Provoked (in a good way) by Inside Higher Ed co-founder and current fellow columnist Doug Lederman’s most recent “Tough Love” installment on how “failure to measure learning is hurting higher education,” I sat down to write a response on how we can indeed measure learning.
I felt confident in my response, because shifting the orientation of writing courses from what I call “schooling”—essentially following prescriptive processes in search of a grade—to “learning” (you know, actually developing the capacity to do something and then translate that doing to other things) has been my focus for nearly two decades.
I know the difference between when a student goes through a school-ish process and when a student learns something. Students know this, too, by the way. The challenge, though, is to “measure” this learning in a way that satisfies the criteria Doug—I am going to dispense with the conventions of referring to authors by their last name here because I have known Doug for like 15 years—lays out in order to “win back the public trust,” namely “whether and how much students learn.”
Calif. 2-Year College Bachelor’s Bills Pass Despite Objection
Regents Block Iowa Civics Center Director From Conferences
