[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Herman Rubin) wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> To make things more objective, multiple choice exams have > become at least a major source of "information". These > almost must be trivial pursuit; a good problem requires > at least 15 minutes of available time, and should not be > graded by the answer, but by the way it is approached and > treated. Even breaking it down to its parts loses so much > that the important parts cannot be tested. The result of trying to apply Frederick Winslow Taylor's ideas about how to run an early-twentieth-century factory to the process of education. Break everything down into little pieces that can be done independently of each other and without knowledge of each other. In a Tayloristic factory, you use in-process inventory to "glue" everything together; the steps can be done independently because you're taking an assembly out of inventory, making a tiny change to it, and then putting it back into inventory. I guess memory has become the educational equivalent of inventory. In mathematics, this results in a system where students know *how* to do computations, but they don't know *why* they're doing them. They can execute a list of steps someone else specified explicitly (though not as fast as the chip I'm staring at) but have no idea how to formulate the solution of a problem. If you asked them why they were doing a particular computation, they'd likely give a very Nurembergian response: "because I was told to." . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
