Links for 9/21/10

David Glenn

The CLA is a direct measure of skills, in contrast to surveys about how much time students spend studying or how much they believe they have learned. And unlike multiple-choice-based measures of learning, the CLA aspires to capture a student's ability to make an argument and to interpret multiple types of evidence. Those skills are close to the heart of a liberal-arts education…

Richard J. Shavelson, an educational psychologist at Stanford University and one of the CLA's creators, makes a similar point in his recent book, Measuring College Learning Responsibly: Accountability in a New Era (Stanford University Press). "If you want to find out not only whether a person knows the laws governing driving but also whether she can actually drive a car," he writes, "don't judge her performance solely with a multiple-choice test. Rather, also administer a behind-the-wheel driving test."…

the CLA typically reports scores on a "value added" basis, controlling for the scores that students earned on the SAT or ACT while in high school. In raw terms, the highest scores in the Texas system are at Austin and Dallas, the most-selective campuses. But in value-added terms, it appears that students at San Antonio and El Paso make stronger gains between their freshman and senior years…

by 2012, the CLA scores of more than 100 colleges will be posted, for all the world to see, on the "College Portrait" Web site of the Voluntary System of Accountability…

JARON LANIER

For every good teacher who is too creative to survive in the era of “no child left behind,” there’s probably another tenacious, horrid teacher who might be dethroned only because of unquestionably bad outcomes on objective tests.

We are tempted by the demons of commercial and professional ambition to pretend we know more than we do. This hypnotic idea of omniscience could kill the magic of teaching, because of the intimacy with which we let computers guide our brains… [AG: My computer told me to say that we don’t need to worry about this.]

KEVIN KELLY

My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be…

This just isn’t fair. I haven’t seen the inside of the gym in years, so not only am I a slovenly, misshaped, poor excuse for a human being, but apparently it's making me dumb too.