COVID-19 and the opportunity to design a more mindful approach to learning
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COVID‑19 and the opportunity to design a more mindful approach to learning Conrad Hughes1
© UNESCO IBE 2020
Abstract The industry of modern schooling leads to surface learning of exaggeratedly voluminous curricula and excessively high-stakes assessments that instrumentalize the pursuit of knowledge. In order to return to a more mindful, authentic, and humanly paced approach, disruption from the present model is needed. Paradoxically, the COVID-19 pandemic might be the catalyst that will bring this about. Keywords Learning · Assessment · COVID-19 · Curriculum The fundamental purpose of education is to improve the human condition. Education leads to a longer, better life, a higher income, and, at a public level, a better society (Wiliam 2016). However, the assessment of learning is a thorny issue, and, in its most extreme forms, it often leads to excessive mental pressure and everything but a better life. While baseline assessment and assessment with a formative purpose allow for growth, assessment with a summative purpose is fundamentally a judgment after learning, based on a performance. Millions of children throughout the world sit examinations, entrance tests, and interviews and enter high-stakes competitions to see who will come out at the end and in which order. This creates an emotional and psychological burden that can become unbearable. The idea that students should be graded against each other goes back to the Gaussian bell curve that still informs most assessment design: students are assessed, at the end of their learning, so as to be arranged in the lower or top quartile, the top 1 percent, or, simply, the mean. Norm-referencing originated in the Industrial Revolution and subsequent massification of schooling: with the reforms of the 1800s leading to a universal education, the scale and implications of schooling became so large that assessment protocols started
* Conrad Hughes [email protected] 1
International School of Geneva, La Grande Boissière, 62, Route de Chêne, 1208 Geneva, Switzerland
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to act as filters, ensuring that fewer and fewer students would rise to the top of a steep hierarchy of grades, schools, universities, jobs, and titles built to protect elites. This worldview has led us to top tier universities refusing entry to students with maximum entry examination points, boasting acceptance levels of well under 10% (Paramita 2020) and taking placement offers off the table when high school students are a single point below what is requested. As higher education becomes globalized and increasingly massified and a small circle of ranked and branded universities become the dream destinations of millions of candidates every year, the pressure mounts even more to the point where it is no longer compatible with the deep purposes of an education. What are the implications and spin-offs of this unsustainable situation? The first is teaching to the test: instead of viewing high school as a period of intellectual growth and curiosity, risk-taking, and sel
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