Leading the Way
You’ve heard me say that high quality assessment should be leading the way in education. It seems like a reasonable idea: Start with the outcomes in the forefront and then build rearward. It’s like building a house, you have the blueprint and architect’s rendering and each step in construction leads towards this final vision. But, instead, in education we act as if we’re taking a trip to Home Depot to buy a tool because something in the house needs to be fixed. If we’re not sure what tool to get, it’s easy to buy the wrong one.
In education assessment has been confused with standardized testing and now standardized testing is leading the cart rather than following best practices in teaching and learning. It’s also contracting the array of college and career readiness skills and knowledge that students need.
Perhaps what I should have been saying is that while standards and targets are a starting point, there’s more complexity in getting to the ending point. Students need to explicitly know the success criteria and the strategies for reaching them. Through formative feedback students get the support they need to be successful.
Assessments should consider growth in learning that takes place from the starting line to the final test. The idea that every child will be 100% proficient at reaching every target is not sustainable. It’s like saying that every person in this country will earn enough to buy a Tesla Model S or be a quantum physicist. It’s a beautiful theory but an unrealistic policy. Quality assessment every day in every classroom will lead in the right direction. Lockstep annual tests will not assure that every student will graduate prepared for this increasingly complex world.
posted by Assessment Network @ 2:13 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
I have to completely agree with your statement that the new Common Core of Standards can be a starting point for proficiency, but it is unrealistic to think every child is capable of obtaining 100% proficiency in all subjects. If they could, that would mean we would have country of geniuses, where everyone excelled at every thing and we know that isn’t the case. There are students who excel at art, but not English. Or they excel at English, but not math and vice versa. And that should be okay. Yes, there should be a minimum literacy standard. Having a literate and knowledgeable citizenry was also a goal of the Founding Fathers. They felt this was necessary in order to protect and maintain our Democratic Republic. So then how should educational success be defined?
John Dewey published, The Child and the Curriculum, where he discusses two major and conflicting schools of thought on pedagogy in the classroom. The first focuses solely on gaining content knowledge and leaves the student as a passive, inactive learner. The second was “child-centered” pedagogy which relied on the student as the driving force in their own education. He believed that this method minimized the importance of content and the role of the teacher as an educator. Dewey believed there should be a balance between teaching the content knowledge and the interest and experience of the student. He stated that for education to be most effective, subject material must be presented in such a way the student is able to connect it to some prior knowledge or experience. This belief would be echoed by Piaget in his “Theory of Cognitive Development”. From this I gather that “lockstep” standardized testing requires focusing on content knowledge acquisition, which is again assuming all children learn at the same pace.
John Dewey was called a “progressive educator.” Progressive education is defined as 1). Respect for diversity, meaning that each individual should be recognized for his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs, and cultural identity, and (2). the development of critical, socially engaged intelligence, which enables individuals to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative effort to achieve a common good (http://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html). This I believe is more aligned with what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they were attempting to set up the first public school systems (The American People and Their Education, A social History, Altenbaugh). But they too recognized there are all different levels of intelligence. Progressive education also recognizes that children are individuals and should be treated as such. Standardized testing takes away the individual success of each student. Children are not like a commodity where if the raw product doesn’t “fit” you can reject it. Children are individuals and assessing each student from the time they enter school on their individual growth would give a truer picture of the child’s capabilities and proficiencies in each subject area. It would give each student an opportunity to reach their full potential as their strengths and weaknesses would be identified and addressed accordingly. I think true educational success is when each child learns to their maximum capability as demonstrated by growth through ongoing assessments.
Kathy C.
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