What exactly are we trying to measure?
Blog post description.
FUTURE OF LEARNINGTHE ACORN STORYACORN IN SCHOOLS
9/3/20262 min read
Ha! To all my teacher friends who have spent the last few weeks pointing out the inevitable holes in my logic about teaching...
I know that schools still need to assess learning.
You are all (felt like 400 of you based on the amount of good-natured WhatsApp abuse I took) absolutely right.
At some point, we need to know whether a child understands something. Honest. I get it.
But it did leave me wondering: What exactly are we trying to measure?
When I was younger, a lot of assessment seemed to revolve around what I could remember. To the extent that I still remember the first two pages of my Std 4 RE pages I had to learn for a test, and the name of the head girl when I started at senior school (thanks history teacher), and a random song I made up to remember the names of the currents that ran down the sides of the Japanese coasts and impacted on the fishlife. And all of that was put into my head over four decades ago!
So what were they testing? Could I write it out, quickly, in time to pass my tests.
And to be fair, that made a lot of sense in a world where information wasn’t sitting in our pockets.
But today, things feel different. If an AI can tell me how many moons Saturn has... does it really matter if I don't actually remember?
And somehow IQ just doesn't feel enough anymore. A child might be wonderful at getting facts into their head, but today life doesn’t hand out marks for remembering facts. It hands out problems that don’t have obvious answers.
It doesn’t tell us whether they know what to do when there isn’t a single right answer. Or whether they can tell the difference between the "right" answer and the "other right" answer that AI might have provided. (Not naming and shaming - just pointing out.)
Truly, knowledge still matters.
But life rarely presents itself as a multiple-choice question.
And most of the important decisions we make involve incomplete information, competing priorities and a degree of ambiguity.
Which leaves me wondering whether one of the biggest educational questions over the next decade is this:
How do we make thinking visible?
Not just what children know. But how they reason... and question... and make sense of the world around them.
I’m genuinely curious what parents and teachers think about this. Because I suspect assessment is going to become one of the most interesting conversations in education over the next few years.
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