Tests Only Measure Other Tests

I have always thought that there is something quite disturbing about testing in the context of education. It's probably because the testing system is used primarily to sort students rather than to develop a sense of whether they understand or know something. In the UK, a test is referred to as an exam which seems to denote better the idea of examining a student's understanding or knowledge of a particular idea. To examine seems a nobler and more useful goal than does to test.


Many years ago when i was a grad student I read somewhere that tests only measure other tests. At first glance this seems like a fairly innocuous statement but the more you think about it the more sense it makes. When I was teaching fourth grade in the UK in the early '70s we changed a reading test one year. The same reading test had been used throughout the school (and all the schools in the entire city of Bristol) for many years so it was decided to use a new test. When the new test results came in it was found that all the students in the city had gained two years in their reading age. Since reading instruction hadn't changed it must have been a much easier reading test but it still made everyone feel really good !!!!!

The same happens eery time you adopt a new test or  testing system such as SBAC. Very seldom re two tests exactly the same and more often than not the new test is more difficult than the old test. This is often done with the somewhat naive belief than making the test more difficult will improve instruction and make the students appear brighter. Usually this results in declining test scores and yet more blame placed upon the education system for falling standards.

But not so in Scotland where a maths test was given  that proved to be too difficult. Instead of blaming teachers and the education system, as we would undoubtedly have done here, the  Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) acknowledged the test was too difficult and adjusted the scores accordingly.

We cannot raise standards by making tests, or exams, more difficult. We must improve the way we teach and the way we motivate students to learn. 

Diane Ravitch Calls It Like It Is

One of the remarkable things about Diane Ravitch is that she has been a staunch advocate from both sides of the great abyss. The fact that she now supports genuine, authentic and principled education gives hope to many of us in the face of the tsunami of testing, "accountability" and political meddling that is at the heart of the dismantling of the system of  education as we know it. Her recent blogpost about the heavy hand of the Federal Government regarding testing in Vermont is both comprehensive and eloquent and serves as a dire warning to anyone interested in the salvation of  our education system as a place where children learn, grow, flourish and blossom as individuals within a caring society.

The impending, inevitable  public outcry of perceived declining standards illustrated in the soon-to-be-released SBAC scores will only serve to highlight the wisdom of Ravitch's words as teachers and the education system are subjected to yet more abuse from an ill-informed public that seizes upon the simple but misguided notion that increasing levels of evaluation will improve the quality of education.

One of my colleagues at SMC, Beth Peterson, quoted Gary Oldfield when responding to Ravitch's blogpost with this brilliant observation " Setting absurd standards and then announcing massive failures has undermined public support for public schools . . . We are dismantling public school systems whose problems are basically the problems of racial and economic polarization, segregation and economic disinvestment.” (Educational Researcher, August/September 2014, p.286).

The SBACS, the tests in English language arts and math, adopted by many States as the  compulsory evaluation tool for the new Common Core State Standards will be an  unmitigated disaster. They are difficult to administer, difficult to take by students, and are scored on the other side of the country in Washington State. Costing around $27 per student they will undoubtedly make someone financially rich and the rest of us who have to suffer them culturally poor.  

Perhaps parents should be asked to take the SBACS to see what their children are being subjected to.

   

Evaluation is not Assessment

Every so often something appears on my Facebook page that makes me stop and think, and then think some more. Then there's something that makes me change my thinking or reminds me of something wonderful in Education that we have, perhaps, lost sight of

This letter from a UK primary school headmistress to one of her students is something I just cannot stop thinking about and reminds me of how we used to focus on the whole child in the assessment process and not just test results. 

This letter is so wonderful on so many levels. I can imagine this school Principal knows every student as well as she knows Charlie. She probably also knows every student's strengths and challenges and knows who they are as individuals. I can also imagine that this wonderful example of assessment runs deep in the school, that all the teachers and everyone else in the school shares this same level of caring for the well-being of each and every student.

The letter also implicitly acknowledges that while it's important to hold schools and teachers accountable there is great folly in using test scores as the only form of accountability. Tests, especially those scored externally, thousands of miles away, by people, or more likely machines, that do not know the students who completed them, give us a narrow band of information about a strudents level of knowledge or understanding relative to a specific predetermined piece of content. The soon-to-be-mandatory SBAC tests, for example, cannot distinguish between a student's knowledge and understanding of the test material and the students linguistic of technology skills required for completing the test.

And no matter what the folks at ETS say about the SBACS they are not assessments, they are evaluations and must remain a small part of the assessment process.

Attributes and Assessment

All four of the student teachers I am currently supervising are in the same K - 2 school which makes for some interesting connections between the lessons I observe. The school, Allen Brook in Williston, Vermont, has just started using the Second Edition of the Bridges math program published by the Math Learning Center.  Last Friday, for example, I watched a super lesson on attributes presented by Erika in her second grade class. The focus of the lesson was to develop  students' understanding of the way we use attributes of objects to sort or classify them. This is one way the Bridges program introduces young children to the idea that maths has structure as identified in the seventh Math Practice Standard.  The way Erika did this was brilliant. She had the students describe a shape on a piece of card in terms of  three attributes, size,  shape and color. In other words, each card could be identified according to three different attributes. As the children described and identified the cards she held up Erika  had the students arrange them by attribute on the board. After several minutes there were two columns of cards but with  with cleverly designed gaps of missing cards. Erika then asked the students, for example, what should go here, pointing to one of the gaps. The students would look at the structure of the pattern of shapes and work out which card needed to go in the gap. The look on their faces when she held up the exact card they thought it should be was priceless. The amount of reasoning and thinking it took to identify say, a large, red rhombus, was amazing.

Later that day, I observed Caitlin in a Kindergarten class also presenting a lesson on attributes but this time there were only two attributes, shape and color. The other neat difference was that the children had to move around and form groups based on the attribute card they were holding. First they grouped by color and then they grouped by shape. Then, Caitlin had them group themselves by shape and color so that they really had to think about how who they should stand with. Developmentally, it was much more important for the kindergartners to be physically involved in forming the groups.

Last Friday I attended  a presentation about the new SBAC "assessments " designed to measure student achievement according to the Common Core Math Standards. Having assured the audience that the materials included in the SBACs were indeed assessments and not tests it was interesting to note how many times the speaker referred to them  as tests during the presentation; five times on one slide alone. The word 'assessment', as more and more academics are reminding us, is from the latin assidere or ad sedere, meaning 'to sit down beside'. There will be no-one sitting beside the students with the SBACS when hey are scored 3000 miles away.  Doesn't that make them tests?