Thank you for the article Howard. You provide an interesting lens in to the world of assessments,their purpose, and the resulting challenges. Freud once said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” For certain, both science and education can fall in to the reductionism trap. Gleaning one piece of insight from an assessment or an experiment will help shed light on the aspect being studied or measured. Contextualizing that aspect of knowledge and fitting it into a larger frame is the challenge for both science and education. Formative assessments, while I understand at least a portion of their purpose, thanks to dialogue with you in the past, do not serve to elucidate the purpose of education. In Carl Rogers book, Freedom to Learn, he explores how humanistic principles can be applied to education in order to guide the process of self-actualization and learning how to learn. We produce what we value, but we don’t always value what we produce. Since assessments have become the standard by which knowledge is evaluated, how can assessments be placed as one aspect of the overall picture, rather than the picture in its entirety? Why are teacher and student generated student portfolios not included as a valid measurement of knowledge acquisition? Can education, as a field, define what is valued in a learner? In part, I would think that higher order thinking skills, Blooms taxonomy, would be an ongoing goal, but I’m not certain that primary education or even secondary education values these types of skills as much as the bottom line and the numbers. In order to incorporate higher order thinking skills, thinking about thinking, and conceptualization and application of knowledge, the model seems to need to shift from quantitative to qualitative.Rogers admits in his writings that he is not certain whether or not he is in fact able to “teach” anything, necessarily. In his later years in practice, he focused primarily on the principles he lays out in his theory of Humanistic Psychology. Mainly, holding a positive regard for all who enter his door and holding an empathic space to help the learner grow. The “values” Rogers brought to teaching and therapy are what served the foundation for learning and developing. Where are the value measures, the qualitative value measures, for administrators, teachers, and in kind, learners? Those are the assessments we need to build strong learners.
