[This is the year of addressing unidimensionality.Here is this month’s installment.]
Unidimensionality can feel good. It is a simplifying assumption that can make a complex set of data or concepts far easier to digest and make sense of.
An inevitable part of becoming expert in anything is the realization that things are more complex than one had realized previously. Potters think about the many qualities of the clay they work with that can contribute to the overall quality of the clay, and they understand that that question of overall quality is really more context- and goal-specific. That is, it is not really ever about quality, but rather about qualities. The same is true for professional chefs and their knives, because a different knives offer a different balance of qualities. This is true for inputs and true for outputs. It is certainly true for the subjects of educational assessment. The more expert you are, the more dimensions you see and factor into account.
But not everyone has the expertise to recognize all those dimensions. Perhaps more importantly, not everyone has the expertise to process and consider what all of those dimensions mean in the context of each other. It is simply information overload—again and again and again.
Most of us have some area in which we are expert or real connoisseurs. There is something that we care enough about to have devoted the ability to comfortably take in and make sense of a large amount of information. We understand what it means and have the schemas to process it together for our various purposes. But this contextual expertise does not make it so easy or comfortable to take in complex information of other sorts.
And so, we resort to simplifying assumptions when working outside of our own areas of expertise. In part, this saves us time. In part, it saves of aggravation and frustration. But mostly, it enables us to make some sense of the complexity, as opposed to simply being overwhelmed or paralyzed.
So, what some people see is a ridiculous oversimplification, others see as a necessary simplification. For some, it turns the apparent chaos into something intellectually manageable, and that feels good. Flattening out details, simplifying, reducing complexing are all coping strategies for the overwhelmed, and therefore they feel good—even necessary.
Well, that’s one perspective.
To experts, to people who have the schemas and experience to have a grip on the complexity of the many factors and various dimension of the situation, unidimensionality is frustrating in a very different way. It is not merely a simplification, but rather the greatest oversimplification possible—reducing everything to just one dimension. It looks like willful ignorance. It can feel like an attack on one’s values and expertise. It’s the frustration of knowing that an approach is usually going to produce wrong answers, and just get lucky every now and again.
To some, it offers there relief of being able to produce any answers at all, and to others it offers the frustration of knowing the answers it offers will usually miss the point.
To an educator or parent, it is important to know which things a student is good or bad at, and perhaps how good or bad. Companies do not hire people based on GPAs (i.e., grade point averages) or WAR (i.e., Wins Above Replacement), as they care which knowledge, skills and abilities job candidates have. Doctors do not make treatment decisions based on one simplified overall health score. No one whom we trust to make important decisions for us or our loved ones does so based on one unidimensional overall scale—and when we asked them for advice or to explain, we do not want to hear “Well, because the overall score of everything is [x], you should do [blah blah blah].” Rather, we want to understand more than that, and we want to decision to be based on greater understanding than that.
So, what does unidimensionality feel like? Well, at first and to non-experts, it feels good. It feels like the solution to frustration. But to experts or to those invested in the quality of a decisions or outcome, it feels even more deeply frustrating.