Last week I was fortunate enough to be in attendance for David Jonassen’s thought-provoking talk “Engaging and Supporting Problem Solving Online”. I had not heard of him prior to this engagement but within minutes of his presentation I wished that I (along with everyone else involved in education) had heard of him sooner.
What he had to say was simple and obvious yet totally overlooked for the most part in education - knowledge that is constructed in context is more meaningful, more easily integrated, better retained, and more transferable than knowledge created in an artificial situation like an exam. Given that we encounter numerous problems during the day - from where to park to what to make for dinner - problem solving is the most meaningful and relevant activity that we engage in.
Instead of teaching for tests Jonassen suggests that we should be teaching in for the real world - after all, it’s in the real world and not an examination hall that the application of knowledge truly counts. This means you have to engage learners by creating an authentic learning environment that has meaning and Jonassen suggests that technology can be a useful tool in creating these environments. Currently, technology for the most part is being used as a way to distribute course content that was previously delivered on paper - class notes, readings, tests, etc. This is all fine and dandy, and hopefully a few trees have been spared thanks to this electronic distribution process, however this hardly classifies as online learning. You don’t change learning by simply changing the distribution of the learning materials.
Jonassen suggest that we go beyond this distribution model and use technology to create meaningful learning environments that support problem solving. In these environments, technology is used both to distribute information about the problem and to help guide users towards a solution. Although problems will differ both in complexity and across domains, what is consistent is the way that technology can be applied to assist in the problem solving process. Simulations are easily accomplished thanks to the data crunching power of computers and are an excellent way for students to experiment with different variables and their resulting outcomes. Simulations would work for a variety of different problems including supply/demand analysis in economics and physical simulations for engineering. Jonassen also suggests the use of constraint-based discussion boards where restrictions are placed on the types of posts students can make in a discussion by encouraging researched-based as opposed to opinion-based responses. These types of boards would be very effective in for domains where problem solving requires decision-making and argumentation skills, such as design or policy analysis.
Using simulations and constraint-based discussion boards are just two examples of the many novel ways to use technology to create meaningful learning environments that engage the learners in problem solving. These are by no means fancy solutions - they are novel in their underlying approach and not in the technology used to implement them. Before we can effectively use technology we must look at how we are teaching. Once we understand that technology is the tool and not the teacher we will be able to harness the full power of the technology and teach to meaningful learning outcomes that support problem solving.
More information on David Jonassen’s work can be found at the Center for the Study of Problem Solving and on the Design Constructivist Learning Environments resource page.
I cannot agree more with Jonassen’s way of framing the problem. My students last term often complained that while certain lines of discussion were interesting and possibly of value in themselves, they didn’t think they were worth pursuing because “they wouldn’t be on the exam.” Given the purpose of the class was to develop critical thinking skills about social and political problem, pursuing interesting lines of discussion, and defending them against the positions of others in the class, was precisely the sort of thing that would provide some practice at those skills. Here the exam placed an artificial barrier on the ‘creative space’ of issues, ideas, topic, &c. the students thought it rational to engage with.
But there is the concern that it is unclear how a teacher could fairly evaluate students without some form or another of exam. Maybe the old A,B,C,D paradigm isn’t the best way to do it — perhaps a increasingly difficult scale of pass-fail tasks or problems, to be solved however the student should think best is better. Surely though, as part of the role of education in society is social engineering (e.g. ensuring that the right sort of people can apply for the right sort of jobs), and that a large part of this is done through the instrument of grading, it isn’t the case that grading be jettisoned without loosing much the value of having systematic education in the first place. So there is the problem: how to give fair grades without having exams. We can’t, after all, have physics students writing essays on f=ma.
Thanks for you comment! I don’t think that Jonassen is against evaluation per se - what he is ardently against is teaching for the test. Problems in real life are far more complex than ones encountered on a test as rarely do they have a distinctly right or wrong answer. Teaching to the test retards the learners epistemological development as it teaches that there is a right and a wrong answer and doesn’t support multiple perspectives. Although Jonassen doesn’t comment on evaluation explicitly, I think he would argue that if you teach effective problem-solving skills based on meaningful learning outcomes then students should be able to handle the graded examinations based on the current evaluation paradigm. For the reasons you’ve mentioned we may not be able to get rid of these types of exams, but we could put less weight on them and focus on teaching skills that students will find useful beyond these exams.
Although you may not be able to get around the exam, Jonassen does suggest some innovative uses of technology that support the critical thinking skills which you are trying to teach your students. Jonassen’s constraint-based discussion board, C-board, forces students to formulate arguments as opposed to opinions and has a very structured response system in order to engage students in a dialogue as opposed to just putting in their 2 cents. This kind of discussion board could be very useful in a philosophy class as it would encourage students to respond critically as opposed to reactively. Blogs are another excellent tool to encourage critical thinking and analysis and I just came across this post this morning which further argues for their educational benefits. So, we might not be able to rid ourselves of exams but we can alter our teaching to go beyond teaching for the test.
Those are two interesting points. I think I’ll look into deploying something like a c-board for my section this term, as the topic (evolution and religious belief) will certainly demand heavier constraints then norms of politeness provide for. In fact, c-Board would be ideal, except that it appears that the SNS technology that it ran upon is no longer in development. Sourceforge to the rescue, I hope. If not, I think setting up a class blog would be a great idea. Thanks!
But in more general terms, it seems the problem can be summarized as: there is a significant gap between the kind of thing that an exam is and the kind(s) of thing that we call a ‘real world problem’. And moreover, the stragtegies learners might engage in to succeed at the first may not have any real relevance to the strategies required to succeed at the second. A good teacher, then, would be once who could effectively bridge this gap.
But is education only of instrumental value? That is, it is only aquired for some other end, or is it an end in itself? For the most part, it does seem like education is intrumental - it serves all sorts of other goals and its then the mere edification of some people concerning some topic. But I wonder how accurate my estimation of this is; for surely some education might be ‘accidently’ of intrumental value. For example, doing well on philosophy exams might - who knows why - selectively create a set of skills that are of great value to future medical professionals, even though it is hard to think of a direct causal link between success on a philosophy exam and all the different kinds of ways one can evaluate success in medicine.
Were you able to find a link to c-Board? From the talk I attended I got the impression that it was in beta and I tried googling but didn’t get very far. If you have a link I’d be very interesting in seeing it.
I like the way that you’ve stated the problem - clearly there is a gap between evaluation and application. It would be ideal if the evaluation and application could match up so that what you learnt was useful and a way to measure your success. I think that Jonassen would argue that we should be testing on problem solving abilities; however that is easier said than done.
I do think that education is instrumental, in that it is a way to learn skills that can be applied to other domains. I use the analytical skills I developed while studying philosophy every day in areas that have little in common with philosophy. When studying philosophy I think that students learn critical thinking skills and they learn about the history of philosophy itself. They will read about Plato’s cave allegory but will also learn how to critically evaluate it. I think that the importance of education is two fold - to learn about something and how to do something. In the case of the medical student who studies philosophy, if the exam is a measure of their critical thinking skills then hopefully those skills will transfer over to their clinical practice. However if the exam is a measure of their knowledge of philosophical facts, then I think those facts will be of little value to them when examining a patient. So, I think that there is a causal link if you look at the types of skills be evaluated and not the content of the evaluation itself.