What Are Critiques Of Standardized Tests & What Are Alternatives? is the “question of the week” at my Education Week Teacher column.
Please share your thoughts in the comments there….
What Are Critiques Of Standardized Tests & What Are Alternatives? is the “question of the week” at my Education Week Teacher column.
Please share your thoughts in the comments there….
Larry,
Every time someone advocates for the usual garbage we find on standardized, multiple-choice, machine-scored tests as THE “objective” source for meaningful data on “What is our children learning?” (sorry, I just channeled George W. Bush for a second), I simultaneously want to retch and try to decide if it’s worth the effort to attempt to show them how utterly flawed that viewpoint is. Of course, if you’re merely looking for cheap, dirty data that you can use as a political/economic club with which to bash teachers, destroy unions, privatize public schools for the purpose of making money from them and promoting business-friendly curricula or ram certain political and/or fundamentalist religious precepts down kids throats, while at the same time separating ‘wheat’ from ‘chaff’ for college admissions, then it’s hard to beat tests like the ACT and SAT. Michigan is one state that has chosen to adopt the former as its main assessment for NCLB purposes, and there are all sorts of insidious movements afoot here to privatize teachers, while we already have a completely anti-democratic bit of legislation in place that effectively does away with local government at the whim of our governor. Looked at from a big-picture perspective, these trends aren’t mere coincidence, despite the fact that the testing decision came from our former, supposedly progressive governor, Jennifer “Do Nothing” Granholm, while the latter two are products of the current right-winger-in-nerds-clothing governor, Rick “Trust Me, I’m Smarter Than You” Snyder. I’ve learned over the past decade that when it comes to education, political party is no indicator of having the slightest clue about or interest in real education.
Consider, if you will, a problem I recently tackled thanks to the ever-stimulating James Tanton, whose free YouTube videos put the drek of Sal “McDonalds” Khan’s so-called academy to shame. Tanton posed three questions about numbers of various types, one of which was to find the 1000th “repdigit” where a repdigit is defined as a natural number all of whose digits are identical. Thus, 1, 11, 333, etc. would be repdigits. I had successfully solved two related problems, and thought that this was by far the easiest of the three (the other two asked us to find the 1000th instance of two different kinds of numbers: palindromic numbers like 131 and 56765, and “repeatful numbers” like 1212 and 635635). I did get the latter two right without actually having to count 1000 numbers in either case, but my algorithm for finding the 1000th repdigit, which was completely correct in principle, led me to the wrong answer, not because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because I overlooked a simple issue in how I interpreted the results. When I heard from Jim that I was wrong, it took me about two seconds to realize just what my error had been and I quickly saw how to correct my thinking to arrive at the correct result.
Now, imagine how that would play out on a multiple-choice test. I would receive full marks for the other two questions, but would receive 0 points for the one I screwed up slightly. And were I unfortunate enough to have only been given that case and neither of the others, my total credit for that part of the test would be none at all. The machine would show that I didn’t understand, that my “teacher” had failed to teach me, and that my school was failing.
Of course, I exaggerate to make a point. Yet the fundamental fact is that if the goal of the high-stakes test advocates was to collect data on students that was actually useful for LEARNING, they’d never push the superiority of, much less the exclusive use of, multiple-choice tests.