A picture's worth a 1000 words

We all know field trips are fun, but how much do children actually learn from these excursions? Harlene Hayne, a psychology professor at Otago University, investigated the kinds of information five and six year-olds absorbed from a field trip to a local Albatross colony and how long that information was retained.

The children were interviewed and tested about the experience. Not surprisingly, the results suggested that standardised testing did not accurately measure the children’s knowledge:

You would draw very different conclusions about what they learned and what they had remembered on the basis of their narrative interviews than you would on the basis of their performance on the tests.

Hayne asked half of the children to illustrate their experience while they talked about it. Interestingly, those children "…reported more information than children who were simply asked to tell." Hayne concluded that, at least for younger children:

…we can sometimes get a better assessment of what they have actually learned and remembered under these more avant garde assessment procedures using drawing than we ever would in standardised testing.

However, the discrepancy between the results of quantitative and qualitative assessment, irrespective of drawing, "might persist forever."

A Storied Career

Kathy Hansen is blogging her PhD research on the use of storytelling as a form of organizational communication, but the scope of her blog is broader, exploring traditional and postmodern forms and uses of storytelling.

Kathy makes the connection between story and career, writing about the emerging narrative approaches to career counselling which represent a welcome move away from psychometric testing and the sort of career planning folly that Jeremy exposes when riffing on a couple of Brian’s recent posts.