Dukenfield's Law & Campbell's Law #2

Some blog followers might be interested in a post of August 2010 “Dukenfield's Law & Campbell's Law #2” [Hake (2010b)]. The abstract reads:

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ABSTRACT: An earlier post “Dukenfield's Law & Campbell's Law” [Hake (2010a)] initiated a 49-post thread on EvalTalk which may be accessed at http://bit.ly/cqINPz and http://bit.ly/anwfoY.

The first response was by Art Burke who wrote: “Campbell said that corruption of quantitative indicators was a problem to be solved - he did not argue for abandoning quantitative indicators in the evaluation of social policies.”

And three years earlier Burke had written (slightly edited): “Nichols & Berliner (N&B) (2007) http://bit.ly/hwHtNY propose a hodge-podge of alternatives that they claim are more ‘reasonable and fair’ than the present testing and accountability rules [such as] ‘formative assessments,’ . . . . . I will certainly support alternatives that both reduce unwarranted stress on school staffs and preserve the protections for parents and children built into NCLB, but I don't see how this could happen with N&B's proposals. "

I wonder if Burke would support “formative assessments” as they have been utilized in science education?

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To access the complete 13 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/d3FrI8.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University

Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands

President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)

rrhake@earthlink.net

http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake

http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi

http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com

http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake

Dukenfield's Law http://bit.ly/bsRokM : If a thing is worth winning, it's worth cheating for.

Campbell's Law http://bit.ly/hMsyUr : The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

REFERENCES [URL's shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 12 March 2011.]

Hake, R.R. 2010a. “Dukenfield's Law & Campbell's Law,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/9FWI9n. Post of 14 Aug 2010 20:52:11-0700 to AERA-L, EvalTalk, NetGold, & PhysLrnR.

Hake, R.R. 2010b. “Dukenfield's Law & Campbell's Law #2,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/d3FrI8. Post of 22 Aug 2010 15:31:31-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post were transmitted to various discussion lists.