Assessing Student Learning

There is a Facebook post running the circuit this week in which Arthur Costa, Emeritus Professor at California State University Sacramento (one of my alma maters) is quoted as saying,

“What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we taught what isn’t worth learning.”

Costa is known for coauthoring Habits of Mind: A Developmental Series in 2000, which has been a guide for some who believe the 16 skills or habits he describes will result in positive outcomes for individuals and society. For more about Costa, check out these sites:

http://www.chsvt.org/wdp/Habits_of_Mind.pdf

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108008/chapters/Describing-the-Habits-of-Mind.aspx

Costa seems to me to have a valid point. Having been in the field of education 20 years, I have seen our nation’s ongoing struggles with meaningful assessment of student achievement.

As an idealistic student teacher in 1993, I was enthusiastic about the gains we would all make as we all embrace “authentic assessment” through ongoing portfolios that would follow students through their educational careers. Educators would work together to increase our objectivity as we scored portfolios with rubrics, and we would develop a truly accurate picture of each child’s strengths and weaknesses of students, as well as their progress toward worthwhile goals. Teachers and schools would be able to review the portfolio and take each child forward from his or her current level.  We were changing the world, almost as significantly as the flower children of the ‘60s! But then I was faced with reality…

Teachers had neither training nor time to create or maintain gigantic folders full of student work. Portfolios would literally be huge file folders full of paper, as we were not yet in the Digital Age. 

Even if we wanted to try some authentic assessments, we were still required to prepare our students for statewide, standardized assessments. Shortly thereafter, our nation was saddled with No Child Left Behind, and any efforts to find students’ talents were abandoned as we prepared them all for more and more objective, standardized testing.

And here we are now, with NCLB slinking away into the shadows and computer servers bursting with data, and the possibility of the movie Idiocracy becoming our reality haunts me. 

We are experts at taking tests now, as evidenced by the multitude of quizzes on Facebook: Which Disney princess are you? What’s your true nationality? What is the title of your future autobiography?

But have those tests truly reflected student learning? Perhaps… It appears that as a whole, our nation has learned very few effective life skills over the past 20 years. We need “life hacks” just to figure out how to cross out errors and organize keys.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/100-life-hacks-that-make-life-easier.html

Our academic knowledge is abysmal, as evidenced by the fact that parents need special math classes to help their first graders with homework.

http://www.oakdale.k12.ca.us/ENY_Hmwk_Intro_Math

http://commoncore.org/parents

More importantly, has this focus on objective, standardized testing IMPROVED our learning? Judging by the fact that everyone is emphasizing the four Cs in 21^st century learning, I would say we have regressed. We are now shouting from the rooftops the need for communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity… presumably because we got so very far away from them while we busily bubbled in test sheets.