SECTION A: HOW SHOULD TEACHERS ASSESS
STUDENT LEARNING?
Emphasis on expanding student content knowledge and improving basic academic skills is
often coupled with the demand for more rigorous assessment of both students and teachers.
The current push for standardized testing across the United States had its origins in the 1983
report,A Nation at Risk.The report charged that the country was threatened by a “rising tide
of mediocrity” in public schools and unleashed a movement for test-driven curriculum
change that, in theory, promotes academic excellence. By 2000, every state but Iowa had es-
tablished statewide academic standards and 27 states had implemented high-stakes testing
programs. For more about these developments and responses by critics, I recommend a
book edited by Kathy Swope and Barbara Miner (2000),Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing
Craze Won’t Fix Our Schools.
For people who support standardized assessments, testing serves multiple functions.
Tests direct classroom curricula and measure student knowledge, the competence of teach-
ers, and the performance of schools and districts. In general, the “standards movement” re-
lies on fact-based multiple-choice exams as the most cost-efficient objective measures of stu-
dent achievement.
Educators who are skeptical about this approach to teaching and learning often raise the
following questions:
·What do fact-based multiple-choice examinations actually tell us about student under-
standing?
·Is there a correlation between more rigorous testing and the expansion of content knowl-
edge and critical understanding or a commitment to active citizenship?
·Will pressure on teachers to have their students score higher on standardized tests force
them to emphasize drilling basic skills and the memorization of facts at the expense of
more interesting and valuable types of classroom instruction?
·Does “prepping” students for tests enhance their learning or simply invalidate the tests
as meaningful measurements?As an education student in college and a beginning teacher, I was taught techniques to
design supposedly “fair” tests with “good” questions. At the end of the marking period, we
were supposed to average up test scores; add or subtract a few points based on factors
such as class participation, attendance, and handing in assignments punctually; and then
assign a scientifically precise numerical grade that summarized a student’s performance in
class. In theory, teachers did not evaluate students; our job was to calculate and record
the grade they had earned—a task now made easier by computer programs such as
Microsoft Excel.
We were also advised to do the following:
·Encourage competition between students for higher grades. This would ensure that they
studied.
·Make all of the choices on multiple-choice tests the same length. Unequal length would
tip off students to the right answer.
·Avoid letting “B” be the right answer too often. It is the most popular “wild guess” answer.204 CHAPTER 8