Assessment

To make sure this post is focused on a single coherent issue, I will think of assessment as part of the general subject of measurement,.  Measurement can be concerned with anything, including money, buildings and their characteristics, time, noise, people, etc.  Assessment - in my current arbitrary definition - is concerned with people, and more specifically, with people's progress towards their goals.

The motivation for assessment is the same as for more general measurements - it provides feedback to all involved, which enables them to see where they are going, and to correct their course if they find they are going somewhere different than where they wanted to go.  I hold these truths to be self evident, that anyone working in open-loop - i.e., without feedback - is bound to fail, except in the simplest of tasks; and that mass education is not simple at all.

First, let's get the following off the table:  In my opinion, testing as it is normally done in schools is a poor method of assessment.  Incessant testing is a detriment to learning, and standardized testing is a detriment to teaching.  I put some of these thoughts in writing in previous posts about tests and about announcements.  The general idea is that studying for a test is very unlike learning, and succeeding in a standard test is quite different than having acquired knowledge, skills or habits.  Whew!  I am glad I took that off my chest.  Now I can continue speaking in praise of assessment without being accused of being a test-happy bureaucrat.  I hope.

Open minded people thinking about assessment of pupils' progress, often talk about using informal methods, such as conversation between a teacher and a pupil, thinking together about what has happened, what is going on, what their expectations may be, etc.  If this sounds vague, it's only because it is.  Such conversation - and what educators sometimes call "reflection" - can be useful in digging underneath the surface and gaining insights.  It has similar advantages to those of qualitative research, and very similar disadvantages, as I discussed in Education Research Impracticalities a while ago.  One specific issue with such methods, which may be called "qualitative assessment," is that of credibility.  A conversation between two or more people is very personal.  It could go differently if other people were involved - for example, if the assessment talk happened between the same pupil and another teacher.  The conclusions from such a conversation depend on the specific people involved, on their mood, and on other things.  It is not easily repeatable, and therefore not verifiable and the level of faith the pupil can have in it suffers.  Faith being an important part of the usefulness of feedback.  I think such qualitative assessment methods should be part of the arsenal, but we should not limit ourselves exclusively to them.

To complement the qualitative assessment method

Now, if we say that the assessment is intended to be used as feedback, to promote growth in the directions we want, then surely the pupils are not the only ones who can benefit from it.  So do the teachers, administrators and the school in general.  Assessment of teachers should be done not only because it is indeed useful, but it will lend credence to the teachers' claim that assessment is not a whip to beat the weak with.  It will also let the pupils learn how to relate to assessment by the example of the grown-ups, which may be the only way to learn any behavior.  We can leave the assessment of parents to another phase of utopia.

Compartmentalized Knowledge

I am going over a book I once read: “Motivation in Education,” and I see more clearly than ever how specific and compartmentalized modern expertise is.
An extremely high level of knowledge is expected on a narrow issue for any scientific work.  Like “The Role of Expectancy and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in the context of motivation in education.”  Knowing dozens and dozens of sources, their various theories and beliefs, their differing terminologies, the methodology they used to conduct their experiments, any weaknesses in the experiments or in the logical development of their arguments, etc.  Beyond that, to be an expert one needs to know what the “holes” are in between the shreds of evidence:  What hasn’t been checked; what has been checked but is not quite conclusive; what has been checked a few times with contradicting results.

While it’s not easy to be an expert even in a narrow field, it is extremely difficult to be an expert in a wide field, such as Motivation of school-children in general.  More difficult to be an expert in a wider field such as Learning of school-children.  It’s probably superhuman to have a real understanding of an issue as wide as schooling in general, which involves students, teachers, parents, finance, politics, etc.  I have never met anyone who claims to have a “real understanding” of the education system as a whole, including sufficient detail  to be able to say something definitive about what needs to be done in a specific situation.  Not that there is any dearth of people who are happy to tell us what to do in every situation we encounter.

To make very clear sense of a real world situation, we need to have very clear knowledge of all the components.  As a simple example, if a pupil seems to be falling behind in his grades over a few months, we need to at least understand the nature of material studied, the material studied by that pupil’s previously, a host of motivational issues specific to that pupil, much about the dynamics in the class, the specific dynamics between the pupil and classmates, dynamics between the pupil and teachers, dynamics in the pupil’s home and personal life, neurological and health issues specific to the pupil, the situation in society in general (e.g., is there a war going on?) and more.  And these are just the facts to consider.  In order to consider each set of facts with clarity, we need a different expert – one expert (or team?) for each “compartment” of knowledge.  And then there is the integration – getting the experts to discuss their insights and let a single picture emerge.

It is not difficult to act with perfect expertise in real-life situations.  It is impossible.

What can we do when faced with real situations, involving real people?  One way is to rely on less-than-expert knowledge in the general situation (schooling, in this case) and have enough specific-domain experts looking behind our shoulders and keeping us from doing something already known to be dumb.

A plan? Hah!

After deciding on a plan to improve education (over a year ago), and declaring it, both to myself and to those around me, I took some time to break my ideas down into a more detailed working plan, with quarterly milestones and deadlines… And then life happened.
The milestones and deadlines came and went, making their characteristic “Whooosh” sound. Together with the predictably unpredictable difficulties of turning my plan into a reality, a few unexpected opportunities arose.

I chanced to meet a group of people who felt and continue to feel strongly about the need to provide a diverse range of schools for parents and students to choose from. Not only are they convinced that educational diversity is good for everybody, but they also act upon their convictions.  Imagine that.

Opportunity for cooperation is precious; a chance to work with people who act, who put their irreplaceable time and attention where their mouths are, should be seized. Therefore, the opportunities that presented themselves directed my activity toward creating an infrastructure for building new and diverse education establishments.

This activity corresponds with the ideas that appear in this blog under the headings of “Market Economy,” “Distributed Establishment,” “Freedom of Choice,” etc.  The goal of knowledge sharing and building, referred to in this book mostly in the context of research, becomes an effort secondary to building the schools. The final issue, complementary to the idea of diversity, is that of regulation, and it now awaits its own opportunity to be addressed.

Things are looking up.

Back in the saddle

I was informed by my more Internet-Savvy friends that a blog is the wrong tool for writing my private thoughts.  Maybe a diary would be better.  But then I noticed that without an audience - even an imagined one - it's hard to make sure I think things through.  There is something about writing something publicly that pushes me to make sure that at least I myself understand what I wanted to say.  I find it useful