Diagnostic assessment

The 'rip, mix, burn' model of pedagogy (see post 14th November 2010) is very compelling but it fails to provide any guidance about assessment.

Edinburgh Castle

Imagine if a person phoned you up and asked you for directions to travel to Edinburgh. I might say: go the the Black Cat roundabout and turn left; continue north up the A1 until you reach Edinburgh. These instructions would be wrong for people travelling from Inverness, Glasgow, London or Cambridge. The first thing to do would be to find out where they were.

You must assess before you teach. If you don't know where a person is in their learning you can't personalise their teaching. Much of what you do teach will be wasted. Your students won't end up where you want them to. Some will get very lost indeed!

MRI scanner

In the 19th Century, medicine shook off the shackles of quackery. Doctors learnt to diagnose. They used technology (thermometers, stethoscopes, etc) to measure key indicators of health. As time moved on they developed more and more high tech diagnostics: X-ray machines, blood pressure cuffs, blood tests, MRI scanners.

By and large education retains the pencil and paper test. These give next to useless information. I attended a parents' evening where the Maths teacher was armed with a formidable array of numbers about my stepdaughters' Maths. What do the numbers mean? I asked. She wasn't very good at Maths. Which bit of Maths? I asked. Maths generally, I was told. What does she need to do to improve? I asked. Try harder and ask for help, I was told.

At least the Maths teacher had tried. Most of the teachers that evening had measured nothing and simply spoke in platitudes. I can't imagine a doctor giving me such vague replies.

So my utopian vision for the future of education is to use technology to improve our diagnostic assessment.