Thanks for the insights, Dave. Your post focuses on a critical issue that has nagged at me for a long time, but that I have not seriously engaged.

It seems to me that education is making real strides in shifting its focus from the teacher’s instruction to the student’s learning, but most all discussions that I see about assessment still privilege the instructor or some authority other than the learner. We still want to measure against an outside ruler (in all senses of that term) and not against some internal metric that makes sense for the individual learner and the learner’s community. We’ve not yet developed the vocabulary and procedures for self assessment as we have for self learning, and yet, I suspect that student-centered learning won’t really happen until we have developed the student-centered assessment piece. It isn’t enough for a student to ask, “What do I need to learn that I do not know?” Students must also be able to determine when they have sufficiently learned what they do not know, and that involves some kind of assessment.

I suspect that an intelligent, self-formed, emergent assessment process will actually feedback into the beginning of the learning process when students first make the unknown known to themselves. If considered early, then both formative and summative assessments can help shape, guide, and inform the self-directed learning from the beginning. Indeed, assessments become a naturally-occuring, emergent property of learning and not some tacked-on quiz at the end.

I like this, and I suspect I will write more about it in my space.