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Adapted from The Blind Men and the Elephant, an Udana parable attributed sometimes to Jainism or Buddhism:

ONCE UPON A TIME, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them there is an elephant in the village that day. Having no idea what an elephant is, they all went where the elephant was and touched the elephant.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg. “Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail. “Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant. “It is like a big hand fan,” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant. “It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant. “It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

As they argued, they got more and more agitated. Each kept insisting that he was right. Finally, a man who can see explained to them, “All of you are right. The reason each one of you are telling it differently because you touched a different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features that you all said.”

ATTENDED LESSON TWO on Evaluation Methods last night. A refrain and a recurring thought was: “What is Truth? Even the one who claims to use the most objective evaluation method can be and is subjective.”

It was like the familiar “Instructivism versus Constructivism” debate again, and yet somewhat different. Our facilitator Prof H. had been deliberately steering us towards the realization that like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, “we can at most try to move closer to the Truth (or ideal solution); but we can almost never say that we have arrived there”.

For example, all the evaluation methods available today for education management can largely be grouped within one of four paradigms: Empirical (Quantitative), Interpretative (Qualitative), Post-modern and Pragmatic (Eclectic). Every paradigm, even the pragmatic one, has its strengths and flaws. Thus, the need for triangulation, pragmatic “mix and match” according to context, and so on.

In addition, just as the communication and perception of truth depends a lot on the speaker’s ability and the listener’s receptivity, effective evaluation also depends a lot on the ability of the evaluator — to focus on the right issue(s), ask the right people pertinent questions, sieve out irrelevant information and finally make the right interpretations.

Dr T.’s introductory lesson on Instructional Design Models & Practices in the earlier week seemed to resonate with Prof H.’s second lesson.

For example, as Robert Mager and Peter Pipe put it in their book Analyzing Performance Problems, “People do things for the strangest reasons. For equally strange reasons, they also don’t do things…. If we label others as having poor attitude and lack of motivation, we are finger-pointing, naming a culprit and hinting at a solution instead of probing for the problem by asking, ‘Why is this so? What causes it?’ Similarly, we jump the gun if we look at inadequate performance and declare, ‘We’ve got a training problem.’ Again, this confuses problem and solution. Training isn’t a problem; it’s just one of the solutions used to solve problems that arise when people truly cannot do what is expected of them.

“The danger in leaping from apparent problem to apparent solution is that large amounts of time and money can be spent in throwing training at a problem that training cannot solve. Similarly, if you leap to a conclusion that someone’s attitude needs to be ‘fixed’ and that what it takes is ‘training’ and perhaps a ‘good talking to’, you can end up blue in the face and nothing much changed. You need to dig a little deeper…

“People don’t perform as desired for many reasons; for example,
(a) they don’t know what’s expected;
(b) they don’t have the tools, space, authority;
(c) they don’t get feedback about performance quality;
(d) they’re punished when they do it right;
(e) they’re rewarded when they do it wrong;
(f) they’re ignored whether they do it right or wrong; and
(g) they don’t know how to do it.”

So, as Dr T. suggested, the model answer in academic circles in most situations is: “It depends.”

(See also What Is Truth… II.)