5.5 - 7) Make Sure What We Value is What We Count and 8) Demonstrate Mastery of Content by Performance, not Testing

Welcome back. It's Week 5, Segment 4. Today we're going to be talking about assessment. And before I even talk about the future of assessment, we're going to talk about the past of assessment. And this is now in the United States, but I know it's had influence worldwide. And this is the idea of standardized testing.

In the history section of this course, we talked about Frederick Kelly and the invention of the multiple choice test. All of our emphasis on standardization and standardized testing was codified in the United States in 2002 when Congress accepted America's, actually first, national educational policy. There's a policy called "No Child Left Behind". It was endorsed by Senator Edward Kennedy and President George Bush. So it was a bipartisan program that was designed to standardize and raise the quality nationally of K-12 education-- public K-12 education.

The important thing to remember is that, in 2002, when these two men got together to support "No Child Left Behind", it wasn't because they wanted to hurt education. It was rather they thought that there should be a floor, and that, no matter where you lived, you should be able to have just some basic, basic features of your education guaranteed by our society. That's not a bad thing, but the unfortunate part is the method has taken over, and now the most important feature of "No Child Left Behind" is that if your class and your school fails the required standardized end-of-grade test, it can either be closed down or privatized. That's a pretty hideous thing to do to a school system; and I mean the word hideous. To think that failing an exam should result, not in learning how to make it better-- which is the method that we've been talking about here-- but should result in the closing of the school or the corporatizing and the privatizing, even though we don't have much evidence that corporatizing and privatizing education leads to better education. It's a severe penalty.

In many states now, if your students do badly on standardized tests, you as a teacher can have your salary penalized; that's also true in some other countries around the world. That's a very backwards idea, and what it leads to is the idea what is called teaching to the test. In other words, if you know there's a severe, extrinsic, external punishment if your students do badly on a test, you no longer are worried about knowledge and inspiration and learning. You're learning about good test scores and how to raise those test scores. So you're teaching content purposely designed for the test.

This is bad on so many levels, I can hardly figure out where to begin. One of the most basic ones is we know that the end-of-grade tests that are now done in K-12 public schools only cover about 20 percent of the content for a course. So even if they were brilliant tests-- and it's very, very hard to write a good test; I'm having to do it for this class, I'm writing multiple choice questions tests for this MOOC and so I'm very modest about the fact that it's very hard to write a good test-- and not many people know how to write a good test. And most of the tests that are being used as part of our national educational testing are not good tests: they often have ambiguity, they don't have exclusive answers, they're very confusing. But the biggest problem, is they don't even really cover the content of the course. So on the most basic, basic level, there's a mismatch between our ideals for learning and the tests we're using to measure that learning.

So the way I phrase it is we have to make sure-- and this is the point number 7 in changing the paradigms of higher, of education--

[7. Ensure that what we value is what we count]
We have to make sure that what we value is what we count. If these end-of-grade tests don't even measure content, what good are they? Also, they're a form of testing that's called summative testing. That means the testing itself is removed from the learning process. They have the testing at the end of the process and sometimes not even directly related. The best kind of testing is formative testing, where the testing constantly is helping you test yourself so that you can learn better. Think about it in practical terms: if you're going to be learning how to play tennis, you want a test that's perfectly geared to the learning of tennis and that is happening constantly so it helps you improve your tennis game then so you can feel that victory; you can feel that success; and build on it. If you're reading about tennis from a book, or you're learning tennis but then take a test from a book at the end, that's not a very successful way of measuring whether you do or do not know how to play tennis. And we know that in our every day lives; we somehow don't know that in our educational system.

There's a cartoon that's very, very clever. And the legend of that, the tag line, is for a fair selection, everybody has to take the same test: "Please climb that tree." And in the cartoon are pictured a bird, a monkey, a elephant, a penguin, a seal, a fish, and a dog. The idea behind "No Child Left Behind" and all standardized testing, going all the way back to Frederick Kelly in 1914, is that, if you give everybody the same test, it's fair. Is it? Or is it more like asking the penguin, the monkey, the bird, the elephant, the fish, the seal, and the dog to all climb the same tree. We know in everyday life that people have a tremendous range of skills. Standardized testing says those skills don't really matter; what matters is how well you do in one kind of thinking on one kind of test. For me, the biggest single tragedy of standardized testing is, it's fabulous to have a way to test the monkey running up the tree, but to think the penguin is deficient, or even worse, learning-disabled, because a penguin can't climb the tree is pretty ridiculous because we know, if the test were swimming and being able to navigate long distances in the sea and come back to a place without a map, that the penguin would do awfully well; and I'm not sure the monkey would do so well. So the whole point of that cartoon is actually, it's funny, but it's also profound. We have to think about what we value, and we have to make sure the form of test helps to motivate learning, but also truly, truly does test what we value so it makes what we value a stronger conviction-- this goes back to Dewey and Piaget and Vygotsky again-- stronger, not weaker. There's relevance in a one-to-one relationship between the things we want us to learn-- our kids our students to learn-- and the way that we test those things so that the testing is a help, not a hindrance, or not something exclusionary that tells us we're disabled or stupid or not productive contributors to society just because our particular skill set isn't the skill set that is offered in that standardized test.

