I teach
statistics. Have for years. And not just any kind of
stats. I teach "social and behavioral statistics"--I've
spent a good deal of my career trying to figure out how to measure and analyze
the way people think, act, feel and learn--as individuals, in groups, societally, globally.
We can learn a
lot from numbers. But I wonder. I wonder if we have gone
"quantifiably crazy."
I received one
of those “freebie” books in my mailbox a few months ago. You know, the book that the companies
desperately HOPE will become your next text.
The titled intrigued me:
Everybody Lies:
Big Data, New Data and What the Internet
Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
After 252 pages exploring everything from baseball to sex, the
author—Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a big data economist—writes,
Numbers can be seductive. We can grow fixated with
them, and
so doing we can lose sight of more important
considerations.
He caught my attention.
While
the desire for more objective measures of what happens in
classrooms
is legitimate, there are many things that go on there
that
can’t readily be captured in numbers. . . .
The
problem is this: The things we measure are
often not
exactly what we
care about. We can measure how students
do on multiple-choice questions. We can’t easily measure
things like critical
thinking, curiosity, or personal
development.
Just trying to increase a
single, easy to measure
number. . .
doesn’t always help achieve what we are really trying
to
accomplish.
It is a good thing to be “data aware,” but maybe not such a good
thing to be “data driven.” By allowing
data to “drive” us, we may miss a good deal of what the educational journey is
all about.
I wonder. . .
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