Many of us, educators, students, parents, and health experts, have begun to question the purpose of assessment, in light of the growing reliance and investment the American education system places in frequent standardized testing. In our podcast myself and two other public school educators discussed the nature and purpose of assessment, then and now, and how we think it should look in the future. Here we're going to give ten tips on how to start changing the oppressive and exploitative nature of testing we current operate under.
This one may seem redundant because if you're looking for ways to change assessment, you likely already know what you'd like to change it too. But even if you know what you believe the role of assessment to be, it should definitely be a community discussion. Your perspective as an educator is valuable, but so is the insight of everyone else assessment effects, from the students who have to take them to the administrators who have to report the data. Make sure everyone's needs are being heard and met before you begin to enact change.
Assessment hasn't always had a profit motive like it does today. It's looked very different over time, and under different forms of governance and economic systems, and understanding the different ways assessment can exist is an important step in imagining new solutions.
How to Fix a Broken Education System
Just like assessment has changed over time, the forms of assessment and its purposes has varied greatly between cultures and societies. For example in India one of the most successful schools for disadvantaged youth has a student driven curriculum, where students choose their own interests and are assessed based on goals they set for themselves.
7 Different Types of Assessment
There are many different types of assessments, and they all have different purposes. For example you might be familiar with norm based assessments, comparing a student to the class, state, or national average, but you can also use ipsative testing, designed to compare the progress of one student over a time period.
Better Ways to Measure Student Progress
If the purpose of assessment is to learn, and failure is an intrinsic part of learning, why are we penalizing students for failing but having the courage to try again? Giving students unlimited attempts to retry assessment shows them that perseverance is rewarded and perfection is not expected of anyone, lessons that much better reflect the real world than having one shot and then being punished if you fail. It also better incentivizes the student to try again, and actually learn the material.
4 Strategies for Implementing Standards-Based Learning
The author of this article points out how many great ideas in education never get off the ground because they aren't introduced correctly. Change can be scary and uncomfortable, so it's vital to make sure everyone finds a common agreement, perhaps something like centering students' wellbeing, and then build from there. This process is slow, but ensures there's no resentment or reservations within the community meant to be benefiting.
Standardized testing was originally developed to measure 'potential' intelligence, a tactic borne straight out the eugenics movement and with ties to white supremacy, and are still tailored to male, neurotypical, upper class people. In fact, any attempt at defining what is universally valuable knowledge will eventually end up only reflecting one's own cultural and personal biases. Rather, start asking students what goals they want to accomplish. Find out how they want to interact with the world, and allow them to define what is useful.
Ultimately, many people believe on some level, public education exists largely to prepare the youth to enter society as individuals. Standardized testing serves as a classist, ableist, and often racist means segregating those with certain abilities or means from those without, and is sustained by a similar economic model. As long as the society they are entering rewards competition over cooperation, greed, and a reality where innovation can be suppressed by monopolies, we all compete for the basic necessities, and your options are a certain career and debt or potentially not earning enough to survive, or live comfortably, there is no point in pretending we can radically change assessment and still adequately prepare them for a cut-throat capitalist world. Therefore it's vital to get active in your community, and apply these same principles of questioning the purpose, function, and alternatives of assessment to existing structures, like the school to prison pipeline, or for profit education. If we create a world where cooperation and innovation and diversity are valued, we won't have to worry about training our students to have the select skills and resources needed to survive, and can focus on education.
Better Ways to Measure Student Progress
Just like there is a wide range of learning styles and teaching styles, there are many different types of assessment. Once your community has an agreed upon range of assessments to use, let your students choose the ones that suit them as individuals, to get the most accurate gauge of their skills.
Assessment Fails to Prioritize Learning
Assessment is good as a tool to gauge where you student is at, where they want to go, and what they need to work on to get there, but the more time you spend assess, the less time your student spends learning and the more time they spend stressed, and the more time you spend grading, or not working on teaching or one on one with students. No matter how well adapted the assessment is for your student or environment, there's no practical benefit in continuously testing students, and quite a bit of harm that can be done in terms of emotional and mental health. Limit assessments as best you can to only what's needed, and it's totally okay if finding that balance is difficult, or different for different students.
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