What a 19th Century Blind Traveler Teaches Us About 21st Century School Assessment
Transport yourself to the early 19th century, to a high-vaulted sculpture gallery somewhere in the sprawling imperial city of Rome.
You might come across a curious sight: An Englishman dressed in a slightly ragged Royal navy uniform, hands flying enthusiastically over the smooth contours of a Bernini, then the marble bust of the emperor Hadrian. Strike up polite conversation with him, and he’ll warmly introduce himself as Lieutenant James Holman. You barely notice his unfocused gaze, due to Holman’s heightened attentiveness to your every word — a technique he learned to master after losing his sight at age 25 to a mysterious ailment.
Before Holman breathed his last in 1857, he would traverse over 250,000 miles in an era that pre-dated widespread steam-powered transport. His successful — some would say stir crazy — circumnavigation of the world took him to the uncharted interiors of Australia, Brazil, modern day Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and countless other cities, regions, and continents. He befriended and was befriended by complete strangers of all backgrounds and social classes. He became a Naval Knight of Windsor, hunted elephants, inflamed people’s imaginations with voluminous travel memoirs, and fought against slave traders. Miraculously, he accomplished all this when most people ignorantly equated blindness with incapacity, and the vision-impaired were afforded grim, if any, career prospects.
Holman came to be known as ‘The Blind Traveler’, or more grandiosely, ‘History’s Greatest Traveler’. His life is studded with curiosities, but perhaps one of the most fascinating is how his understanding of the world was largely built through touch. Even more curiously, there are striking parallels between Holman’s touch-based explorations and the ever pertinent conversation in the 21st century around the relative merits of summative versus formative assessment.
Let’s back up a bit here. The sense of touch, or haptic perception, is vastly different to visual perception. The author of Holman’s biography, Jason Roberts, puts it vividly in this way:
Where vision gulps, tactility sips. In the haptic world, an object yields up its qualities not all at once, at the speed of light, but successively over time, and in sequence of necessity. It is not a flash but a process, like the procession from rough sketch to finished portrait.
While visual perception takes in everything in one go, haptic perception builds a progressively complex picture, bit by bit. For example, most sighted people would spot a brick wall in the distance and not think twice of it. Yet Holman would get up close and patiently run his hands over each individual brick, noting the variability in texture, form, protrusion, coolness and so on. It would take longer, but he would end up with a much richer representation of the wall in his mind’s eye. Over time, information revealed by touch can be more complicated than that gleaned from visual sight.
For educators, this provides a neat analogy of the differences between formative and summative assessments for school students.
Formative assessment takes place continuously as students are learning (think in-class quizzes, journal reflections, interactive games). Summative assessment takes place periodically at the end of learning (a mid-year exam, a final paper).
Formative assessment takes after haptic perception, in that it builds up detailed pictures of a student’s learning progress through smaller chunks of information — it sips. It aims to provide immediate feedback that can be used to nudge teachers towards more effective methods and identify areas where students are struggling. Formative assessments are generally low stakes; they don’t impact heavily on final grades.
By contrast, summative assessment evaluates the knowledge students have acquired following an entire term or semester of learning.
Like visual perception, it gulps. Tests are administered to measure progress against standardised benchmarks. Summative assessments are high stakes; they are often tied to significant outcomes for students, educators, schools or even school districts.
So which is better? Formative or summative assessment? As with many answers to less-than-straightforward issues, most educators would respond with ‘a good balance of both’. However, while summative assessments can motivate instructional changes, they occur too late in the learning process to allow effective adjustments to be made. This is where formative assessment excels.
Lending weight to the utility of formative assessments are the technological leaps and bounds made in the field of learning analytics.
Much like haptically exploring each individual brick in order to construct a complex image of an entire wall, technology offers myriad ways to comprehensively assess students on an ongoing, non-intrusive basis. New tech-driven learning methods and tools mean contemporary formative assessments now take the form of online quizzes, interactive videos, simulations, games and educational apps allied with powerful data capture solutions.
As students participate in class, these solutions collect valuable insights into students’ concept mastery and problem-solving sequences. Data is collected and analyzed on multiple fronts, including student selections and inputs, the order in which they select the inputs, the number of attempts, the time taken to answer a question, and more. These data points can then be aggregated longitudinally or hierarchically — starting from the input level, to the question, session, student and classroom levels, all the way to the school, district, regional and national levels.
In this way, key decisions about learning can be properly informed by continuous data, making improvements in the quality of education at all levels more transparent and robust. Among the advocates of this shift towards tech-based formative assessment is the U.S Department of Education, which enthusiastically hailed its “potential to make visible data that have heretofore gone unseen, unnoticed, and therefore unactionable”.
The benefits of continuously collecting, aggregating and organizing data through tech-based learning tools aren’t limited to providing actionable feedback to students, teachers, and school administrators.
The more detailed learning data is collected and aggregated over large numbers of students, the more data mining algorithms can explore, classify and identify patterns in the data, as well as make suitable recommendations. It’s the Netflix approach: the more you browse, rate and watch movies on Netflix, the better Netflix gets at recommending movies to you.
Sophisticated learning analytics systems not only recommend what activity an individual student should do next, but can also predict how they will respond to future learning content based on identified competency gaps.
There are also broad implications for educational research; using the numerous streams of data available to them, researchers can generate and test different hypotheses to validate how students interact with, learn, and retain knowledge.
On being deprived of his sight, Lieutenant James Holman had this to say:
[P]erhaps this very circumstance affords a stronger zest to curiosity, which is thus impelled to a more close and searching examination of details than would be considered necessary to a traveller who might satisfy himself by the superficial view, and rest content with the first impressions conveyed through the eye. Deprived of that organ of information, I am compelled to adopt a more rigid and less suspicious course of inquiry, and to investigate analytically, by a train of patient examination, suggestions, and deductions, which other travellers dismiss at first sight.”
One can’t help but think The Blind Traveler would appreciate the ways in which 21st century technologies now allow us to carry out ‘a more close and searching examination’ of students’ knowledge, motivation, metacognition, and learning attitudes.
With the right amalgamation of innovative data collection and forward-thinking assessment techniques, learning analytics can help paint rich portraits of learning journeys, as well as pave the way towards better educational experiences that sense and adapt to the needs of individual students. Of course, the key challenge that runs concurrently with the rise of educational data analytics is how schools and service providers grapple with and prevent the misuse of personal data — an important issue deserving of ongoing attention and debate.
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Cogniss Magazine is published by Cogniss, a platform for building Human Transformation apps — apps that use applied neuroscience and psychology to drive better learning, health and behavior change outcomes.
