Reflection #8

This week was a good one. They all are good ones. We talked about evaluation and assessment and the difference between the two, we learned how to make rubrics, we learned that Geoff’s father (or some older gentleman in the story he told) did not know what a rubric was despite being a professor for decades, and we learned about telemedicine, telediagnosis, and water conservation from Francesca and Kat, respectively.

The idea of validity and reliability in education is interesting to me. Ideally, students would achieve a high level of each (i.e. consistently achieving excellent results). But I was wondering, if I could only choose one, which would be more important? I was considering especially a technology education setting, such as the one in the movie clip we watched with the boys launching rockets. They had high levels of reliability (that all ended in similar failures), and eventually ended up with a successful launch (validity in that one case). But I wonder, if they could only experience a lot of failed launches OR one successful launch, and not both, which would be most beneficial to their education? Yes, only launching one rocket and having it succeed would be awesome and motivational to the students, but at the same time one could argue that the experience gained through the long process of working through failures is worth many times more than the success of that single launch. I suppose this is one of those questions that could be highly debated, and of course, answers are always situational. In this situation, however, I would be inclined to lean towards the side of many failures, and not the single success.  

What does this mean for me? Well I like the idea of validity and reliability applying to life as well. In what situations do I achieve a single result and move on? In what situations do I strive to achieve proficiency, the acquisition of a skill being more important than a result? I’ll definitely think about this as I observe my own actions. That’s about all for now. I do recognize the importance of all the other things we learned, but the idea of reliability and validity has given me the most to ponder.