Assessment and Analogies

In the springtime many a school’s fancy turns to assessment. Despite increasingly agreeable weather and spring colors, assessment season becomes a nerve-wracking time for many students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

The high stakes nature of our current assessment process has fostered a sharp competitive climate that does much to hamper the real purpose of education – and that doesn’t need to be the case.

Let’s talk analogies to create some perspective.

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Elmer Smith wrote a piece some years ago about a Philadelphia high school student who received good grades, was a highly competitive chess player, and was by all personal accounts a hard-working and dedicated learner. However, his standardized test scores were fairly low, and as a result he found his choices for higher education were limited. Smith used the metaphor that the test results were a single still shot in the movie of the young man’s life – imagine deciding on an Academy Award based on a still. (While I contacted Smith some years ago and got his permission to use the analogy in a presentation I was doing, I never thought to archive the column – my regrets.)

On April 1, 2008, GE stock closed at $38.43. Should you base your decision on the quality of that company based on that day’s performance? Wouldn’t it be better to also consider that two weeks later it closed at $31.98, and two days ago it closed at $32.81? Looking at ongoing data gives investors a far better chance to make good decisions.

Nobody would be satisfied if their doctor just took their temperature and proclaimed them healthy. We would want to share our symptoms, to use information like blood pressure and heart rate, and maybe have blood drawn before feeling confident in the clean bill of health.

If you served on a jury, a single eyewitness account of a crime would make a verdict far more tenuous than one made with multiple eyewitness accounts, physical evidence like fingerprints, and surveillance video.

While it may be too strong to say we are prosecuting students with only a single form of evidence, the high stakes assessment model has overstepped its limits. Many educators and parents know that an ongoing diagnostic-prescriptive model based on daily observation and ongoing authentic assessments better serve students, yet every year many in the process become as skittish as Pennsylvania deer in late November.

Please refer to http://www.fairtest.org/ for a more cogent case against our current assessment model.