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And now to our second thesis about the future of learning.
And this is another provocative proposition about what could
be a fundamental change in our learning environments.
And the proposition is that in the future there
will be no distinction between instruction and assessment.
Now again, seems like a pretty definitive statement about the future.
We can't make definitive statements about the future.
But the proposition is one that where we really mean to say
that this might be possible, and perhaps it should be possible.
This is what we did for assessment in the old school.
Here we have an exam, in fact, this went viral on the Internet,
you may have seen it before.
It's an examination in Thailand, where you can see that the classic kind of
expectation is that students will have remembered things individually themselves.
So we have in that traditional classroom the teacher speaking,
the student listening, the textbook telling, the student remembering.
So we have a whole lot of exercises around remembering where when you come to
an exam, you're in this very strange, artificial environment with this
strange set of artifacts where the artifacts of assessment are actually
very different from and separate from the artifacts of learning.
One of the fundamental epistemological presuppositions here,
learning is memory work.
And particularly it's what's called long-term memory work.
And what's the definition of long-term?
The definition of long-term is until the day after the exam.
You gotta get through the exam, and maybe some of it sticks afterwards.
But from an assessment point of view, it's until the day of the exam.
Now one of the questions that we might ask about this is just how relevant is memory?
Look, here in my pocket here I've got my phone, here's my phone.
And in fact there's nothing in the world that I can't find out through that phone.
There's nothing in the world that I can't calculate through that phone.
So the kinds of memory I might have might be empirical memory or
it might be memories about procedures,
which is how to get the right answer and to calculate something.
In fact, we now have these devices in our pockets.
We have computers on our desks.
We have tablets that we carry around with us in work situations increasingly.
And what do you have to remember?
In fact you don't have to remember much except the skills of navigation.
The skills of looking up.
So in other words, you have to remember a certain number of procedures, but
they're fundamentally different from the kinds of things that the students in that
picture that we just looked at were remembering in order to pass their exam.
The other thing, too, is that all the students are in that classroom and
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the measure of their learning is templated sameness.
So the classic modern form of assessment is the standardized test.
Standardization means everybody gets the same test, it's more or
less appropriate to them.
Some kids are going to not do very well because they don't quite know enough and
some kids are going to know a bit more.
But there's a kind of idea that within a particular frame of reference this
test is a standard measure which measures everybody against a measure of uniformity.
And also the standard of knowledge is empirical correctness.
I remember a fact correctly, I get an answer right, and so on.
Now, you know well as I do that in fact, knowledge and
learning isn't quite like that.
And in fact what we have with the test is a very, very, very strange artifact.
So we go into the test and in fact, let's just take the item-based test.
We go into the test, and there's an unusual game being played there which
is not played anywhere else in the world and
not played in the rest of learning for that matter.
Which is we've got an A, B, C, D answer and
in fact, you have to eliminate things which are obviously wrong.
And you've gotta know that the other items,
particularly at least one item, is what's called the distractor item.
It's an item which looks right, but deliberately designed to trick you.
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It's a very, very, strange thing to be doing.
In order for there to be one answer which might be,
let's say B, which is either a fact or it's empirically correct.
Now you know as well as I do, that you can get the right
answer by guess work and not understand the underlying principles.
You know as well as I do that you can actually say the distractor item
is correct because you understand the underlying principles, but
there's some small piece of trivia that you overlooked.
So you've got the concept, but in fact you're marked wrong.
So these things are a pretty strange artifacts, and
are often reasonably inaccurate.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisDean
