[Note: Before getting started with this posting, I
wish to express condolences to the survivors and families of the victims in the
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
Since this blog is dedicated to civics education, I would like to convey
my admiration of that school’s social studies teachers; their students are
expressing, in an articulate way, a level of civic knowledge beyond their
years. Hopefully, our nation can arrive
at a workable solution to this problem of repeated mass shootings.]
The current topic of this blog is evaluation. The aim has been to review a list of
functions an evaluation should meet to be effective in a change effort of a
school’s curriculum. To this point, the last
posting commented on the functions: diagnosis
and revision. These functions are
offered by the curriculum scholar, Elliot W. Eisner[1] and also
includes comparison, anticipation of needs, and determination of
achievement.
This posting
will begin by focusing on comparison. When one thinks about evaluation, one should
realize that all evaluations are of one form of comparison or another. There are those comparisons against objective
standards. For example, if one evaluates
a new car, very objectively, he/she could determine that it should last five
years without having to be subject to major repairs. That can be stated because of the state of
mechanical advancements that automobile technology has achieved and by
comparing how other people’s cars hold up.
Of course,
most efforts at improving school curriculum is not that kind of thing. For example, say a school opts to change its
math curriculum. It implements a newer
approach to teaching geometry. The
school buys textbooks that incorporate a more practical method of instruction
with students solving common problems in which geometry theorems are utilized. How does one evaluate that effort? There’s no comparable numbers as there is in
the car example.
“Many, but not
all, policy changes in schools are based on certain values that the [practical
geometry] policy is intended to realize.”[2] The value here is that a practical
application with everyday problems is better in that students can more readily
understand the importance of the material – it’s a value for less abstract instruction. Evaluation would be to see if the belief,
upon which that value is based, is true.
But can that determination be made within a school year; how about two
school years? How about a longer amount
of time? One can begin to see the
problem when it comes to educational changes in curriculum.
Here there is
an inability to impose such objective standards as with the automobile. They are subjective most of the time. Assuming one has a fairly good idea of what
is being sought, whether one attains that aim can be often hard to
ascertain. And, assuming further that one
at least has a workable sense of that question, how generalizable is it? It works today, will it work tomorrow? Will it work in another location, with
another set of people, or under another set of supervisors? These are but some of the questions one will
inevitably have to ask in real life situations.
And to top it
off – and this happens often – yes, it works to some extent, but it leaves one with
other problems. If the change is
instituted, are the students better off if the school had just kept what was? So, there are comparisons in terms of time,
people, and states of being. And much of
it is attempted with less than optimal information or over a concern that does
not lend itself to definite and discreet information. Yet, change is needed and all one can do is to
try to do their best.
Again, the
previously stated standards, this model identifies, centers on effectiveness. Effectiveness is defined in terms of student
conduct and is measured by the levels students can:
·
demonstrate learning curricular
content;
·
demonstrate learning skills in
acquiring relevant knowledge associated with curricular content;
·
demonstrate dispositional outlook
supportive of being a productive member of the student body;
·
perform their student roles in a civil
manner;
·
and follow, in a collaborative fashion,
those behaviors that abide by the reasonable policies of the school and school
system.
Yes,
in a real school, with real problems, these standards need to be more nuanced
and more concrete. For example, what
does “learning” mean? How will learning
be compared? By test scores, demonstrated
applicability, transferability, or some other demand? All that depends on what the conditions of a
school are, what is the nature of the curricular content, and what are the
needs of students in question.
The
next function identified by Eisner is identifying
educational needs. This posting will
not expand on this function since this blog in a previous posting conveyed most
of what Eisner describes when the blog reviewed the problem identification
phase. See “Initial Concerns of the
Landscape,” February 2, 2018. What
should be added here is Eisner’s concern for biased evaluations; a concern already
mentioned as the Hawthorn Effect. He summarizes
this obstacle with the following: “… we
find what we are looking for.”[3]
The
next posting will describe the last of Eisner’s functions, determining what
needs to be achieved. The writer also
wants to add an idea associated with problem identification, the first of the
phases of this blog’s proposed model.
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