Measuring behaviors

Mid-level workers in most fields have had the experience of having to record and report everything they do in a given period of time, for the purpose of being evaluated. How many cold calls did you make in an hour? How many customers did you see? How many forms did you process? How many absent students did you talk to? Computers make it easy to collect and process this kind of data, and they appear to provide an objective means of judging productivity.

The problem, of course, as anyone who has been evaluated this way knows, is that the method fails to capture many of the behaviors that result in actual productivity, like the extra time you spent with one particular customer or one particular student. This is a management technique that reduces every task to its least creative, most routine parts.

Some of the most important work in the world cannot be easily quantified, and that is true of education too. The part that can be quantified is knowledge of data and facts. We have standardized tests for that. But it is hard to objectively test higher level cognitive skills like analysis, synthesis, or evaluation.

Surfing the web the other night for information about constructivism, I stumbled on a blog by a young teacher with whom I instantly identified. This teacher was frustrated by the requirement to teach to objectives using the behaviorist model of learning.

My guess is that anyone who has gone through teacher training in the last 15 years has had to design lessons around SWBAT: the “Student Will Be Able To” formula. It involves breaking the thing to be learned into a series of measurable behaviors. A whole vocabulary of active verbs describes these behaviors: the Student Will Be Able To name, to identify, to explain, to select, to use, to list. But one verb you absolutely may not use in an SWBAT lesson plan is “understand.”

That is because, as the blogger noted, “Understanding is not measurable. Behavior, however, is.”

With older students, especially at the college level, an advantage of SWBAT lesson plans is that they reduce arguments about grades because they reduce arguments about correctness. When only measurable, right or wrong behaviors are assessed, there is little chance for a student to complain, “My answer isn’t wrong. You just don’t agree with me.”

Because it works best at the lowest level of cognitive skills, SWBAT is not very useful for producing what I have defined as an educated person. But it is ideal for training. See my next post.