Pedagogical Minute   

A Weekly Service of the College of Arts & Sciences

Measuring Knowledge

 A guest-spot this week…

 Long before we spoke of assessment in higher education, people were doing it. In fact, they were assessing assessment, which is must’ve been like trying to pick a knot out of a shoelace in the dark. In recent work, John Tagg points out* the frequency with which our theory-in-use (the principles that can be inferred from our practices) contrasts with our espoused theories (what we say we value). Now, the easy and obvious thing to do with such a gap is to attribute it to hypocrisy, but that’s not the response proper to scholars. Rather, it may be that the difference between what we say we want from students and what we actually reward may point us to things we should and would consciously value, if we only knew about them, and could articulate these values in a way consistent with our other values. 

All very abstract. Let’s get concrete.  

We’ve all been students, we’ve all had students. We all know what “bull” or “B.S.” is (and being people of the world, we know the saltier synonyms as well). Back in 1963, William G. Perry Jr. wrote a delightfully approachable essay with a truly off-putting title: “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology.” Perry suggests that what we do when we reward certain things as evidence of knowledge is the surest indicator of what we think knowledge really is. He observes a particular case in which it became evident that we professors tend to punish bull mercilessly when we detect it – but to reward it very highly when we do not. He goes on to argue that it is entirely appropriate for us to reward it. It was a startling thing to say almost a half-century ago, and it remains so today.

 I have had my students read this essay every time I taught a freshman writing course, and I used it when I trained college teachers of writing. It starts long and rich conversations – they last the whole semester, really – about what it means to be liberally educated, and what’s happening when we (faculty) ask students to demonstrate knowledge.