[squeakland] Thoughts on Assessment

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi,

On 05/31/2010 07:54 AM, Steve Thomas wrote:
> Assessment is a tough problem.  I share the frustrations with the 
> current forms of assessment (especially in Math) that others have 
> expressed. While I am constantly assessing while teaching (as I am 
> sure you are too) it is not in a way that produces evidence that could 
> be used to facilitate appropriate comparisons.
>
> While I have many problems with assessment, I fear "its the worst form 
> of figuring out what works, except for all the others"
>
> The problem, to quote Peter Drucker "if you can't measure it, you 
> can't manage it"
>
> Society (ie: people, parents, politicians, school board members, even 
> teachers) need to have a way of knowing how well their kids are 
> learning and I would argue that they are right to demand it.  The 
> challenge for educators (and it is in no way an easy one, otherwise it 
> would have been solved already) is to come up with an appropriate way 
> to measure.
>
> The folks at CRESST (well actually I only know of the work I saw by 
> Greg Chung, which I saw at G4L, the following is my limited 
> understanding of what they are trying to do) have a potentially 
> interesting approach where they set up environments (where they design 
> in from the beginning methods of assessment) that records "events" 
> (actions taken by the kids within a given "micro-world") then use 
> those events to analyze understanding and what works and what doesn't 
> work.
>
> I would expect in the future they will take those events in real time, 
> analyze them and provide feedback to the micro-world (thus to the 
> user) to  facilitate a customized learning environment (like 
> customized search) based on what works (and yes what works can differ, 
> just as customized search differs).
>
> Stephen
>
>
> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Avigail Snir <avigail at snir.org 
> <mailto:avigail at snir.org>> wrote:
>
>     And we can probably repeat word by word when speaking about
>     current and future attempts to introduce Etoys into school life.
>
>     I wish our society will not be as obsessed about standard
>     measuring as a way to define accountability and evaluate
>     achievements. I feel it is counterproductive.
>
>     *From:* stevesargon at gmail.com <mailto:stevesargon at gmail.com>
>     [mailto:stevesargon at gmail.com <mailto:stevesargon at gmail.com>] *On
>     Behalf Of *Steve Thomas
>     *Sent:* Sunday, May 30, 2010 11:56 PM
>     *To:* Avigail Snir
>     *Subject:* Re: FW: also this article
>
>     Thanks.  I agree with the one comment in the article you attached:
>
>     "the problem of training teachers in new mathematics topics and
>     new pedagogic approaches was never solved, especially for the
>     large contingent of teachers in elementary grades"
>
>     The other hard challenge is figuring out how to do good
>     assessment. Especially doing it in a way that has a realistic
>     chance of being used given time and cost constraints.
>
>     Stephen
>
>

Now that I'm catching up with community, this reading on assessment 
comes just when I have read the discussion on ranking in Squeakland 
showcase. Measure as a management problem can be close to measure as 
control. We, as an occidental culture, are obsessed with control, and 
that remembers me an article of Tom DeMarco: "software engineering is an 
idea whose time has come and gone" at http://ur1.ca/7l3p His point is 
that if you have to control closely things where the proportion between 
resources and return value is tight. If you have a budget of $10.000 and 
a return of $11.000, you need to control excessively, but if you have a 
budget of 10.000 and a return of $100.000 you can be more relaxed on 
control. So the question of DeMarco is: ¿if you're too much focused on 
control, why on earth are you involved on project with so low return 
value? His conclusion, which I share, is that we will focus on projects 
that deliver transformation for the world, enterprise, institution. And 
that change of focus could take us from quantitative to qualitative. For 
me the big question is "how I can change the education so it can change 
the world?" and smaller ones are "how to change my educative practice so 
it can deliver future changes?". Most of them are configured in extra 
academic places. So class is a place where I can made smaller changes, 
for example in the aesthetic experience of "making the class", so, 
"some", students can find a place (mostly extra-class) to ask themselves 
about that changes, what is behind and how design and be part of them. 
We're now making small steps, but microchanges create macro-behaviors, 
as Schelling probed which lead us to what I call the "Hope Corollary": 
"To change the world you don't need to change it all, just change 
someone who changes someone else, keep that way, and iterate" :-)

Cheers,

Offray

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