Is this Actual Self-Actualization? Edtech’s Push to Move Beyond Traditional Measurement Pitfalls When Assessing Non-Cognitive Skills in Online Environments
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The increased technologization of education and the increased emphasis placed on developing and assessing non-cognitive skills has led to a need for measurement of non-cognitive skills in online environments. Questions remain about the possible benefits of these measurements, as well as the challenges to their adoption. This thesis takes a qualitative outlook, and investigates these questions from the perspectives of the people who build such education technology (edtech). I interviewed 10 technologists, including founders, CEOs, and software engineers, who are building these tools, to understand the impacts they want their tools to have, and the factors that stand in their way. In the technical realm, they identified three main perceived technical benefits: the ability to utilize more valid data sources, the ability to measure more frequently, and the ability to experiment. They also described one main contextual desire, the hope that the ability to measure would increase overall emphasis on non-cognitive skills. The technical barriers were twofold: that the technologies had difficulties extrapolating from context to context; and that technology was often the wrong solution for a problem. However, while these technical barriers were surmountable, contextual ones were harder to overcome. This is due to a Catch-22: increased emphasis on non-cognitive skills is hard to drive without accountability measures to incentivize it, and accountability measures often come with the types of high-stakes testing that are antithetical to many non-cognitive skills. Because of that, some founders are forced to use the effects that non-cognitive skills can have on cognitive skills as the basis for their adoption, rather than non-cognitive skills’ standalone value. These findings suggest that policy and contextual education factors, not just technical capabilities, must be a focus in research on edtech tools measuring and developing non-cognitive skills.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Rao, Neel |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | edtech |
|---|---|
| Subject | non-cognitive skills |
| Subject | measurement |
| Subject | accountability |
| Subject | technologists |
| Subject | founders |
| Subject | self-efficacy |
| Subject | Graduate School of Education |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Rao, Neel. (2021). Is this Actual Self-Actualization? Edtech’s Push to Move Beyond Traditional Measurement Pitfalls When Assessing Non-Cognitive Skills in Online Environments. Unpublished Honors Thesis. Stanford University, Stanford CA.
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education
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- Contact
- neelvrao@stanford.edu
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