fast feedback

I'm reading Stuart Yeh's book on rapid assessment of student learning via daily computer quizzes: Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment And Test Reform.

It's terrific, though it's also a case study in education school thought world-ery.

Example:

[F]unding for rapid assessment programs may enable schools to begin to address the challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act to improve student achievement without compromising educational quality.

Statements like this appear throughout the book, along with companion statements assuring readers that rapid assessment reduces skill and drill to the bare minimum, leaving maximum time for "critical thinking activities." The author has written an entire book about direct instruction, practice, and feedback: teacher teaches a lesson, then students do a bunch of problems and the computer scores their work pronto.

But 'drill' is bad.

Yeh is the person who showed that class size reduction was 124x less cost effective than rapid formative assessment.