The testing trap

Check out Burks Oakley's, Burks on Learning podcast on the Sloan-C Quality "Pillars" for distance learning. The Sloan-C pillars (.pdf) provide an excellent rubric for evaluating the value of distance learning to an institution. Of the five pillars -- Access, Learning Effectiveness, Cost Effectiveness, Student Satisfaction and Faculty Satisfaction -- the issue of learning effectiveness...rather, measuring learning effectiveness, stirred my thinking. I have been fuming over the purpose of tests.

I heard an NPR recent story on NPR on how the Secretary of Education has formed a commission to consider standardized tests for US Colleges. Ugh! I thought college was the reward for putting up with tests through public education! The commission is headed by testing advocate Charles Miller and is reccomending a national database of measurable performance outcomes by US colleges. How can something as complex and varied as human learning, especially at a level when people are developing specialties, be captured in standardizes tests?

It is an approach advocated by some in the business community. And challenges they see are real. As IBM's Nicholas Donofrio said in a recent commission hearing (as reported in Inside Higher Ed):

Companies like IBM “have alternatives” if American higher education can’t do a better job producing technologically skilled graduates,” Donofrio said. “We want to see America continue to be great. But it’s naïve to think that” competitors like China and India “aren’t doing something better” as they ascend the economic ladder, he said.

Is that a threat or a promise he is making? Are standardized tests the fix? The challenge is real, but others like David Warlick are arguing for "shallow standards and deep learning." Writing about K-12, he argues:

Our students must leave school able to make themselves experts and able to teach themselves, becoming learners and relearners. Our current model does not do this. Currently, our process is [to] have a blueprint (the standards), and to usher our children through assembly lines, installing the elements of the blueprint, and then applying quality control at the end, making sure that every child knows the same things, thinks the same way, and solves problems in the same way.

Are we just too dumb to do it the right way or are those in power operating from the wrong moral framework? Consider that testing is not the same as assessment. Tests produce scores and these scores are being used to assess learning, not the learning itself. The moral issue arises with what we do with the scores. Currently we use scores to mete out punishment. If kids can fail, then so can teachers, schools districts, etc. and we punish those failures by withholding resources, thus guaranteeing further failure. I see it as part of the larger political agenda to defund the commons, an effort to make public education into another government social service that has to be shrunk and reformed until it no longer works.

Beware! The same people doing this to our public schools are the same peoople advocating college tests.

There are other assessment options and one gaininng currency is ePortfoilios, an online collection of representative student work. In fact, some faculty are building portfolios to prepare for tenure evaluations, etc. There are some pitfallls here too. I'll address those in another post.

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