How do the perspectives of Brennan & Resnick and Wolz et al. align with the other main perspectives we have considered so far?
Brennan and Resnick are the first people in our readings to address assessment in a concrete and clear way. Most of the other authors were more concerned about how to integrate constuctivist thinking into our schools, and to encourage students to engage in authentic learning experiences. Where I think Brennan and Resnick's proposal of possible assessment techniques are important is that they keep the spirit of Papert's constructivist theories. They do not aim to switch back to an easily assessable learning style but rather they embrace the difficulty and maybe impossibility of assessing this type of thinking. They want to ensure that they gain an accurate representation of the learning that is taking place and how student's mindset is shifting. I do no believe that they achieved this goal yet but they are the closest to making that assessment a reality. Although, I am not convinced that assessment is as necessary to the learning experience, it is right now unfortunately a necessity in our system.
Wolz wants to move away from what he labels as "injecting" computational thinking into the curriculum and instead focuses on "infusing" computational thinking into the already overloaded school curriculum. Wolz perspective on computational thinking and it's relationship to the classroom is most like mine so far. Computational thinking is something that teachers strive for in their classroom, and using this new dialogue in the education community to support the types of learning that are already going on, we can achieve very powerful and authentic learning experiences with our students.
Michaela, I'm not surprised you said this, especially with your espoused definition of CT as being kissing cousins with higher-level thinking. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm in the Brennan/Resnick camp with assessment. Not that I think capital a Assessment should be the end goal of learning anything, especially computer science. But I believe that any learning worth learning is purposeful learning. The assessment phase of learning should attempt to capture and harness that purpose as closely as possible so as to not kill the powerful ideas that students tried to reach by learning in the first place, and yet measure their advancement toward those ideas. Maybe I have a sophomoric idea of learning and assessment, but I tend to think that if we're not working (as learners) with the end in mind, we are wasting time and energy. We can probably agree that "Because this will be on the test" is a terrible reason to learn anything, but maybe not if we are careful about what constitutes the "test."