| Thinking Lateral |
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| Need new thinking for your own problems? email nick leth at gmail dot com |
Students study to pass exams. Passing an exam is an "objective" -- the objective is, to get 50% (or possibly better) in the exam. With continuous assessment the objective is, to get 50% or better by the time the last piece of assessment has been marked. What is new with OBE? Why is it better? Apparently we need objectives such as, Understands the deep societal significance of adding two numbers together. Whether or not you can actually add those numbers together is irrelevant -- as long as you understand the significance of the activity. How are these objectives measured? Well, the teachers can spend a lot of time discussing the task with each student, to see what is being understood... There may also be a little test, to test that minor, secondary objective of, Able to add two numbers and get an accurate result. How do we test that objective? We can ask the students to add up a whole lot of sets of two numbers then see how many they added correctly... Oh dear, a test. And with objective, measurable, comparable results, too! That can't be any good. The first objective is wishy wasy, the teacher can phrase the result in any fashion -- in particular, the results will be subjective and with no fear of failure. After all, it's far better to have a society full of ignorant, uneducated fools than to have any students feeling that they are less able than others...
Here's a largely irrelevant anecdote: I was a university lecturer, at a university where attracting fee-paying students was more important than education. I was a lecturer for seven semesters, presenting one particular unit for nearly all of those semesters. This gave me the opportunity to test all sorts of ideas to keep the students interested... Each semester, students evaluated the lecturers. It was generally accepted that evaluations were influenced by assessment: if a lecturer failed a student, the student failed the lecturer. Lecturers then had to explain to the head of school, why students did not like the lecturer. My own students consistently gave me poor evaluations. I tried lecturing with a lot of interaction, explanations, questions and answers. I tried setting tasks, so that students found out the answers for themselves. I tried just standing up and telling the students the facts that they needed to know. Guess what? In the semester when I simply stood up and talked -- the students loved it! My student evaluations were so good that the head of school mentioned me at a staff meeting as a good example! What had I done right? The way I see it, I presented what the students wanted to hear: information that was relevant to what they had to learn. Students wanted to pass the unit. To do this they needed to learn a bare minimum of facts, ideas and understanding. I stood in front of them and provided exactly those facts and ideas, with perhaps some understanding. They could read the text, they could listen to me, the information was the same. I was providing a very clear, very straightforward explanation of what they needed to know. I provided simple information, students appreciated that. They knew why they were listening to me. No confusion about learning to learn, no deeper significance, just an obvious link between my lectures and the requirements of the unit. Did they learn anything worthwhile? Of course they did! They learnt the material relevant to my unit. At the end of my unit they were all better ablt to do what I was trying to teach. My objectives were simple: students should learn my unit material. I presented lectures to support that objective. It was all very simple, measurable an even com[parable amongst the students: learn more and your mark will be higher. Did the students appreciate the direct, no-nonsense, "just learn this" approach? Apparently they did. Not only did the students appreciate it... I found it a lot easier to prepare lectures. And the head of school appreciated the improved results of my student evaluations... Satisfaction all round -- through a very simple, traditional approach to teaching and learning.
| Independent Thinking |
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| Independent analysis of your problems by Agamedes Consulting. Support for your thought: email nick leth at gmail dot com |
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