The 8th point of changing the paradigms of higher education is another assessment point:
[8. Demonstrate Mastery of Content through Performance, not Standardized Testing]
Some years ago when I was writing Now You See It, I went and visited lots and lots of schools and talked to teachers about end-of-grade testing. Testing is a chapter in Now You See It, which is available to you for free on this website, called "How We Measure"; and I'm very concerned about this idea of how we measure. And I interviewed teachers about what they felt about standardized testing. To a person, they hated it, and, it was said most eloquently to me by a principal at a local junior high school, who said in the month before it's time to give the end-of-grade test, everything stops, and instead, you can just feel the tension in the air, and everybody concentrates on how to prepare students-- again-- not for learning, but how to do well on the tests. He says, at that point, they know stomach aches go up, headaches go up. He says, during that month, when everyone is preparing for the end-of-grade tests, everybody gets sick: the parents, the kids, the teachers-- he said, "And I've got a stomachache myself". But what he meant by that was the anxiety is so high to do well on the test that learning goes out the window.

In the Now You See It chapter, I propose I make a modest proposal in the swifty incense. It's something I know is not going to happen, but it's a great thought experiment. And that is, since everybody I talk to, every teacher said they spend a good month doing nothing, nothing but teaching to the test. But if we, even in half the schools as an experiment, abolish the end-of-grade testing but kept that month and made a different kind of test of what students have learned. So instead of having students taking multiple choice tests, what if kids got together to think about ways and could take everything they learned that year-- all the different things they learned that year-- and instead of reducing them to a test, figured out a way that it could do good in society. Figure out a game plan, a project they could do where they could actually use their learning in the world at large, and to make some kind of change in the world.

That may sound crazy and unrealistic, but you'll see on the website, two interviews-- one by Connie Yowell, who's the director of education for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and one by Sheryl Grant, who is the director of social networking for our own program, HASTAC, and the digital media and learning and competitions-- Connie directs and is the goddess-- the founding figure of the Digital Media and Learning Initiative, which is looking at all the kinds of ways we can learn for social engagement, and that learning itself can engage us socially, including those kids who have been totally forgotten, excluded or dropped out of traditional learning. I know, in that interview, we're going to find out lots from Connie about what her thinking was in devising this initiative. It's very, very much based on this idea of demonstrating mastery of content through performance, through action, through engagement, not through testing.

The interview by Sheryl Grant is about something very interesting that we've done in the last couple of years, which is badging and the idea that, through badging, we can come up with a different way of giving certification to a whole array of accomplishments that are not now tested for. So that penguin can say, "Wait, wait, wait: I get a badge in swimming underwater because I'm great at it. I don't care that the money can climb the tree. I want a badge for swimming underwater, and swimming underwater is a great skill." Badging is a way of acknowledging all of those skills that our traditional education system do not acknowledge. Particularly, we're interested in the social justice aspect of that. What skills do kids growing up poor in survival conditions have to learn to master and negotiate their world. Those are great entrepreneurial, creative, inventive, important skills. It's horrible that they have to be in that situation, but in that situation, they have learned things that most middle class or upper class kids never have to encounter. How do we reward that incredible gift in a way that maybe their future won't be governed by poverty? How do we find a way to credential the things they have learned that can translate into possible future careers? I know that's idealistic, but we're finding it's happening. It's idealistic, and yet, fortunately, through the Digital Media and Learning and Badging competitions, we've actually been able to identify kids for whom badging has been transformative.

Throughout this entire course, I've been interviewing lots of exciting people from all walks of life and all ages, and I end my interviews with one question: "Who's your favorite teacher?" I ask people to tell who their favorite teacher was and why. What's interesting to me-- and this is perhaps a summation of everything we've been doing in this week's lessons in talking about pedagogy and talking about assessment-- not one person has said, I loved Ms. Smith, my 7th grade teacher, because she helped me get an A on my test. People remember the teachers that inspire them, people remember the teachers that teach them how to learn. People remember the teachers that give them something that makes them realize, my penguin skills of swimming underwater are fabulous, important, crucial skills in the world. It doesn't matter how I did on that test; I have a skill that makes me special in the world. People remember the tools of learning that helped change their lives. This is important because, over and over again, when I talk to people about transforming education, they say, "Well, how will we cover all the content?" "How will I cover everything on my syllabus?" Content is a fiction. I mean that. Content is a fiction, in the sense that we know knowledge is constantly changing. We can teach everything we think we know in a semester-- which of course, that alone is a fiction, it's impossible-- we can teach everything we think should be taught in a semester, and in the world we live in now of change, and in 4 or 5 years, that content might be out of date. You can never teach all the content somebody's going to need to know for the rest of their lives. It's impossible. It's a fiction. It's futile. What you can teach is the tools that help people take the methods of learning. The confidence in their own abilities is learning. The self-confidence that they do have skills, that they can thrive, that they can be tested and win, and apply those to the rest of their lives. That, to me, in a nutshell, is the future of learning.

Thank you. See you next time.