What If We Could Build a Badge System From Scratch? Let's Measure What Matters!

By Cathy Davidson. Most of the systems we have in place for measuring, credentialing, and assessing education are about productivity, output, grading, ranking, and creating hierarchies from the top scoring learners to the bottom in order to reward the one and punish the other.  That is not surprising since most of the systems we use today--grading, ranking, IQ tests, and multiple choice tests--were invented between about 1875 and 1915, in the great era of Taylorism and "scientific labor management" when the goal was to quantify how much a worker contributed.  So with our inherited assessment systems.  They were designed to "scientifically" (which is to say quantitatively) measure and rank learning. More...