Accounting for learning

By Maureen Mancuso. We need to measure what students learn. In my introductory column, I hinted at the ever-brewing, sometimes boiling conflict between unconstrained academic freedom and the increasing demands for accountability and proof of “return on investment” in higher education. In some ways we are victims of our own success: as academics we know that education is as much about the journey as the destination, but there’s no escaping the fact that many of the people involved value that destination pretty highly. Education is an excellent investment – for students, communities and governments – but as with any program that pays off in social and intellectual as well as mere monetary capital, it can be challenging to demonstrate that fact convincingly.
What annoys many academics, including me, about the baldly economic description of education as an “investment” is that modelling teachers as producers and students as consumers not only demeans both parties to the relationship but also reduces learning to a purely passive activity: mere absorption of knowledge, pre-digested and individually wrapped. The problem is that budgets are budgets, and if all we can provide are fiscal metrics, there will always be a tendency to use a model that conforms to what can be measured. Read more...