Define success

My job is to take web usage data for our site and help business owners understand if their section of the site is "successful" and how to make it better. I see some similar patterns in the meta analysis we read this week.

At the end of the day success looks different from situation to situation depending on your objective, and if a group or a company or an industry can't agree on the same metrics and what they mean, then no one really knows what is being reported.

So, in education, what is our objective? We want kids to learn. But how do you measure how well a kid has learned?

I propose that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to move forward with meaningful, actionable research until we think about this question. What does learning look like? Is it the ability to recall facts, can it be demonstrated in the ability to write an essay? And, to Alejandro's point, what about cheating? Once we identify what success looks like, then students efforts turn to striving to mimic that standard, not learning.

What if we were to accept that in this day and age, anything can be searched for and found, so what is the benefit of memorization. My kids are being taught cursive, and for the life of me I cannot imagine why.

It seems to me like the challenge is to be able to take existing information, sort out the good from the bad, synthesize it, and figure out how to use it appropriately. What if learning was measured by what was created and the process of creating it?

We would look at a student or students ability to pick a project, search for the resources they need to understand it at an appropriate level and take that information and apply it. We'd evaluate their success in collecting and gathering the requisite depth and breadth of information; the level to which they've understood and used the information appropriately; and how well they took the information to create something of their own.

It is unrealistic to think that anyone can learn all that they need for the rest of their life from their time in school. The benefit to this approach is that students learn how to find their answers and be critical thinkers, so whatever the question that arises in the future, they'll know the process to take to build their understanding.