More than Words and Numbers
Common techniques can’t convey the true measure of student performance.
By Mel Chua
Growing up deaf, I loved leaning against speakers and blasting classical symphonies until my ribcage shook. As a teenager, I learned how to sight-read orchestral scores. With sheet music in one hand and an album review in the other, I would blare CDs of the pieces my school orchestra was playing, tracing melodic lines with my finger. My “Music Appreciation” essays described piercing flute lines I’d never heard. I’d read the flute part on the score, borrow appropriate adjectives from music critiques I’d read in newspapers, and get fantastic grades.
Of course, I also had no idea what I was talking about.
When I was 26, I heard one of my old favorites for the first time, through new hearing aids. Once I had stopped sobbing, my friends asked me what it was like. I couldn’t say; the music washed through me in ways I couldn’t (and still can’t) describe. No matter how many adjectives I used to write it down, there would be something… missing. Ironically, it was my immersion in experiencing the music that rendered me unable to express it verbally.
Music goes beyond words.
So does engineering. We value “creativity,” “innovation,” and the ability to be a “maker.” We understand that it’s folly to teach “teamwork” solely via lectures on interpersonal dynamics and that students on a service learning trip are getting something far beyond factual data points on life in Haiti. We recognize book learning isn’t enough, and we’ve stepped beyond that in our classrooms.
Or have we? What does it say about our culture of learning when our homework primarily consists of writing exercises or numerical solutions?
How many assignments require students to reduce their Haiti trip to a three-page reflection paper, or have them rate their teammates on a scale from 1 to 5? How many times do we require students to translate their knowledge into a secondary symbolic artifact that’s easier for us to evaluate? In other words, how often do we value only the things we can pull comfortably into numbers and words again?
Do we inadvertently penalize “doing” and “making” because they contain things we can’t articulate?
Words and numbers have advantages, of course. They’re easy to store and transmit. They can automatically be checked for accuracy and plagiarism. They can be printed in books and broadcast in lecture halls to give the “same experience” to all our students, or at least something close. They seem “fair,” and they scale massively. These are all very useful features. Symbols can absolutely describe and transmit knowledge; it’s just that they can’t transmit or describe all of it. There are aspects of human communication that go underneath and beyond words; at some point, we’ve all conveyed something to someone else by waving our hands around and saying things like: “you know, the… THING! That goes like… THIS!” Remarkably, sometimes they understood – sometimes completely – what we meant by that.
If we privilege words and numbers, then we disadvantage everything that can’t be captured by them: the wordless encouragement of a room of colleagues working side by side with you; the glint of excitement in a student’s eye; the cheer that rises in the lab at 2 a.m. above the whirr of motors as your robot adroitly – finally – spins its way across the floor and to its target. If we privilege words and numbers, we might as well convert all our classes into MOOCs, because that’s the most efficient way to transmit information.
But it’s not information we want to transmit. That would be treating our students like computers and ourselves like glorified encyclopedias. We need to show our students that we value all they know and can do – that we encourage and respect them, not just the subset of themselves they can fit onto a piece of paper.
If engineering is more than a set of facts – if it’s an art and way of being that we want to nurture – then we need to open our assessments to creations that don’t always happen in a way that we can capture in words.
Mel Chua is a graduate student at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education.