[Eng1508] 508 Question

[dworden at mail.wsu.edu]

My first response, and perhaps a good selling point, is that even if
positivism could fulfill its promise to provide a definitive answer for a
question or problem, that such an answer might still be unusable. 
Certainty sounds good, but what is really important, and what
contructivism stresses, is utility.  The “solutions” of constructivism are
not designed to be neat and tidy, they are designed to be useful in the
specific situations and stakeholder views from which they were
constructed.  I think that positivism has a history of disappointing those
it claims to serve, especially in terms of the usefulness of its elegant
and definitive answers.  Clients who have, perhaps, tried positivistic
evaluation and been disappointed in the applicability of the answers it
provided could be attracted to the more modest goals of fourth generation
evaluation.

Another response I would make is that while constructivism does call for
power to be shared, responsibility is also shared.  When Bill shared his
strategy of having his students design the rubric for their portfolios, it
was this element of shared responsibility that made the strategy seem the
most attractive for me.  By sharing power with students, Bill also created
an atmosphere in which challenges to grades are extremely unlikely.  As he
attested, in a grading situation that should normally have students
calling to have the teacher lynched, his students were calm and relatively
unworried about the process.  Positivistic evaluation is so often used to
place blame, that the option of sharing responsibility could be one
promise that might entice clients to give fourth generation evaluation a
try.

Finally, I think that a bit of optimism is not out of place here.  Of
course not everyone who looks for an evaluation is really looking for
meaningful feedback.  Pharmaceutical companies trying to get a new drug on
the market are not likely to seek out a constructivist mode of evaluation.
 That does not mean, however, that everyone who would fund an evaluation
are equally jaded.  I agree that people do not voluntarily give up power,
but in difficult enough circumstances, I think there are those who are
willing to give up some immediate power to avoid a more permanent loss of
power (such as a company going under, or a major strike that could halt
operations).  In those situations, the loss of power is offset by the
potential growth in power (though it is now power that is shared) that
could come from sophisticated and useable data about a complex or messy
problem.

Dorothy



Hey All,
>
> My question for this week is this: Since we all agreed in class that
> convincing people to give up power is such a difficult task, how can that
> be accomplished successfully in fourth generation evaluation?  It seems to
> me that if you ask someone to give up their power, you might offer them
> something in return (a solution or answer to a problem, for example) - the
> problem with this is that fourth generation evaluation acknowledges that
> it provides no certainty or definitive answers.  If we cannot even promise
> our stakeholders a definitive solution to a problem in exchange for their
> release of power, how else can we convince them to do so?
>
> Michelle
>
> Michelle Fankhauser
> mfankhauser at wsu.edu
>
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