London Branch Seminar

Education without testing
Jan Bransen (Radboud University Nijmegen)

I shall argue in this session that testing has a number of relevant and useful functions in education, but that the use of testing to endorse decisions should not be one of them. Testing is best understood as an integral feature of ordinary cooperative interaction, and should not be isolated from that interaction to serve the legitimization of decisions.

Jan Bransen is Professor of Philosophy of Behavioral Science at Radboud University and Academic Leader of the Radboud Teaching and Learning Centre. He has published scholarly work on autonomy, personal identity, self-knowledge, love and practical rationality. A decade ago he shifted his focus and since then he mainly writes in Dutch for a wider audience. Don’t Be Fooled. A philosophy of common sense was published with Routledge in 2017, and his plea for a radical transformation of education was translated in 2021 as Homo Educandus and published in open access by Radboud University Press.

A short paper is attached here.

For further inquiries: Yuxin Su (yuxin.su.16@ucl.ac.uk).

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