The Greek Sculpture Question

Carl Bereiter provides a lucid metaphor to illustrate how our thinking about assessing learning needs to shift.  Before the era of great Greek sculptors, the criteria for determining the artistic merit of a work was how “human” or “life-like” it looked.  Observing the primitive or stiff figures of earlier eras this approach was useful.  But for the Greek masters, such mimmicry was easy, their challenge was to capture the essense of moments, emotions and an individual’s character.  Similarly, in a world of limited information, “knowing the facts” was a good criterion for learning.  But with our era’s easy access to an exponentially expanding body of knowledge, assessing student learning through products that can be copy and pasted from the Web makes little sense. How will education come to validate significant student learning?

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