[lit-ideas] Re: How Clearly Can A Student Demonstrate Their Thinking?
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 11:32:40 -0700
Woke up this morning to find that I had missed the world wife-carrying
championships in Finland as well as the live snail spitting competition in
France. These were both reported in our newspaper.
I returned to classes, a hard thing after a sabbatical, to find a harder
thing yet: we are now not allowed to say that we teach people to think.
Clearly the claim was always problematical, open to the challenge that it's
hard to judge a) when someone is thinking and b) who caused that thinking to
come into existence, but we lived with that situation for a long, long time
and we have learned to trust clues. Experience allows an instructor to
distinguish one dim bulb from a thousand points of light. Surely that is
one of the reasons they pay us the big bucks?
No longer. I quote the document that I'm sure all of you who are on
faculties have seen, or will see shortly:
Writing learning outcomes for course syllabi:
It's usually best to avoid outcomes written as: "to know how to paint" or
"to think about contemporary concepts" because it is difficult to measure
knowing and thinking--and outcomes need to be linked to measuring devices.
Likewise outcomes with verbs "to know" or "to think" are less desirable
because they are not specific, and it is difficult to form measurement
devices around them. For example, how clearly can a student demonstrate
their thinking?
I am going to include a live snail spitting competition in my seminars. No
problem with measuring outcomes there.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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