Bengt Johannisson believes, in response to my debate article, that children learn best when they are allowed to experiment until learning and that the affirmation of children’s natural desire to experiment cannot be reconciled with the introduction of absolute measures of competence and knowledge.
I agree that experimental learning is one of several well-functioning teaching methods. For example, through measurements and experiments to discover the connection between the circumference and diameter of a circle is something that can both give a greater understanding and make it easier to remember, compared to just being served a formula from a textbook. My experience is that this is a widespread form of teaching today.
The problem is that Bengt Johannisson have shuffled the cards. The choice of form of teaching has no connection with the actual validation of the knowledge goals. Assessment of students’ knowledge is done on an ongoing basis in all teaching – so-called formative assessment – but also in special knowledge checks, for example in tests and quizzes.
The teaching does not have to be boring, rigid or mechanical at all for the knowledge requirements to be clear and measurable.
Even if you have learned to add and subtract by competing in a simple and fun way – a good method by the way – the knowledge must at some point be evaluated and assessed. How the learning took place is not a parameter in the assessment. The teaching does not have to be boring, rigid or mechanical at all for the knowledge requirements to be clear and measurable.
What I meant by my article was not to shed light on different forms of teaching, but to point out that the governing documents the school currently has for assessing knowledge are so vague and vague that there is room for interpretations.
That room for interpretation is a problem from an equality and fairness aspect and I wanted to show that in the long run it leads to both lowered knowledge levels and grade inflation. Because it is not difficult to realize that the room for interpretation in the knowledge requirements is tempting to use as the students’ knowledge is scarce and the grade statistics are gloomy.
We may have to ask ourselves what we want the students to be able to do more concretely in different subjects than just having vaguely formulated goals such as “basic knowledge” to aim for. No matter how the learning has gone. Today, this is done locally at every school – if at all. It’s laid out for arbitrariness.
Are there basic skills that are necessary to bring with you in life? It happens that when I ask the students in year 6, for example, how far they think it is to the wall at the back of the classroom, I get answers that hold both several kilometers and miles. Is the idea of how long a meter is such a basic knowledge? Today it is possible to pass mathematics without that knowledge. So we can not have it.
I would like to see more entrepreneurs in the school and all creative forms of teaching that affirm children’s desire to play and experiment are welcome. But in order to have an equal and fair school where knowledge is at the center, the knowledge goals need to be made both clear and measurable, as the measure of swimming skills already is.