More on Badges and Assessment
David Wiley,
iterating toward openness,
Jun 15, 2012
David Wiley follows up an earlier post on badges and assessment. Since direct measurement of what's in a person's brain is impossible, he argues, we stimulate external performances in order to provide evidence of learning. This evidence is then used in a number of ways, from allowing a person to performing a job, to enter graduate school (where you will produce more evidence) or skip some other assessment. A badge is a form of evidence. But it is manifestly not the activity that resulted in the evidence. Nor (therefore) is it directly the evidence of your learning. It is a pointer to the fact that some such evidence was, at some time, produced. "You see that a badge is a proxy for evidence, which evidence itself is a proxy for what a person 'actually knows or can do.';" It saves other people the effort of checking the evidence directly. Why is all this important? Wiley argues, "I hope that as a community we will commit to being agnostic with regard to (1) the activity, (2) the evidence, and (3) the judgment." I agree.
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