This YouTube video created by EDUCAUSE has me thinking that after hundreds and even thousands of years, we still don’t have a grasp on our assessments. Even some of our education thought leaders have a hard time defining what learning is. This video acknowledges the struggle of trying to assess learning and it suggests that learning is far more complex than the assessments we give. What are we missing when we boil learning down to bite-sized components on a test?

Some of my favorite quotes from the video:

“…learning is one of the most multidimensional things out there, and one of the problems with measuring learning is that sometimes we have to simplify it too much in order to capture data or to capture understandings of it that we can use.”  –Amy Collier, Associate Provost for Digital Learning, Middlebury College

“…there are no reliable, simple, proxy indicators [to measure learning] that we can trust, so we’re asking the wrong set of questions it seems to me.” –Gardner Campbell, Vice-Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success, Virginia Commonwealth University.

“If you’re looking at particular behavioral patterns or outputs, I think we can measure those types of things…Can you get inside my head and see how I’ve changed? I rather doubt it.” –Ellen Wagner, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Strategy Officer, PAR Framework, Inc.

“Measurement really involves constructs like achievement.” –Daniel Hickey, Associate Professor; Program Coordinator, Learning Sciences Program, Indiana University.

So should we be boiling learning down to bite-sized achievements? And are we really measuring learning when we give a ‘B’ to a student? I’d love to hear your thoughts.