Techlearning blog

Despite our current K-12 emphasis in the United States on high-stakes summative assessment, learning is still measured with "seat time" in most school districts for students as well as teachers. Yes, students take tests and schools are commonly "rated" on a sliding scale according to the performance of students on those tests-- but MONEY is allocated by state legislatures based on ADA: student Average Daily Attendance. Seat time assessment makes a basic but often fallacious assumption: If a learner "sits there" in class for a specified amount of time, then as a rule "learning" will take place and the educational purpose will be fulfilled. As we all know, seat time does not necessarily correlate with learning. Whether or not learning takes place is correlated to time on task, but it also has to do with things things like:

• the learning environment created by the teacher/professor
• the curriculum that is studied
• the tasks assigned to students
• student background knowledge about the topic(s) being studied
• student perceptions about the importance / value of the assigned activity task (both its instrumental as well as intrinsic value)
• The degree to which students are provided with bounded choices in their learning activities

Sometimes, situations drive home the fact that learning is still measured with seat time in our schools. Professional development (including technology workshops) are often a case in point. In October when I presented at the ESC9 Wichita Falls regional technology conference, all teacher-attendees carried around a piece of paper with places for "session stickers." After each 45 minute presentation session, teachers were "awarded" a sticker for their paper to signify the learning-- which of course as a result of "sit and get" instruction-- had just taken place. The amount of professional development credit awarded to each teacher for their day attending workshops was based on the number of stickers they had on their piece of paper by 4 pm.

Last night, a non-educator friend was telling me about a continuing education workshop he attended in the last year at a resort. Participants had brought their families to the resort, and gathered each day to watch DVDs together about new information and ideas related to their profession. This was "read-only" education in practice, and the unit of measurement for student learning was seat-time.

The two snow-days we've had here in Edmond, Oklahoma this week also drive home the reality of "seat time" assessment in schools. Apparently this snow storm, which dropped a thick layer of ice on central Oklahoma followed by 6-8 inches of snow, is the worst winter storm the area has had in about 12 years. The local school district plans for 2-3 "snow days" in its calendar each year, and it is unusual to use up two of those "snow days" on November 30 and December 1. The chance of additional snow days this winter is pretty good (February is often the worst month for severe winter weather, I'm told) and this makes chances high that at the end of the school year, additional days of "seat time" will be required for students and teachers.

We continue to measure learning in most schools largely with seat time in the early twenty-first century, and this is a paradigm that needs to evolve and change. Measuring learning with seat time is anachronistic as well as misleading. We know a great deal more about learning today in 2006 than we did in the 19th and 20th centuries when public schools were widely established in the United States, and the basic forms of learning assessments we commonly utilize should reflect our improved understandings of the learning process.

I really enjoyed watching and thinking about Larry Lessig's keynote about RO (read-only) and RW (read-write) culture at the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Germany recently (MP4 video format). Lessig discusses how culture in the 20th century was largely RO, but today thanks in large part to the interactive technology of web 2.0, culture is becoming a blend of RO and RW media.

This discussion connects directly to the aforementioned ideas relating to learning assessment. I think advocates for "messy assessment" in schools (a group I count myself in) are sometimes misperceived as promoting an assessment climate where there is no standardized testing or summative assessment. That is not my position. Just as Dr. Lessig observes our cultural environment becoming a mixed one of both RO and RW media, I think our educational environment needs to increasingly feature an assessment landscape that includes "messy" as well as more traditional, standardized measures of student learning. Use of web 2.0 tools to reflect and collaborate, like blogs and wikis, can be powerful assessment tools in the hands of 21st century educators and students.

We need to move beyond seat time. Stickers may have been a good way to measure learning in the 19th century, but the novice and expert learners in our schools today need and deserve more authentic assessment models in the 21st century.