{"id":1504,"date":"2011-07-19T06:42:38","date_gmt":"2011-07-19T12:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=1504"},"modified":"2011-07-19T07:01:44","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T13:01:44","slug":"assessing-learning-a-response-to-john-fritz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/assessing-learning-a-response-to-john-fritz\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing Learning: A Response To John Fritz"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend and colleague John Fritz<\/a> commented on my last post at some length<\/a>.\u00a0My response to his comment grew and grew, \u00a0so I decided to make it a post instead.<\/em><\/p>\n

I know you’re as passionate about these issues as I am, which is no doubt why your initial question comes out more like a peremptory challenge than an inquiry. Nevertheless, there are important issues here, and I will take a stab at speaking to them.<\/p>\n

Of course I believe in evaluating the quality of student learning, both what they’ve learned and the conditions we imagine and provide to foster that learning. But now we’ve got not one but at least three things to assess:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the student’s orientation toward learning (attitudinal, cultural, cognitive). One big difference between a rat in a Skinner box and a student in a learning environment is that the student brings memory, affect, expectation, etc. to the moment. What the cog-psy people call “appraisal” becomes crucial. And as Donald Norman points out, human beings infer intent and indeed the nature of other minds from the design of what they see and use. Schooling often sends very dismal messages indeed about the other minds who have designed such a deadening experience.<\/li>\n
  2. what the student has learned–and now we have to think about what we mean by “learning.” Memorization? Insight? Creativity? Cross-domain transfer? “Going beyond what is given” [Bruner]? Mastery? Life-long self-directed learning and re-learning? All of the above? I choose “all of the above,” which means that “assessing student learning” must be complex, multi-source, longitudinal, and constantly revised in terms of what we educators are learning about brain science, learning environments, social aspects of learning, etc. etc. Doesn’t mean the assessments can’t be done, but I’ve yet to see an analytics paradigm that’s answerable to that complexity, and I suspect the paradigm itself is simply too limiting, too behaviorist in its model of mind.<\/li>\n
  3. finally (or at least “finally for now”), we have to consider the very structures of schooling itself. While certain human concerns persist, or appear to (I’m not sure school really wants the disruption of true insight to dominate the experience, but maybe I’m just cynical this morning), the conditions and organization of schooling have changed over time, and not always for the better. Clark Kerr’s book The Uses of the University <\/em>is very interesting in this regard. I also recommend, very highly, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine<\/em>, one of the most sensitive and poignant examinations of the uses of computers in education that I’ve ever read. Maybe *the* most. Right now I’m reading Norbert Wiener’s posthumously published Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas<\/em> and learning a great deal from his thoughts on the technologies of education (including technologies such as funding, degrees, environments, etc. etc.). I just finished a fascinating article in Scientific American<\/em> on “cognitive disinhibition”<\/a> that suggests we should think about the role of disorder and eccentricity in education. The book Falling For Science: Objects In Mind<\/em> also examines the oblique paths to deep learning, and the sometimes counter-intuitive ways in which the design of learning environments can encourage the learner to discover and explore those paths. I think also, with great admiration, of Chris Dede’s work on learning-as-bonding, and of Diane Ravitch’s newly awakened opposition to so-called high-stakes testing. For me, books and articles like these ought to frame the conversation. When I hear a speaker at a national conference say that supermarkets know more about their customers than schools know more about learners, I think the conversation is on the wrong foot altogether, and dangerously so. What a supermarket knows about my buying habits is not at all an apt analogy for what I want to know about my students’ developing cognition.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If you got the impression from my blog post that I don’t think we should assess student learning, please read the post again. The problem I mull over is the one that occupied Brigham: premature standardization and a “testing industry” (or, mutatis mutandi, an “analytics industry”) in which financial stimuli interrupt the necessary and messy process of ongoing research. Blackboard, for example, got enormously wealthy by giving higher ed a way to avoid dealing with the World Wide Web in any serious or innovative way. I remember being regaled with tales of improvements in everything from menu design to customer service while also listening to scornful commentary on “frills” like wikis, avatars in discussion boards, ingestion of RSS feeds, and of course all competing products. I also heard a lot about adoption rates, as if the very fact of widespread use was a reliable and complete measure of worth. As a sales technique, such talk was undeniably effective. As evidence of better opportunities for learning? Not so much.<\/p>\n

    Unless and until we acquire the patience, humility, and appetite for complexity that it takes to think and talk about learning, all other questions–allocating resources, evaluating teaching\/learning technologies, etc.–are secondary. To assert a final answer to the question of resource allocation before we have suitably rich and complex questions about learning, let alone about assessing that learning, is to “do more widely those things that are now being done badly,” in my view. The huge danger is that resources will be allocated in the direction of anti-learning, or thin and superficial learning (they really amount to the same thing for me). For example: can we safely assume that grades in a course tell us everything we need to know about student learning, so that if grades go up, there’s been an improvement in learning? The grades tell us something, but what? And do they always tell us the same thing, across or even within a course? I don’t advocate eliminating grades as a measure of successful learning. I do advocate that we not design an entire system of assessing learning technologies around that single measure of success, when that measure itself begs so many questions about the nature and purpose and quality of learning.<\/p>\n

    On the macro scale, the degree completion stats also need more complex and nuanced thought, in my view. Reverse engineer it: if we find a way to nudge more students over the “C” line in more courses so that they pass the courses faster and thus finish the degree, what have we accomplished? Even if we assume that a “C” means the same thing in every class, and that a “C” is an acceptable outcome–and I do not assume these things by any means–what will we have when we have a nation of “college-educated” people who have squeaked by in factory-like classes based on memorize-and-repeat models of “learning” and “assessment”? Not the nation I’d want to live in.<\/p>\n

    The Internet has been transformational. College can be, too, but not by using metaphors of “management” in the way it thinks about fostering cognitive development. The honeymoon of edtech’s potential is almost over? What honeymoon? I don’t think higher education has progressed much farther in its relationship with interactive networked computing than awkward conversation on opposite ends of the sofa while the parents look on with disapproval.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My friend and colleague John Fritz commented on my last post at some length.\u00a0My response to his comment grew and grew, \u00a0so I decided to make it a post instead. I know you’re as passionate about these issues as I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-og","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1504"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1506,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504\/revisions\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}