Evaluating Education

I have been following the conversations Bill Gates has had this past week on the subject of education. One entry was about how to evaluate the quality of education.

I am not a fan of our current national and state systems of evaluation. I find that Student Learning Outcomes can be altered too easily allowing for a dumbing down of our educational system. Combined with standardized testing and No Child Left Behind this combination has actually left a larger percentage of students to be left behind upon graduation than at any other time in the US educational system.

As an educator I believe in teaching students to think, not regurgitate. Regurgitation is great for knowing some blips of information but it is almost useless when it comes to the day to grind of living life and advancing our endeavors. Does it matter that I can spout off what day an event happened? No it does not. What should matter is the understanding of the importance of that happening, the critical analysis of the situation.

I use Blackboard as an educator and use many of the question types built into it, not just the multiple choice type. Using the other question types, even if I have to go in and manual grade a test provides greater benefit for my students. Their minds are so used to looking at multiple choice (other wise known as multiple guess) that they truly have issues with any other form of question. I have worked with high school and community college students and many of them have learned top play a numbers game; if they do not know the answer they remove to the obvious wrong choices and guess from the remainder.

So how do we as educators evaluate the knowledge base of our students? In the past instructors were allowed to recommend the holding back of a student that was under performing. While this basically is a good idea education needs to be more proactive, if a student is starting to fall behind we need to get tutoring in place. Tutoring, one on one (or few) education is a great tool to help students. The delivery of the teaching materials is different in this scenario than the delivery in a group situation. It allows for more questions to be asked and answered in a style that matches the particular student.

Get rid of standardized tests. The tests are a useless metric to use for evaluating student success. Each person is an individual with topics they will do well in, exceed expectations in, or even perform poorly in (at least for a time). I will use myself as an example. Through grade school I was a top performer, challenged by my teachers and my parents to excel. Upon reaching high school I faltered, partly from rebellion partly from a change in the instructional style that I trouble grasping. In particular math was a troublesome subject for me. I failed algebra the first year, received a C- the second year, a B in geometry (which made sense to me where the numbers in algebra did not), then I completed high school by taking business math as I could not go beyond basic geometry. My brain at the time had difficulty with the subject.

That did not stop me however, all of my other subjects I did well to exceptional in, including the arts. After graduation I started college, then dropped out to enter the service. After my time in the service I graduated and started into management and eventually running my own service based business. Eventually I became bored with that line of work and decided to go back to school. Thanks to my job experience and a brain that had changed I was able, with some difficulty, to complete math through calculus and statistics with a B average.

Individuals can only be standardized at a low level, beyond that each will perform best at a subject they enjoy and have sub-performance in subject matter they do not enjoy. From early childhood education through high school I believe more teacher involvement and the use of tutors will provide more meaningful outcomes than our current evaluation systems.

Parents too should get in the mix much more than they do. Few parents evaluate their children, leaving it up to the schools instead. Expand your own knowledge as a parent, just because you had problems learning as a child does not mean that is true now. The kids are learning the same subjects you learned, it really has not advanced as much as some people might think. Talk with your children, ask them questions about the workd around them, challenge them to THINK.