Introduction: Evaluating Educational Experience(s)

"Despite repeated calls for accountability from a variety of sources, including Congress, the higher education community has not found a satisfactory way to measure, report on, and improve performance. Several institutions have designed model assessments of learner outcomes, such as Evergreen State University and Alverno College, but most institutions insist that those initiatives cannot be replicated, or that educational outcomes cannot be measured. Although graduation rates remain unacceptably low for the most part, too many educators argue that such rates are not a valid measure of performance." from Correcting Course: How We Can Restore the Ideals of Public Higher Education in a Market-Driven Era (The Futures Project, Brown University, February 2005).(PDF available at http://www.futuresproject.org/)

" ... the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want." from Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller (1949)

We have now had two seminar discussions, and as questions of evaluation will be extremely important to us later in the design process I thought it would be worthwhile to talk briefly about how we could/should/might evaluate the "educationalexperiences" we've been having so far. Specifically, if you thought either of the two sessions were especially successful or unsuccessful, try to pinpoint why you think this.

Disagreements about the quality of educational experiences will often depend enormously on disagreements about the criteria we use to evaluate them. Here are 7 such criteria that might lead us to regard the value of the last two sessions differently:

• Did the class make me feel good/better/happy?
• Did I learn something in class?
• Was I able to do something as a result of the class?
• Did the class further my personal project(s)?
• Did the class further the social projects with which I identify/affiliate?
• Am I able to teach/transmit something as a result of the class?
• Do I think differently about something/anything as a result of the class?

Perhaps a good way to motivate Scheffler's comments about the "illusion of givenness" is to talk about how techniques like "seminar discussions" and "small group discussions" can fall pray to the same sorts of unexamined assumptions as the introduction of computers in school(s).

Dewey's Experience and Education (1938)

On Tuesday we talked about some of the bigger/broader distinctions made by Dewey, but to connect his book with Scheffler's article we'll need to focus on various aspects of Dewey's concept of "educative experience":

1. What is the connection between Dewey's talk about the value of "educative experience" and contemporary talk about the value of "learning to learn"?
2. How important is an individual's memory for the having of educative experiences?
3. How important is common knowledge/experience in designing opportunities for educative experience?
4. How important is "knowing a lot" (e.g. in the sense of Hirsch's Cultural Literacy) for happiness and success contemporary life?
5. What (then) are some difficulties in designing educative experiences for others?

In the final chapter of Experience and Education, Dewey writes of experiences like shop and home economics:

"The final justification of shops, kitchens and so on in the school is not just that they afford opportunity for activity, but that they provide opportunity for the kind of activity or for the acquisition of mechanical skills which leads students to attend to the relation of means and end, and then to consideration of the way things interact with one another to produce definite effects. It is the same in principle as the ground for laboratories in scientific research." (p. 85)

If we now consider a computer science course in schools, or a course that is centered around the computer in some way (e.g. a CASS-based mathematics class), the question becomes what kinds of activities are valuable and/or worth having/promoting at school. This is the question that motivates Scheffler's 1986 article, "Computers at School".

Israel Scheffler's "Computers at School?" (1986)

We'll discuss Scheffler's philosophical article, led by John's comments and questions. We'll try to be clear about Scheffler's concerns and arguments in each of the four sections of the paper, and reflect on whether/how this article stands up today; the four sections are:

1. The Illusion of Givenness
2. Distinguishing Means from Ends
3. The Uses of Computers at School
4. The Notion of Information in Educational Thought

"Reading" Decisions, Decisions in a Deweyan Light

Sounds dramatic, non? OK: it's a rather pretentious way of calling attention to the degree to which we evaluate a program like "Building a Nation" using assumptions about the aims of education and the nature of educative experiences.

For Tuesday, please find a partner and post a review of one of the modules at Decisions, Decisions Online, in light of some of the issues raised in Dewey and Scheffler.

For next time: Teams should try to have their project pages posted in some form by Friday, and send their revised project descriptions to the listserv (CS92-L@listserv.brown.edu) no later than Sunday night.