Live from La Strada: : Why Is It So Hard to Increase Learning?: "The single most important obstacle to improving student learning in college...
...is our terrier-like obsession with assessment and our faith in punishment and reward as the only motivators of any use. It’s all summative evaluation, that does nothing for performance because it’s delivered too late and in an affectively toxic context.... What improves quality is (1) formative, and evaluation is the least of it, and (2) collaborative. These are bromides of industrial quality assurance, but in higher ed, for teaching, we are still in the dark ages of the 1970s when GM thought it could make quality cars by doubling inspections and having a larger reject lot at the end of the assembly line where defective cars could be triaged into ‘scrap, rework, or ship’....
Learning happens while reading, writing, doing problem sets, group projects… not even mainly when being lectured at.... Here are some propositions implicit in the discussion of this issue, and in our practice, that need a lot more skeptical examination:
Improving performance in an affectively fraught, improvisational, creative enterprise can only be accomplished with objective measurements of performance (thus, student test score mania)....
Knowledge is facts, teaching is telling, and learning is recall (David Cohen), hence fact-recall tests are the unique measure of learning.
The key, maybe the only, element of value creation is avoiding mistakes....
Teaching effectiveness is a trait, so a dollar spent assessing it (so you can promote good teachers and fire bad ones) is worth a hundred trying vainly to improve it. Also, firing and raises are quick, cheap, and allow us to get back to writing that journal article, something we know we’re good at....
Even if you... want to... mak[e] teachers better at what they do, money and fear are the unique motivators....
Coaching is OK for people of modest intellectual chops performing mindless physical tasks. Like football players, opera singers, and, um, heart surgeons (cf A. Gawande). Collaboration and peer advice is essential for research but for reasons much too arcane and technical to actually explain, useless for teaching...
