We want to track “learning,” but learning is hard to quantify, since it happens inside of students and occasionally arrives after a period of delay. Any writing instructor will tell you about the email received from a student a semester, or a year, or even five years removed from a course, in which they will report, “Now I know what you meant when you talked about …” The data we can capture in education can be misleading. And as we’ll see when discussing the problem of standardization, when we let incomplete data drive our curriculum, we cause serious problems.
