For those interested in education innovation made possible by technology you must read Bill Tucker’s new report – Beyond the Bubble: Technology and the Future of Student Assessment. Bill is reframing the debate between two key education camps.
Bill’s key idea is that, ultimately, we don’t have to choose between accountability systems and instruction that addresses a broad array of skills and deep content. Because whether you are Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, or Linda Darling Hammond, you have common ground on one thing. .. our assessments can be radically improved.
Over the last eight years, education took major steps towards holding schools accountable and measuring their progress. But our actual assessments, for the most part, took a few steps back. We automated the most basic forms of assessment, and states stopped experiments in performance-based assessments designed to measure the higher-order thinking our kids need to succeed in the future.
Now that the FEDS, the teachers union, and the governors, ALL agree that we need national standards – this conversation about investing seriously in assessment innovation is extremely timely and relevant. My vote for how to use some of this stimulus!
For more discussion on this issue click here.
I agree that we need to use technology to improve assessment and make it more authentic, performance based and lifelong. We have been led away these past eight years from our natural inclination to assess the whole child’s educational progress by measuring student development in terms of human observation (social and emotional) as well as academic (both knowledge tests and performance-based skill outcomes such as writing, speaking and cooperative problem solving). A one dimensional assessment once a year does not provide even 25% of the data we need to accurately assess teaching and learning. Technology can provide the vehicle for innovation in assessment, but educators have to provide the ideas. I agree the time is ripe for this to happen (stimulus money, failure of NCLB to improve education, the now desperate need for our nation to create citizens who can read, write, compute, investigate, research, think, debate, solve problems, create, collaborate and innovate on a global scale).
By the way. I do not agree with the need for national standards to create an innovative and comprehensive student assessment system. Please show me where statewide learning standards have succeeded in improving student learning and then I will revisit my opinion. Schools are inherently local organizations and should remain that way. Standards breed mediocrity (e.g students will be proficient – what happened to mastery) and have stripped educators of any creativity or desire to provide anything other than an average education for all students. The history of public education in America suggests local control (funding, leadership, curriculum, teaching and community participation) mostly breeds successful schooling. It was in the latter half of the last century when local control eroded and statewide standards movements became the norm that schools began to fail.
Greg, I agree that statewide standards didnt lead to innovative assessments. But read the report.
The big issue for innovation in assessment is R and D and investment.
States usually had one or two testing poeple .. shocking when you consider what the stakes were.
What we need is investment and innovation in how we measure… bc what gets measured gets done. The more simplistic our measures the more simplistic our teaching.
Imagine if we could invest 200 million or more even in a couple of really powerful almost gamelike national assessments. How might that drive instructional practices if that was the test we were teaching to!