surprise, while searching for the authoritative definition above, I also came across this interesting idea of Zero-Sum bias provided by Daniel V. Meegan in his 2010 paper in the journal Frontiers of Psychology: “Zero-sum biasdescribes intuitively judging a situation to be zero-sum (i.e., resources gained by one party are matched by corresponding losses to another party) when it is actually non-zero-sum.”[1] His study of this bias was about the expectation of grades available to be earned in undergraduate higher education. In sum (total, not zero!), Meegan writes, “University course grading in the United States is often relative (i.e., an individual student's grade is determined by how the quality of their work compares to the quality of the work produced by the other students in the course) rather than absolute (i.e., an individual student's grade is determined by how the quality of their work compares to a predetermined standard of quality). Relative grading systems create a zero-sum competition among students, because a high grade given to one student means one less high grade available to the other students.”[2]

 

It is my opinion that a zero-sum mindset really has no place in grading in education for several reasons. First, it is ineffective at the individual learner level in the classroom because with a zero-sum grading approach a grade competition is create, not a learning environment for all. If every student’s work meets or exceeds the standard and the student demonstrates mastery of skills and content (and isn’t that what we are aiming at for our students?), then every student should earn a grade of A. This is why we have discipline-related, state, and national educational standards—and we want everyone to reach them. One’s educational attainment is not weighed against another person’s educational attainment because education is not a competitive game, it’s a standards-based process. It’s the development of mastery of skills and knowledge. It’s a necessary lifelong process. Students need to be self-aware and self-correcting, not competing with each other for grades--sharp minds, not sharp elbows. 

 

Second, according to…everybody, collaboration and teamwork, and not competition and a zero-sum mindset, are essential 21st Century/Age of AI skills to be taught and ways of acting to be learned. Learning is Rousseau’s stag hunt with a landscape full of stags (A’s) to be bagged-- forget about the hare; that’s small potatoes (AI can pick that one up). Competition is not a skill that needs to be taught in the classroom; it’s a practice undertaken in business, sports, and politics, but not in education because grades are not a scarce resource. There are plenty of A’s to go around for everyone to earn. But what about grade inflation, one asks. What about it? Think about this: If a classroom is full of A-students, and a zero-sum mindset is used, then some earn B’s despite meeting the standards for earning A’s-- isn’t that grade deflation? Hmmm, the other side of the coin with the same value, no? Note, teachers aren’t giving grades away in the classroom; in an authentic learning environment, students are earning those grades. And, in a 21^st century classroom, they are learning content, critical thinking, problem-solving, and how to collaborate too, because they’ll need teamwork skills to thrive in the competitive realms listed above. That is a win-win mindset.

 

Finally, and I think pretty obviously, in its aggregate, education is a public good, and excellent education is a public asset. In education we want to strive for the win-win of educated  individuals in an educated society. So, it’s time to put a crack in the grading Bell Curve and ring in a positive-sum approach in which the sum of winnings and losses is greater than zero as the outcome for both individuals and society. No bias, no competition, no stopping us now--‘just win-win, baby.’

 

*Note: a modicum of AI was used in the writing of this article.