I like Bransford, et al.'s emphasis on moving away from rote memorization ...
In my reflection on it, I'm wondering if it relates to exactly what sparked the Behaviorist movement in the first place: a confidence in only what can be visibly observed and measured (in contrast to the cognitive science school of thought). In tradtional classrooms that rely on a lecture-and-regurgiate model, assessments like quizzes and tests typically produce a body of data that's easy to point to (e.g., Student _X_ got a 90/100) and these results are very *visible.* These clear, visible results make it not only relatively easy for students and teachers to measure progress, but also administrators and educational statisticians who share this quantitative data with politicians and, who then, may incorporate that into funding formulas. On the other hand, curricula that is designed with projects and problems that don't have clear-cut answers, nor predictable pathways to those answers, is arguably more difficult to quantify. How do we measure learning that occurs on these upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy so that we, as designers, can understand whether or not students have met the instructional goals? Bransford, et al. discuss this from the learner's perspective ("What strategies might they use to assess whether they understand someone else's meaning?" p.12), and perhaps, this is one of the ways in which teachers can talk to instructional designers about how they want to develop assignments that more frequently rely on the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
More than ever, the sheer magnitude of human knowledge renders its coverage by education an impossibility; rather, the goal of education is better conceived as helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts. (p. 5)What I find kind of odd in this is how long our educational system has seemed to have generally clung to this approach. Perhaps it demonstrates the strength of the Behaviorists? Briefly tracing this line of thinking, ... Bloom came up with his taxonomy in the 1950s, and in this taxonomy rote memorization essentially falls at the bottom . Yet, half a century later, it seems that schools are still working to get out of this muck of simple knowledge acquisition and rote memorization. Bransford, et al. leave me with the impression that most school curricula doesn't present assignments that consistently challenge our students on the higher cognitive planes (e.g., Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation). Wny is that? Was Bloom's taxonomy considered highly controversial in its day? Did educators generally agree with it in theory, but find it too difficult to carry out in practice? Was it something else?
In my reflection on it, I'm wondering if it relates to exactly what sparked the Behaviorist movement in the first place: a confidence in only what can be visibly observed and measured (in contrast to the cognitive science school of thought). In tradtional classrooms that rely on a lecture-and-regurgiate model, assessments like quizzes and tests typically produce a body of data that's easy to point to (e.g., Student _X_ got a 90/100) and these results are very *visible.* These clear, visible results make it not only relatively easy for students and teachers to measure progress, but also administrators and educational statisticians who share this quantitative data with politicians and, who then, may incorporate that into funding formulas. On the other hand, curricula that is designed with projects and problems that don't have clear-cut answers, nor predictable pathways to those answers, is arguably more difficult to quantify. How do we measure learning that occurs on these upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy so that we, as designers, can understand whether or not students have met the instructional goals? Bransford, et al. discuss this from the learner's perspective ("What strategies might they use to assess whether they understand someone else's meaning?" p.12), and perhaps, this is one of the ways in which teachers can talk to instructional designers about how they want to develop assignments that more frequently rely on the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
