Teaching Inquiry

My first post in this series on assessment distinguished wicked problems from tame problems, which are characterized by codified rules, recognizable patterns, and clearly defined structures for obtaining and interpreting feedback. The clarity of tame problems makes assessing responses fairly straightforward; we can see whether a response is right or wrong and, if it is wrong, we can generally diagnose why and how it came to be wrong—which also helps us correct the response. This straightforwardness is also why, as Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, humans routinely switch out confusing and ambiguous problems for concrete and well-defined ones, usually without conscious awareness. In effect, they are “taming” the problem’s wickedness.

This very human tendency is central to what I am exploring in this series, because it directly impacts how we—as individual teachers and as whole systems of education—orient ourselves toward protocols and practices of assessment in formal education. This tendency helps us understand how grades, which are contingent evaluations of contingent student performances within contingent contexts and timeframes, come to represent generalized markers—not only of student learning in a course but their overall abilities and intelligence. We routinely replace very difficult questions like, “What did students learn in this course?” and “What do they know how to do as a result of taking this course?” with more straightforward questions like, “How did students perform on this paper?” and “What score did they receive on this test?” Conflating deliverables with learning is a great example of taming wickedness.         

My central thesis is that assessment is a wicked problem, but I recognize that some taming of assessment is inevitable within spaces defined by mechanisms of standardization and bureaucracy. This is why I do not advocate “blowing up” assessment as we know it; as I concluded in my previous post, a truly wicked education system would be a chaotic mess. The purpose of this series is to explore the gap between tame and wicked assessment and to consider how much this gap can be meaningfully and generatively narrowed. To put this another way, how much agency do we—again, as individual teachers and as whose systems of education—have to shape what some taming means?

In this post, I step back to address the bigger picture. Why does it matter if assessment is a wicked problem? What is at stake here?

For me, what is at stake is higher education’s teaching and learning mission in a time of abiding skepticism about the purpose of college, the value of a college degree, and the massive disruptions caused by artificial intelligence. I believe this mission must be revitalized and purposefully reimagined. I take my cue here from Paul Hanstedt, whose wonderful book Creating Wicked Students actively wrestles with the wickedness of assessment. Written in 2019, this book is prophetic of the challenges higher education faces in the age of AI.

Here is Hanstedt’s take on what attending college should do for students:

“We want them to enter the world knowing they have the ability to participate in thoughtful and constructive ways. To hope for anything less would be, I believe, to acknowledge an essential meaninglessness in our work.” (p. 4)

Key to this process is cultivating authority. Hanstedt offers a nuanced take on what he means by authority, but essentially (at least as I read him) it means having a sense of purpose and at least some capacity to shape events—both professionally and civically—in alignment with that sense of purpose. Hanstedt makes clear that the only way to develop authority is “to practice it, consistently, from the start, in ways at first small, then increasingly large.” Cultivating authority requires active learning, such as high-impact practices, via which students work to apply content soon after encountering it—ideally in real-world situations like internships, laboratories, and community partnerships—rather than absorbing and regurgitating it as they do through more traditional teaching practices.

Hanstedt believes students should have frequent opportunities to make meaning, integrate, synthesize, and make decisions—all components of higher-order thinking—in contexts of uncertainty. I love that part about contexts of uncertainty; it exemplifies the wickedness of assessment.

Cultivating authority is a purpose higher education should get behind, because it satisfies multiple subgoals that matter to differing degrees to different stakeholders. The capacity to make meaningful contributions includes pursuing a career and a stable (if not necessarily prosperous, in this time of pervasive precarity) standard of living—which is by far the primary goal motivating most students (and their parents) to attend college—but it also reflects higher education’s traditional mission of broadening horizons, presenting diverse perspectives, and building a civically engaged population willing and able to tackle the big problems of the day.

I have spent most of my own teaching career attempting to reconcile these pursuits: preparing students to have a financially stable career and to catalyze meaningful change for civic issues they care about. My ongoing (mostly failed, but also generative) experiments in this direction, which have included deep dives into creative maladjustment, social psychology, behavioral economics, and what I call the progressive teacher’s paradox, represent the central throughline of my scholarship.

Cultivating authority also reflects one of this blog’s core principles, namely that learning is supposed to be messy and hard. This principle counters AI branding about making learning “easy and efficient,” which poses a clear and present danger to students’ cognitive and intellectual development. “Selling” a counternarrative that purposeful cognitive struggle is good for you—not just your brain but your career—and that it can actually be more fun than making the work easy, is key to higher education’s relevance (and possibly survival) in the age of AI.

Restating this challenge: Cultivating authority means grappling with the wickedness of learning assessment, but we operate within institutions that systematically tame assessment, so how can we make assessment relatively wicked? As I will address in the next post, learning outcomes—with their “by the end of the course, students will be able to” language—exemplify the conflation of deliverables with learning. If we want to narrow the gap between tame and wicked assessment, we must attend to the differences between what we ideally want students to learn in our courses and what we can reasonably and feasibly hold them accountable for producing.

Those are the stakes.