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(crossposted in a related discussion yesterday at www.dailykos.com):

IMO the discussion around standards and assessment must move to a point where we acknowledge the fundamental, fatal flaw in our assessment system:

what is easy to measure and easy to score is not necessarily what is important.

Picture any academic high-stakes assessment with which you are familiar. You're probably picturing a selected response (multiple choice) assessment. Such assessments are an economical way to assess knowledge. We use them because they are cheaper to administer and to score. We get more numbers back out of them--and the scores we get back are more reliable than, say, scores on essay exams, because there is no subjectivity required on the part of the scorer.

The problem I have with the elevation of any such test is it wrongly ascribes too much importance to a very small subset of the kind of skills and abilities that I hope our students are able to master. If we elevate some NAEP-like test to such importance, as we seem to be moving to do, I fear the tremendous negative washback effect in classrooms as we continue to focus our attention only on students' ability to perform a very narrow subset of more routine tasks (focusing on the what of factual recall or routine computation, rather than the why of applied learning).

I find that when we put so much importance on such tests, staring at the results of the same kinds of measures seventeen different ways, we are like the man standing on a street corner looking at the pavement. When asked what he was doing, the man replied, pointing to his left, "I lost a ten dollar bill a block away from here, and I'm looking for it." When asked why he was looking a block away, he replied, "The light's better over here."

We have a deep desire to continue to improve education for our children. But I fear that we're spending too much time scrutinizing the ground a block away--because the light's better over here.

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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