Training and Education are not the same thing. When designing assessments, it is important for teachers to understand the difference between the two. Training is teaching a skill, which usually involves motor skills and contains a complex set of actions or activity. For example, making pottery is a skill. This is a skill that can be learned, but takes time to hone and perfect. Education, on the other hand involves more of the process of thinking and reasoning. Students in an educational program will learn about broad topics that will allow them to problem solve and apply their knowledge in new situations. When in an educational program, students study only a small portion of the whole idea in order to form a foundation with which to draw from when placed in real world situations that require them to use the knowledge gained. In real life and in the classroom, the line between the two is sometimes blurred. An excellent example can be found in a letter to the editor of National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Spring 2000, p. 46 from Robert H. Essenhigh of the Ohio State University which is reproduced at this website: http://www.uamont.edu/facultyweb/gulledge/Articles/Education%20versus%20Training%20.pdf. In the letter Mr. Essenhigh states: “The difference? It's the difference between know how and know why. It's the difference between, say, being trained as a pilot to fly a plane and being educated as an aeronautical engineer and knowing why the plane flies, and then being able to improve its design so that it will fly better. Clearly both are necessary, so this is not putting down the Know-How person; if I am flying from here to there I want to be in the plane with a trained pilot (though if the pilot knows the Why as well, then all the better, particularly in an emergency).”
An excellent example of how the two can be confused happens in the classroom with teaching reading. Many have asked if reading is a skill or not? If it is a skill, students can be trained to read. If it involves education, then a different approach is required. Sounding out words is a skill that can be taught (known as decoding in educational circles) even though abstract concepts such as random symbols being attached to specific sounds are involved. However, being able to sound out and read words doesn’t guarantee that someone will understand the words they are reading. Since reading involves both decoding and comprehension/understanding, we can say that it also involves education. Students must be taught the skill of reading and the more complex concepts behind the skill in order to effectively read.
Training and education each require a different approach to assessment. If we are training, we will need to make sure we assess all critical skills for the complex performance the training is supposed to teach. Otherwise, we can’t be sure the person being trained will be successful when performing the skill. This would be very bad in certain situations, such as the pilot analogy used above. A task analysis must be done to determine all of the parts of the skill in order to be able to teach and assess them. If the content represents education instead of training, a broader base of knowledge will be the topic of our lessons. Basically, training and education differ in that training teaches us to perform a complex task that usually involves motor skills whereas education helps us to know how to think about things, how to problem solve, how to understand the why behind things. Since education is so broad, only a portion of the whole can be learned and then, only a small part of what is learned can be assessed. The reading analogy is a good example here, again. We can educate students to think about what they have read and make connections and evaluations on the material which they can then apply in future readings outside of the classroom. However, we could never possibly imagine all the different types of situations they might encounter when reading outside the classroom or the many different connections or evaluations they may make in those future activities. Neither can we assess those many and varied future situations. Instead, we must narrow our focus and decide specifically what to teach and assess based on our focus. For example, we might narrow our focus to understanding and comparing poetry. Then, we would decide the important concepts about poetry which need to be taught and assessed.
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