Research, Development, and
Assessment with Badges:
An Equity and Diversity
Perspective
Bill Penuel
University of Colorado Boulder
A Convergence
• Misalignment of accountability tests with
valued goals for learning (especially in the
workforce)
• Growth of non-school settings for learning,
especially as a means to reach young people
alienated from schools
• Need for recognition of accomplishments
across settings of learning
• “Unbundling” of functions of schooling
through market-based reforms, facilitated by
technology
Risks
• Risks
education
Growth
of badges
– Growth
of badges weakensReconfiguring
public schools,
and
allow
for to
a greater
nothing
emerges to replacetothe
right
a free,
weakens
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quality
education. diversity of pathways for
schools,
andpublic
nothing
– Badges
become
all. of a new monopoly
emerges
to replace
thethe province
the parlance of market-based
right (to
to aadopt
free, quality
reformers).
Enabling a more complex,
public
education.
• Opportunities
robust ecology of learning
– Reconfiguring
allow fortoaemerge
greaterthat
Badges
become the education tosupports
diversity
of pathways for all.
enable more just and
province
of a new
– Enabling
a more
robust ecology
of
social futures.
monopoly
(to adopt
the complex, equitable
learning
supports to emerge that enable more just
parlance
of marketand
equitable social futures.
based
reformers).
Opportunities
A Puzzle
• Education is a universal right, but we
compel students to take part in it.
• Choice and interest are key catalysts of
development.
How can we organize an equitable system
of supports for interest-driven learning that
produces no failure?
Why Organize?
• Claim: Learning is the collective, concerted
effort of people to organize new social futures
(O’Connor & Allen, 2010; Penuel & O’Connor,
2010).
– Organizing highlights the idea that the ends of
learning are always contested, not given.
– A focus on social futures foregrounds the
questions: Where are we headed? Where do we
want to go? What new futures can we imagine?
– Focusing on organizing in the badge world means
attending to the social and material work of
changing institutions
Studying Learning as
Organizing
• Foregrounding values
– What values inform what learners do in different settings?
• Highlighting agency
– What are the scope and limits of participants’ agency to
pursue their individual and collective interests?
• Making explicit the ends (teloi) of learning
– To what ends are we organizing new systems for
recognizing learning? How congruent are those ends with
one another?
– Which ends are recognized, misrecognized, or ignored?
• Expanding participation in defining the ends
– Who defines the ends of learning?
– How can participants become involved in defining those
ends?
– How can participants help define criteria for recognition?
from O’Connor & Penuel (2010)
The Route of Formal Assessment:
Validity Arguments
• Requires agreements be negotiated on the
ends of learning: But among whom?
• Requires an evidentiary argument that:
– Makes clear the claim about what someone
knows and can do
– Marshalls evidence in the form of observations,
work products, or other knowledge displays of
student
– Tests models for linking claim and evidence
(Pellegrino: what does a collection of badges
mean, in terms of inferences about a learner)
‘Natural’ Assessment as
Recognition
• Recognition is an integral part of identity
formation (Erikson, 1968).
Identity formation, finally, begins where the
usefulness of identification ends. It arises
from the selective repudiation and mutual
assimilation of childhood identifications and
their absorption in a new configuration,
which, in turn, is dependent on the process
by which a society (often through
subsocieties) identifies the young individual,
recognizing him as someone who had to
become the way he is and who, being the
way he is, is taken for granted. (p. 159)
‘Natural’ Assessment as
Recognition
How can an open badge system make different forms
of participation consequential for subsequent access to
and participation in valued social practices?
• Consequentiality is at the heart of a validity argument.
• What’s new here is that identity pathways, not
knowledge displays on tests, are at the center.
• Possible requirements
– Young people’s own pursuits drive the needs for what is
recognized, when, and by whom.
– Badging system that is both open and local (DYN
example).
– Badging system should help connect different settings for
learning institutionally.
A Germ of an Idea…
Connected Learning
Research Network