One of the comments on my earlier post deserves some attention:
Considering Education
Education, I think is often seen as formal instruction, and learning as something that can be concretely measured.
Unfortunately, I think Monica’s right. That IS the perception.
My problem with that perception is that it’s completely backwards.
Learning — as educational psychologists have known for decades — cannot be measured accurately. One can only attempt to assess some subset of interest and then only by measuring it indirectly with a test of some kind. The more authentic the test, the more likely you get a true measure. The classic task of “making change” is a good example. I can teach you about money, and give you strategies for making change, and then assess you by a) giving you a quiz on paper, b) giving you some money to handle, or c) sending you to the store to find out whether or not you can make change accurately for 125 customers in a day (without the cash register that tells you how much you owe them).
Education is the only thing that can be measured. “Do they appear to have learned what I intended to teach them?”
Logically, you cannot ask whether or not they actually learned it, only whether or not they can demonstrate it on a given day for a given assessment. Logistically, you can’t go back two years later and give them another assessment to find out if they still know it, if they’ve made the learning part of their lives or only picked it up long enough to pass your test and move on to the next course. And you can’t test for things you didn’t intend to teach them. You don’t know what it might be – how significant or how meaningful it is. It’s not relevant to the educational experience you’re presenting, even though it might be more profound than the actual lesson.
Case in point: I did a stint as a teaching assistant in the Teacher Prep program at the University of Northern Colorado. My job was to teach Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to preservice teachers. My assessments were all intended to assess whether or not the students could use the tools to accomplish specific work related tasks. But on more than one occasion, what I taught them was that the computers were just tools — mostly simple tools — that they could master. That they could get beyond the mechanical and use the tools with students in ways that enhanced their abilities to teach. Those lessons came through loud and clear, and while I didn’t intend to teach them, they weren’t on any syllabus, the reality is that these unintended lessons in technology were the ones that were the most profound.
That’s why I teach the way I do now. The syllabus has one set of requirements. That’s what’s intended by the course, but I’m paying a lot more attention to teaching to the unintended. By doing so, I’ve learned that I can exceed those intentional objectives by orders of magnitude.
And while I learned it in school, my teachers didn’t know they were teaching me.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I think that learning is a difficult term to define and it is hard, almost impossible to measure learning. As teachers we measure what we teach the students, but as said in this posting we have no way of determining if the students actually learned the content 5 or 10 years down the road. Plus there is also the factor as to what type of test is being administered. Some students perform better on essay exams, while others do better on multiple choice. I do not think that learning means memorizing something for a test, which I have been guilty of. There have been many tests that I got A’s on because of memorization, not learning. To me learning means that you remember something for a long time.