Andragogy & Assessments

I'm beginning to try to tie down my view of adult learners and how they interact with their academic assessments. Below is a short essay I wrote primarily for myself to get the thoughts moving in the direction they seem to be pushing me...

If this makes sense to anyone else at all, I'd love to hear that news.

Brief outline of Andragogy and Alternative Assessments

Andragogy, or principles of adult education, is primarily concerned with bringing the unique aspects of adult learners into the planning and execution of the teaching. Adult learners bring with them skills, experiences, successes and failures that play a role in their future learning, things that are not accounted for in pedagogy.
Another way of viewing this idea is that pedagogy centers on the teacher as the content expert and the student as the novice that needs to be directed through content in a prescribed manner. Andragogy places a different role upon the teacher. The teacher becomes a content-facilitator, serving more to guide the learner through experiences designed to make the content accessible to the learner.
Principles of Andragogy that underline this approach are widely recognized to be the following:
• Adults are not a blank slate and do best when participating in planning and evaluating their learning
• Experience is a valuable teacher for adults, including mistakes
• Adults need connections to the immediate relevance of the subject matter to their learning goals
• Learning to learn, or problem-centered approaches vs content-centered approaches, is more inline with the innate approach to learning of adults
Looking at these basic tenets, it is easy to see that professional schools do some of these very well, for example the experiential learning that takes place in lab or clinic, but it is also clear that there are areas within which we have yet to recognize the differences between child and adult learners.
Academic assessments in particular are an area where capitalizing on an adult’s ability to self-assess and evaluate their own work is underutilized. Assessments such as peer and self-evaluations using a rubric, or reflective blogging fall right into the arena of adult learners. Yet far too often assessments are limited to lengthy multiple choice examinations, which sadly fall at the very bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy, meaning they do not lead to transfer or synthesis of knowledge and sit squarely on recall alone. Recall of information is not necessarily the type of learning that needs to take place in professional school as much as learning how to navigate the field of study should be.
Perhaps by trusting in our learners more and trusting in our ability to guide them through their own discovery of their abilities and weakness we can build upon an andragogical foundation in professional schools instead of hoping to inspire the type of knowledge gain we would like while testing for simple recall.