Who Stole Effective Education?

by Jay C. Powell

We all walk in a constrained envelope of knowledge
Surrounded by an envelope of ignorance.
There are things we know we know.
There are things we think we know but actually,
We don’t know the truth about this topic.
There are things we know we don’t know
There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

This set of aphorisms describes the human condition. Should the function of education be to help us to push bask the frontiers of this envelope of ignorance?

If so, can we identify these zones of ignorance? Yes, these are the places where we make the most mistakes. By paying close attention to our mistakes, we can learn to expand our zones of understanding more effectively than we can in any other way. Such is the history of human discovery. ,

Why then do we ignore the mistakes our students make on tests or in classroom interactions with us? Our research shows that students give us answers not randomly but based upon the ways they interpreted the questions,. Actually, learning is not linear. It is complexly non-linear with gains in some areas and losses in others and no change at all in still other places. Without this wrong answer information, the dynamics of learning are indeterminate. In addition, tests tell us more about the levels of thinking and learning skill our students possess than the factual information they can recite.

Powell and Shklov (1992) presented an adaptation of the multinomial procedure that bypasses the linear dependency problem and gives access to these learning characteristics. We showed that, by giving the test twice and considering every answer, between two and three times as much information are available from the same test as can be provided by the right answers alone. The answer change patterns revealed the dynamics of the changes in status behind their answer selection. Our new scoring procedure reveals students’ learning processes than what they “know.”

We are calling this additional information “cognitive maturity.” These status changes become immediately evident because we can now look at performance on an answer-by-answer basis using all answers, not just the “right” ones.. This procedure makes such tests powerfully diagnostic, making the scores more formative than summative as assessment in the same data set. The rationale behind answer selection is qualitative information, and should be treated as such using selection-pattern analysis to provide change profiles for subscores.

Our contemporary test scoring approach is actually both mathematically and psychologically invalid, but because educators and testing experts have not researched the meaningfulness of alternative answers “right/wrong” scoring has rendered this mistake invisible. At present we remove the “unacceptable” answers from consideration in the scoring process before we begin to make sense of these data.

Who stole effective education? Everyone who continues to rely upon total-correct scores, or even partial credit systems that remain linear in their analytic system is stealing effective education from our schools every day. See my book; Powell, Jay C. (2010) Making Peasants into Kings, Bloomington, IN: Author House. (ISBN: 978-1-4490-0634-1; Available with Membership).

© Better Schooling Systems (2011). P.O. Box12633, Pittsburgh, PA 15241. By including this acknowledgement this material is open source and may be distributed freely for educational purposes. . Last Updated on Monday November 21st, 2011