[From Chris Cherpas (961010.1316 PT)]
[re: > Bruce Gregory (961010.1005)]
...The only way I know to
alter the situation is to stop giving grades. This idea is so
unrealistic that not even I entertain it!
Part of the problem of using grades in school is that
the distinction between "schooling" and "educating"
is rarely discussed; the latter, by definition,
controls for indicators of learning, whereas the former,
involving the goals of people in charge of education,
may not. Grades are undoubtedly one basis for
thinning out the population of people eligible for
entrance into the "better" schools, jobs, etc.,
without necessarily challenging and enlarging the
student's developing intellectual repertoire.
But here's another problem with grades, even if taken as
"purely" serving to indicate what kinds of perceptions
a student has already learned to control, as well
as those yet to be learned. Grades presuppose a
very coarse- (and course-) grained ontology of
"what every educated person should know." Since
learning (or "studenting" -- to be more accurate in
this context) isn't modeled very well, if at all,
by curriculum developers and administrators, there's
little that can be said about a student's current
repertoire at any given moment. So special samples
are taken, such the infamous mid-term and final exams,
and grades are just deduced from there.
By collecting the right data within a well-modeled
learning process, you shouldn't need a test that is
detectably separate from the learning process itself.
Instead, a student would have a continually (measured in
seconds, or less, not weeks, months, or years) updated file
that includes estimates of the student's ability to control
any given subset of a full constellation/network of perceptions
relevant to being educated. This kind of profile, in contrast
to one's "permanent record" of grades, could provide
answers to questions like, "how much energy would a
student have to invest in learning to control perception
P1, given the current state of the repertoire?"
Bruce, as an aside, if you haven't read Hugh Petrie's (1981)
PCT-friendly book, "The Dilemma of Enquiry and Learning," I'd suggest
going to the library: ISBN 0-226-66349-3. I don't know if
he is on CSGnet currently (e.g., lurking silently), but Hugh's
email address was prohugh@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu as recently as
last year.
Best regards,
cc