It is indeed more useful to have specific
>critique of a particular performance if the goal is simply to improve it.
>But not if the goal is to make a decision how much of one's life to devote
>to activities where you know you are not likely to be judged by others as
>outstanding, or even adequate.
I do believe the research indicates that academic performance
does not predict job performance.
And who can say that a student who performs poorly in
one class will perform poorly in all such classes?
I've worked with students who were stamped "damaged goods" --
soon to be dumped from the assembly line. Most were capable but
in need of a scaffold; a few turned out to be stars.
>Perhaps there is a deeper emotional and cultural issue here. Many of us do
>not like to cause pain to others, to tell them just how badly they are
>doing, how little progress we see, how unlikely it is that others will
>judge them highly enough to make it worthwhile in the long run for them to
>continue to pursue a particular goal. ...
If you were alluding to highly technical fields or to highly
specialized fields I would concede your point. But no:
There are also cultural
>differences in how difficult it is to tell someone that they will never be
>a great opera singer vs. telling them that they aren't likely to excel in
>ways the culture deems more related to general intelligence than to
>specialized skills...
>
...The most comfortable forms of evaluation for us are the
>short-term, highly specific ones; it is so easy then to show the few simple
>things that could be done to greatly improve the work. When we move to the
>longer time scales, however, it often becomes clear that what is wrong
>cannot be so easily, or explicitly, fixed, or that the timescale for
>improvement is realistic in relation to the timescale of a student's life
>ambitions.
>While sociological functionalism always has to be complemented by critique,
>there is still much to be said for the basic principle that long-surviving
>practices have multiple functions and that very often many aspects of
>social life have come to be dependent on them. If we want to intelligently
>change our involvement with grading, we need to understand as much about
>its functions as we can.
It still sounds like sociological functionalism in want of critique to me.
Judy
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183
Eternity is in love with the productions of time - Wm Blake