Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-"No" dept.

According to Molly Worthen's article in The New York Times, The Misguided Drive to Measure 'Learning Outcomes':

"[...] In 2018, more and more university administrators want campuswide, quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning. Their desire has fed a bureaucratic behemoth known as learning outcomes assessment. This elaborate, expensive, supposedly data-driven analysis seeks to translate the subtleties of the classroom into PowerPoint slides packed with statistics — in the hope of deflecting the charge that students pay too much for degrees that mean too little. [...]"

But apparently, there is little to show for tons of money and effort expended to gather data on what students are really learning or adapting curricula to their actual needs.

Mr. Erik Gilbert, a professor of history at Arkansas State University, who has criticized the methods, said to the author: 'Maybe all your students have full-time jobs, but that's something you can't fix, even though that's really the core problem. Instead, you're expected to find some small problem, like students don't understand historical chronology, so you might add a reading to address that. You're supposed to make something up every semester, then write up a narrative.'

As Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, told the author about the situation in Britain: 'It's a bit like the old Soviet Union. You speak two languages. You do a performance for the sake of the auditors, but in reality, you carry on.'

As the author puts it: 'If we describe college courses as mainly delivery mechanisms for skills to please a future employer [...] We end up using the language of the capitalist marketplace and speak to our students as customers rather than fellow thinkers. They deserve better. [...] Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It's about giving students an opportunity that most of them will never have again in their lives: the chance for serious exploration of complicated intellectual problems, the gift of time in an institution where curiosity and discovery are the source of meaning.'

A lengthy read, but worthwhile. Are we preparing current students better than in the past or are we simply siphoning money out of them? Yesteryear, a degree was a sure bet to a better life, nowadays, it doesn't mean as much. Are the education methods lacking or is the surplus of graduates to blame for useless degrees?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:02PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:02PM (#646066)

    1. Every time a kid is at school taking a test, they aren't being taught. It apparently took teachers raising a hue-and-cry for any of these wise politicians in the state education department to notice that they had allocated over half of classroom time to taking tests, and that was likely going to prevent the teachers from, y'know, teaching.

    2. Metrics can be and always are gamed. In this case, the way to game the metrics is to "teach to the test", i.e. tell the kids what they need to know to do well on the test, which frequently bears no relationship at all to actually understanding the subject matter the test is supposed to be testing. And of course this also means that anything not on a test is now pedagogically off-limits.

    3. There's a substantial number of people who want to put an end to the US public education system. Those people are involved in designing the tests and metrics used to evaluate teachers. Therefor, in the event that the tests are showing substantial improvements and quality teaching, they will be doing everything in their power to change the rules so that they no longer show those improvements. This is sort of like a manager demanding that a certain percentage of employees in a department being labeled as underperforming, so they can then go to their bosses and say "Hey, that department is underperforming! We need to fire them and replace them with this outsourced company that just happens to be owned by my brother-in-law."

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 02 2018, @04:05AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 02 2018, @04:05AM (#646205) Journal

    2. Metrics can be and always are gamed.

    Cobra effect [wikipedia.org] in education.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford