Comment by cortesoft
10 months ago
Because you want to pass on knowledge? I am not saying there aren't ANY situations where a teacher cares about what their students think, but the example given isn't really one of those times. The question is not one that has many opportunities for original thought; it is a basic question that everyone who knows the answer will answer similarly. The entire purpose is to ascertain if the person understands what was taught, it isn't meant to engender a novel response.
> Because you want to pass on knowledge?
Arguably, that's not what teachers mainly do (to an ever increasing proportion).
Most knowledge is easily available. A teacher is teaching students to think in productive ways, communicate their thoughts and understand what others are trying to tell them. For this task, it's essential that the teacher has some idea what the students are thinking, especially when it's something original.
How do you know if you have passed on your knowledge without knowing what your students think/know?
Sure, but my contention was more with the word “original”, because they aren’t really original thoughts. The teacher just wants to make sure the student’s thoughts contain the information they are teaching. The teacher isn’t looking for actual original thought in this test.
Teaching isn't blatting someone's mind with the Correct Answers and checking whether the overwrite took. Instead, you empirically build a model of the student's own world model, then examine the model to see where it fails to conform to reality, and construct ways to fix it. The example from TFA was consistent with "this is university coursework", which is fertile ground for a tutor to identify such errors! It's not like the student should be receiving a yes/no response and nothing else; there will presumably be comments on the incorrect answers.
It's not a "test", it's an "assignment". Assignment is a way to practice what you've learned, and a (good) teacher would want to get your original thoughts so they could adjust their instruction and teaching material to what they believe you missed in order to improve your mental model around the topic (or in other words, to teach you something).
Perhaps the problem is that they are "graded", but this is to motivate the student, and runs against the age-old problem of gamification.