> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>
>> Teachers always do that, no? Exams, papers, conference, class comments,
>> etc. That's a whole different ball of wax from the obsession with NCLB-style
>> standardized tests, which are rapidly making us stupider.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>
> Yes, I agree. I think the confusion here is semantic: for some on the
> list, "assessment of learning" appears to mean standardized testing; for me,
> it means gathering some evidence that a person has learned something. I
> refuse to let the NCLB advocates define the terms here! Assessment of
> student learning can be done in many different ways, and we faculty need to
> be actively engaged in developing these meaningful assessment methods rather
> than accepting the flawed premise that "assessment = standardized testing".
>
> Miles
>
> Miles,
It isn't only semantic. First of all, you need to convince me that the ways
most of my colleagues and I assess our students' learning is a problem and
you haven't done that. Secondly, while you reject the NCLB/RttT approach,
you don't seem willing to acknowledge that the primary issues with teaching
effectiveness and student learning have absolutely nothing to do with the
quality of our assessment tools. CMU students do or don't learn for
hundreds of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the pedagogical
abilities of CMU faculty and/or our assessment tools.
When these debates, and you, start to acknowledge that students having to
work upwards of 40 hours a week while taking a full complement of classes,
that the quality of the preparation of the students, that the class
background of students, that the 30 years of the intensification of American
anti-intellectualism, political cynicism and declining economic opportunity
and job security embedded in neoliberalism/neoconservatism, that the rise of
any number of romantic and reactionary anti-science perspectives, that the
infantilization of students by college administrators, that the increase in
students attending college not to learn something, or even to develop job
skills, but because that's what you do after high school, that the
imposition of standardized testing all over primary and secondary education,
that the casualization of the professoriat, that the increased demands on
faculty time - almost all of which point to success coming from every place
but great classroom work, and so on and so forth has more to do with
learning outcomes than the assessment mechanisms we have... then we'll have
something to talk about, until then you are still accepting the NCLB/RttT
line that teachers and professors are the problem and feeding the stomach of
the beast that wants to eat up "inefficient" public institutions and poop
out "highly efficient" privatized ones.
Alan