Medium is doing a series called the Age of Awareness which consists of “stories providing creative, innovative, and sustainable changes to the education system.” It seems to be mostly focused on primary and secondary education and Ireland’s contribution to the series is uses K-12 examples, but is still applicable to higher education.
In it he asks an important question. Critics of assessment in higher education have mostly focused on the poor quality of the data that is used in assessment. Ireland is asking a different type of question and that is whether education is a really susceptible to measurement. Even if you could measure some facets of student learning with great precision what would that tell you?
How do I measure your experience backpacking Europe for 2 months? How do I measure that piece of music you have been making in your basement for the last year? How do I measure how you deal with negative emotions? Or your humility or gratitude towards others? I could try, but we both know that it would be so imprecise that it would have little to no value.
The question facing education and the world for that matter is: Are we brave enough to trust that something has value without having the proof of measurement? Are we willing to live with that unknown?
He concludes with this:
We have become so beholden to these external metrics that we no longer trust ourselves. We have lost our instincts for what success feels like.
We need to accept that what is considered valuable is not the same for every person. We need to accept that time spent doing immeasurable tasks is often no less valuable than time spent toward measurable ones. When the ship starts to sink we need to stop blaming the tools and subjects of measurement and instead begin to suspect the measurement itself. We need to shift from asking how do we fix these numbers? to why are we measuring this?
In the words of Russel Ackoff, we need to stop doing the wrong thing righter and start doing the right thing.