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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?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:09PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:09PM (#646071)

    They just like a big nice quantifiable number. The question is how do they really measure what they want?

    What they actually want is an excuse to fire you arbitrarily. The big nice quantifiable number (or one of the smaller quantifiable numbers) is that excuse.

    If you're an adjunct, getting rid of you is easy: They just don't give you any classes the next semester. If you're the minority of college instructors who are tenure-track, you'll keep your job so long as you bow and scrape to the deans and administrators. And if you have tenure, they are really looking to get rid of you and will jump at any chance to do it.

    And yes, one of the targets of all of this is "academic freedom": They want college instructors to censor what they say to the public to please their administration. A free and responsible search for truth isn't what this is about, not in the slightest.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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