Blog # 8: Rethinking Assessment and Educational Reform

Priorities

Ask the majority of Americans how they think their favorite sports team should improve their defense or offense and you’ll receive detailed analysis of past performance, current team status, statistical analysis, suggested improvements and predictions correlating outcome with or without said improvements. Similar detailed and analytical discussions are modeled daily by media outlets in relation to “star” status, cosmetics and fashion, automobiles, and commercialized food items. Awash with sound bites, blaring advertisements and dedication supported by like minded peers our attention is drawn to what our public is told they should desire, what will help them improve their lives. The advertisers most successful are most often those making “personal connections” with the best placement, best design and coincidentally the most funding.

Perhaps this is why issues regarding education reform and the environment often are overlooked by the media and pubic. Who is writing the press release, sponsoring the selling tour, and designing the campaign? Education entities are facing a crisis in silence. Schools as they are currently designed are not able to adapt their philosophies and concurrent methods rapidly enough to assist their charges with appropriate critical thinking skills. Students in today’s day-and-age must to acquire and adapt new knowledge and skills to wade through the flood of information (accurate and not). This is a recognized concern in the field of education but few in the general public realize the impact on their daily lives. Thus the issue slowly slides away with the undertow caused by the overlapping flow of popular trends.

Educational standards are being designed to ensure a common learning and content background. Unfortunately these standards are being utilized, more often than not, as a mechanism of design for assessment rather than an instructional guide. Through out this week’s reading Critical Issue: Rethinking Assessment and its Role in Supporting Educational Reform, we see call for a coordination of content, instruction and assessment. Paralleling this coordination request is societies expectation that students will learn, while in school, the skills they need to survive in the real world. I contend that, to some extent, the students and public already have these skills, as demonstrated by the sports analysis. The problem is that there is no personal context or connection that would cause the students to creatively apply his or her attentions and analytical prowess to in truly significant social and environmental issues or education. We as educators have not made that sale.

Compounding the lack of consumer interest curriculum and assessment designers are passing mixed signals to knowledge facilitators and learners. Current forms of assessment are not modeling critical thinking. Students who do have opportunity to explore in constructivist schools are frequently then assessed with traditional ‘multiple-guess” formats. Bybee and Stage (2005) identify several potential problems: too much time is being spent on how to test, instruction via multiple tunnels of single disciplinary topics, unrealistic “real-world” connections, and disconnect between philosophical ideals and actual application. Bybee’s suggestions for our nation to overcome these faults…embrace innovative science and mathematics programs that examine fewer topics but each to a deeper depth, design accountability assessment to test deep understanding not surface knowledge, and enhance professional development efforts to support and entwine our teachers. By moving toward more detailed understanding both our students and teachers will be exposed emotional and intellectual factors which initiate concern and buy-in necessary to develop respect for themselves and the social and science issues rising in our world.


References and Suggested Readings:

Becker, William E., Jr. (1982). The Educational Process and Student Achievement Given Uncertainty in Measurement. The American Economic Review, 72(1), 229. Retrieved , from Research Library database. (Document ID: 936559).

Bond, L. A. (1995). Critical issue: Rethinking assessment and its role in supporting educational reform. Retrieved April 7, 2006, from: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as700.htm

Bybee, Rodger W & Stage, Elizabeth (2005). No Country Left Behind. Issues in Science and Technology, 21(2), 69-75. Retrieved , from Research Library database. (Document ID: 782479861).

Pearlman, Robert (1993). Designing the new American schools. Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM, 36(5), 46. Retrieved , from Research Library database. (Document ID: 83859).

Tam, Maureen (2006). Assessing quality experience and learning outcomes: Part I: instrument and analysis. Quality Assurance in Education, 14(1), 75-87. Retrieved , from Research Library database. (Document ID: 1016440941).