Content area
Full Text
PERFORMANCE assessment, one of the "hot topics" in education reform, is a closer measure of our children's ability to achieve our aspirations for them than is conventional standardized testing. Indeed, our educational aspirations have been influenced by the fact that our children will inhabit a world requiring far more complex and subtle forms of thinking. They will need to know how to frame problems for themselves, how to formulate plans to address them, how to assess multiple outcomes, how to consider relationships, how to deal with ambiguity, and how to shift purposes in light of new information. These modes of thought will be critical in a society where citizens are apt to change vocations several times in a worklife, mobility has increased and new forms of adaptability are required, and choosing a course of action requires considering diverse, sometimes conflicting, information. No longer will most jobs, particularly the most desirable, require routine skills and rote memory.
These changing expectations for the outcomes of education reflect a nonbehaviorist view of human nature. When learning was conceived of as acquisition and aggregation of reinforced units of information, "practice makes perfect".could serve as a guiding principle for teaching. The kind of thinking students are now encouraged to engage in requires much more. Context matters, judgment counts, and the opportunity to act to try out one's speculations is of critical importance.
The demise of behaviorism and the emergence of constructivism in our view of human nature are not the only sources of our changing conception of children and education. We have come to realize that meaning matters, and that it cannot be imparted from teacher to student. In a sense, all teachers can do is to "make noises in the environment"; we have in education no main line into the brains of our students.
We are shapers of the environment, stimulators, motivators, guides, consultants, resources. But in the end, what children make of what we provide is a function of what they construe from what we offer. Meanings are not given, they are made. And we are interested in enabling students to make their activities in school meaningful, not merely because of the grades they receive but, more important, because of the satisfactions and insights their efforts make possible....