“For a long time, I dragged the trace of this shame behind me. Hatred and the need for affection had taken hold of me at the same time from my first failures. It was a question of taming the school ogre. Doing everything so that he would not devour my heart.” How many students in France still live with this ogre described by Daniel Pennac in his book Chagrin d’école  ?

When the issue of student assessment is raised, schools seem unable to meet the mission of benevolence set out in institutional texts. From L’Élève humilié by Pierre Merle to On achève les écoliers , bien by Peter Gumbel, they are often described as an unjust institution and a place of suffering.

By asking the question of a “France that discourages its children in the name of what they are not, instead of encouraging them by virtue of what they are”, the journalist Peter Gumbel describes a system that “not only does not correspond to its ideal image, but also does not achieve the same level of results as in a large part of Europe and the developed world”.

The relationship to error seems so firmly linked to failure and the pressure of grades is such that for many, assessment remains synonymous with fear and even anxiety, at the risk of leading students into a perverse spiral of school phobia, as Hadji underlines in Should we be afraid of assessment ?

This assessment synonymous with failure would be induced by “the macabre constant”, described by André Antibi in his work. The researcher proposes the critical analysis of a system, and not a criticism of teachers who, under pressure from society, feel obliged to give a certain percentage of bad grades for their assessment to be credible: an excellent teacher, with excellent students having excellent grades, would certainly be singled out and considered lax. Unconsciously, teachers would feel obliged to give a percentage of bad grades to be credible, this percentage corresponding to what he calls “the macabre constant”.

This unconscious phenomenon would thus be at the origin of the artificial failure of many students “if they are unlucky enough to be part of the “wrong” third of the class”. The consequences are multiple: deterioration of the climate of trust between the teacher and the students, loss of self-confidence of the students and low self-esteem, malaise at school, stress in the family environment, orientation of the students, etc.

Mistakes, essential for learning

If the error, pointed out and sanctioned, induces what could be considered as a mistreatment evaluation, it remains indispensable when it comes to learning. This is what the pedagogues agree to say who, from Rousseau to Bachelard, consider the error as an inherent stage in the understanding and formation of the mind.

Numerous studies in the psychology of learning bear witness to this, since those undertaken by the pedagogues of new education in their time who, from the beginning of the 20th ^century  , advocated the right to make mistakes when they proposed a school that would adapt to the needs of the child, based in particular on advances in developmental psychology. Experimental trial and error is at the heart of the child’s activity and constitutes the starting point of the pedagogy to be put in place by any educator.

With constructivism, which comes from the work of psychologist Jean Piaget, errors are perceived positively because they indicate the progress that remains to be made to acquire learning. According to the professor of educational sciences Jean-Pierre Astolfi , it is a real lever for the teacher that allows him to dissect “the logic of error” in order to take advantage of it. We find this same interest in error as a revealer in the work of Lev Vygotsky on the proximal zone of development, which is based on the idea of ​​adjusting learning requirements by promoting students’ experiences of success without putting them in a situation of failure, which allows them to gradually support them in their autonomy.

For his part, the philosopher Edgar Morin considers error as one of the essential questions to be taken into account for the education of the future, in order to combat what he calls, in The Seven Necessary Knowledges for the Education of the Future , the blindness of knowledge:

“It is remarkable that education which aims to communicate knowledge is blind to what human knowledge is, its devices, its infirmities, its difficulties, its propensities to error as to illusion, and is not at all concerned with making known what it is to know.”

While mistakes are recognized as being essential for progress in learning, how can schools take them into account in their assessment processes to move towards a dynamic of well-being rather than academic discomfort?

Towards school well-being

Let’s go back to André Antibi’s analyses, which offer us a first concrete way to fight against the macabre constant by proposing an evaluation by contract. The teacher must be clear with the students about the evaluation set up during the tests, he enters into a contract of trust with them by respecting these three essential steps: announce the test program, organize a pre-test followed by a question-and-answer session, provide feedback on the content and give corrections to the subject. All while specifying the requirements in the writing from the beginning of the year. The notion of fault, of error is not accompanied here by any notion of guilt.

This pedagogy of trust, used by many teachers, allows the process to be reversed and a positive evaluation to be entered into, and promotes a peaceful school climate.

Another dynamic is possible involving a formative assessment rather than only a summative assessment. While the summative assessment reflects a moment in a child’s learning process by giving a mark that sanctions and makes a definitive observation, the formative assessment participates in the learning process and reflects a development that takes place over time.

By using fun tools, such as quizzes and surveys, teachers can more easily monitor the progress of their students and adapt their teaching to each student’s level. Group discussions and debates are another example of formative assessment, which is essential at a time when artificial intelligence is disrupting assessment when it only consists of measuring acquired knowledge. Assessment can thus be seen as a tool that promotes student participation and the development of critical thinking, in a dimension of inclusive education and integral development of the person .

Thus, by reversing the relationship to error, the assessment which takes into account the student’s activity and integrates the notion of experimental trial and error becomes not only a relevant indicator for teachers, students, and parents, but also one of the key factors of academic well-being .

Author Bio: Fabienne Serina-Karsky is Professor of Educational Sciences at the Catholic Institute of Paris (ICP)