Blogs
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Grade Inflation is a Symptom, Not the Disease (Part 3): The (Irrational?) Exuberance of Alternative Graders
In this current series, I am exploring the tensions between two functions or philosophies of education: 1. That we should prioritize supporting all students’ learning and growth, and 2. That we should prioritize sorting the highest achieving students from the rest. I argue that the education system operates from the flawed, if mostly implicit, premise Continue reading
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Grade Inflation is a Symptom, Not the Disease (Part 2): The Specter of Grade Compression
In this subseries on the wicked problem of assessment, I am exploring the tensions between supporting the learning of every student and sorting students by levels of distinction and merit. I argued previously that: 1. Although the education system (and broader society) is more invested in sorting students, many teachers (like myself) are more invested Continue reading
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Grade Inflation is a Symptom, not the Disease (Part 1): The Sorting and Supporting Functions of Education
Amid my ongoing series on the wicked problem of assessment, I am devoting several posts to the latest controversy (scandal? moral panic?) about “grade inflation” in higher ed.(Seriously, we are talking about podcast titles like “Has Harvard Gone Soft”?). This issue is obviously assessment-coded, but its sensitivity to current events merits its own subseries. Before Continue reading
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Assessment is a Wicked Problem (Part Five): Performance Zones and Exploration Zones
As someone who has enjoyed psychologist Adam Grant’s writing on themes including epistemological humility and the benefits of generosity over selfishness, I was taken aback by his New York Times opinion piece “No, You Don’t Get an A for Effort.” In this essay, Grant resorts to tired kids these days complaints like, “In the past, Continue reading
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Assessment is a Wicked Problem (Part Four): Course Mapping is Misleading
Several years ago, I attended a six-session training offered by the teaching and learning center at my then university. I wanted to get certified for hybrid courses, meeting students in person once a week and having them work asynchronously the other day. Here is the text of a slide presented early in the training: Course Continue reading
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Assessment is a Wicked Problem (Part 3): Learning is a (Useful) Fiction
Off the bat, I concede some academic clickbait in this title. In calling learning a fiction, I obviously don’t mean that the experience of gaining knowledge or acquiring skills and abilities doesn’t happen. I mean fiction in the sense Adam Mastroianni (drawing on Yuval Noah Harari) uses to characterize psychology’s fundamental conundrum: studying inherently abstract Continue reading
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Assessment is a Wicked Problem (Part 2): Cultivating Authority
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 Continue reading
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Assessment is a Wicked Problem (Part 1)
I have a love-hate relationship with the enterprise of learning assessment. By assessment, I mean both the formative, “checking in to see how someone is doing at a given moment” assessments and the summative, “this is how you did and what that says about what you learned” assessments that get recorded in gradebooks and eventually Continue reading
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Teaching as Wicked Learning
One of my favorite books of the past 10 years is David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Among many fascinating topics addressed in the book, I want to focus on the distinctions Epstein makes between kind and wicked learning environments and, more specifically, how people learn (or fail to learn) from Continue reading
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Learning as Play
“It’s better to be wrong than boring.” So believes Andre Geim, the only scientist to win both a Nobel Prize—for isolating the highly versatile material graphene—and an Ig Nobel Prize—for his highly unconventional experiments levitating frogs. Geim is what art historian Sarah Lewis calls a deliberate amateur, someone driven by a restless spirit of exploration, Continue reading
Teaching Inquiry 