Marking. Grading. Evaluating. Asessment. An A. A B+. 77% or 83%? Rubrics. Check-lists. Giving feedback.
It is that time across educational institutions where we kick into high gear evaluation mode. Not our favourite time. Although potentially a time of great learning on the part of the whole learning team: the learning designers, the learning facilitators and the students themselves. Did they learn? That is the big question. And how do we best evaluate that learning?
I haven’t had to “mark” in this formal way for many years. And it brings back memories of staying up late or getting up very early trying to finish marking projects, papers, exams and so on. This past few days I have been marking MBA final exams, MBA new Business Plan projects, the B.Comm d.studio projects and so on. It has caused me to pause and reflect yet again on the mysteries of learning. Have forgotten who said it but I have always loved this sentence:
Teaching (learning) is like posting a letter (or perhaps sending an email) –you don’t know when its going to get to its recipient — if ever.
I am looking forward to reading the Blog Wraps from the d.studio because this is where they are supposed to be reflecting on their learning. Now obviously this isn’t a fool-proof method of really finding out what has been learned — they are being “marked” on this work. So, they may not be completely honest. Although I have noticed that most of them don’t pull any punches around criticism so their reflections will probably be authentic.
It is especially difficult to evaluate this idea of design/business learning. Any kind of a process takes a while to be integrated into your other thinking and doing processes.
And then we have the challenge of the 13 week term. Time-bounded learning experiences. As Ron, Miguel and I were grading the projects yesterday we were musing on several ideas. For example, what would have happened if we could have had another couple of weeks “after” the final presentation to re-think the projects and their processes? We wondered about mixing and matching the teams differently — what if we merged the two Concert teams or the two Coast Capital teams? What would have happened? We also thought about how we structured the studio and what we would do differently next time.
Finally, I actually don’t mind giving feedback — because I learn from the reflective process of thinking about the work and finding language that extends the learning. It is the numerical side of things that I find challenging. Is it a 77%? Is it a 99% Then don’t get me going on grade inflation. I know there is a lot of educational research on evaluation. I wonder if we are ready to move to a hybrid system of grading — where some learning process courses are Pass/Fail and others more suited to numerical grades (right and wrong) keep them.
Back to the grading.