Measuring Social Studies Achievement: A Matter of Values.

Questions as to whether measurement can provide a universally applicable set of criteria for making value judgments in the social sciences are raised. Four assumptions about education, experience, reality, and value formation were identified to provide a fuller reference point for social science educators when they are viewing current standardized measurement practices within the social science: (1) that there are two kinds of existence and two kinds of experience and that current measurement does not encompass the full range of existence and experience; (2) that human action involves decision-making processes stemming from the total experience of an individual and that these predispositions to act do not necessarily stem from learnings within a discipline, but stem from the values of individuals which have greater emotive effect; (3) that though a society may agree on universal goals and also agree upon the approach to the instruction necessary to bring about the desired goal, there is no assurance of the fulfillment of the goal; and (4) that implied in the process of education is a certain kind of relation--triadic (teacher, student, subject) that must be held constant in both time and location for universal criteria to be valid in measurement. The central theme of the paper suggests that if these four assumptions hold true, they greatly limit the possibility of measurement providing a universally applicable set of criteria for making value judgments in the social sciences. (Author/DB)