I don't have time for an in-depth review of this article on assessment, but I do enjoy it. I never thought I'd read an article that approvingly quotes both Dewey and Hofstadter.
I want to quote two things. First:
As Michael Bennett and Jacqueline Brady point out in their 2014 article “A Radical Critique of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Movement,” learning outcomes is only a different term for lesson plans or course content.
Yep. It's about asking us to restate something we already know (we'd better show up to class with an idea of what we're doing) with a word that they control, because they can always accuse us of not understanding their buzzword well enough.
Second, there are many great points about the pointlessness of "learning goals" but I will quote this one:
Trevor Hussey and Patrick Smith, in their 2008 article “Learning Outcomes,” distinguish between and among learning goals written for a lesson, for a course, and for a program, and the authors point out that the more remote the learning goals are from the classroom itself, the more irrelevant learning outcomes become. Robert Shireman, in his 2016 op-ed “SLO Madness,” amusingly labels student learning outcomes as “gibberish,” capturing Dewey’s point that for a learning goal to be an intellectual one it has to arise from the intelligence and experience of the teacher; otherwise it is meaningless. Similarly, one cannot function as a true scholar or an intellectual while being told what to do. Moreover, the sheer number of classes that need to be certified necessitates that learning goals be written in categories that may or may not be relevant to the material taught. For example, in the general education category at San José State University (SJSU), where I teach, a single learning goal can apply to ten to twenty different disciplines.
This machine-like nature stands in stark contrast to the ass-essment movement's commitment to "innovation." If I'm constantly doing new things then the goals will inevitably be shifting, at least in part. Yes, at the end of the day I still want them to learn optics or mechanics or whatever, but if I try new assignments then the details change, and the details of the assignment matter! The details of the project matter! Two classes can cover the same basic idea in such different ways that all you can really say is "Well, both classes talked about lenses."
