3-D Student Evaluations: Testing, Assessments, and Learning Goals

This is a difficult time for educators to embrace the vocation of teaching.  It's not difficult because there is a lack of passion or desire among the professionals working in the field.  The challenge is the result of shifting paradigms that move like the sands of the Sahara searching for some anchor to attach and expectations that bounce around like an onside kicked football in a political arena that looks only to blame someone for the shortcomings of an entire system.  Assessment has become a dirty word to many professionals in education.  It suggests for some, a means to separate wheat from shaft, winners from losers,  the good from the bad. Testing is a bad thing used by the politicians and administrators to tell us how bad our teachers perform, and how poor our schools compare to the rest of the world.   Learning Goals and Backwards design imply the stifling of creativity and is a paradigm that can only be accomplished in lecture halls by disengaged students.

A recent professional development survey of my staff revealed that of 100 teachers not a single one indicated that assessment was their number 1 interest for future professional development.  ZERO!  It's important to note that the survey asked about assessment not testing.  My teacher's know it's important but who needs another reminder about the big high stakes event at the end of the year. We work hard to focus on the results as opportunities for curriculum evaluation rather than good teacher/bad teacher.  But, for many educators working in this high stakes testing environment, I'm afraid that assessment has become synonymous with testing.  Testing has become a BAD thing.  What I have learned about testing and assessment is that both are critical to effective education.  The problem is when either of these tools are used inappropriately or are used without balance they are ineffective and misleading. 

Assessment is broad term that can take many forms in a classroom.  It might be the observation of a students  creative designs posted on a webpage about a particular area of study. A puzzled look offers one assessment, while another comes from an essay. It could be the evaluation of a students interaction during a classroom discussion or even the evaluation of a students performance on a quiz.  It's an evaluation or quantification of a students progress towards a goal.  It doesn't stifle creativity, it doesn't demoralize a students self-esteem, and it doesn't create unmotivated students.  It's OK to have learning goals and to work towards achieving them.

These formal and informal assessments or evaluations serve the purpose of providing feedback to both the student and the teacher in terms of progress towards the learning goals.  This feedback should be used to provide and prescribe alternate experiences for the student, if needed, to meet the goals.  Using assessments in this manner means recognizing that some kids will get to the end on a completely different highway of thought.  But, in the the end, they will have accomplished the goal.  These evaluations are taking place all the time during instruction.  The great teacher uses them in combining the art and science of teaching.

Testing, whether the unit exam or the state standardized exam are both formal assessments.  They provide a sampling of the learning that has taken place.  It generally comes at the end of a learning activity and provides a sort of post mortem.  I say sort of because the formal assessment provides only a sampling of what has been learned and only single viewpoint.  It is difficult to evaluate a students performance of mastery based on this single perspective.  This is where testing begins to develop the bad rap.  The results, in recent years, have come to be viewed as a single measure of mastery.  I taught the lesson, Johnny failed the exam, therefore Johnny must not have learned the lesson... "F".  As educators we blame the politicians.  But we created this system and based our entire grading structure on it.  The politicians took an unauthentic assessment system that we created and used it to measure us, the way we have been measuring our kids. Testing has become viewed as the X-ray for what must be ailing schools.

An assessment system needs to use both formal and informal evaluations that are mixed into the learning process as both formative and summative assessments.  We need to embrace assessment as a tool for learning. Formal testing is only a tool to provide a partial measure of mastery, but alone it doesn't define mastery.  The current view of assessment is that of a tool all right.  It's an Axe at the end of the lesson to chop the hands off the students that didn't learn the lessons and stole valuable class time with divergent ideas and learning styles.  Testing is viewed as a single definitive measure that comes at the end.  I don't think educators believe this and I know that students don't believe it.  But it's easy.  That is where the challenge is for educators. We need to create an assessment system of measures and evaluations that provide three dimensional pictures of student learning.

Three dimensional systems of assessment would use data from informal observations, learning activities, class discussions, student questions, and yes, formal tests -even standardized tests.  All of these things combined would create an overall evaluation of a students mastery of learning outcomes.  Academia acknowledged a long time ago that quantitative research could not provide all the answers.  Qualitative research was developed to help provide a clearer picture to questions and inquiries that could not be accurately quantified with surveys and tests.  Like this, a three dimensional assessment system needs to be defined and implemented that provides answers to those inquiries about student learning that can not be quantified simply by testing.