TESTS AND TESTING
NUMBER FOUR OF TEN ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF SCHOOL
Having found yourself here, you may be interested, or outraged, enough to want to read arguments one, two, and three. They are here:
http://tdurrie.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/one-of-ten/
http://tdurrie.wordpress.com/2010/09/
http://tdurrie.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/three-of-ten/
School is the only place where questions are asked,
the answers to which are already known.–Neil Postman
When you first start thinking about it, administering tests seems like a perfectly reasonable and practical thing to do. After all, how better for a teacher to find out if students are actually learning what they’ve been taught—especially if the number of students involved is 25 or 30, not unusual for a standard elementary or high school classroom? Say I’ve been teaching long division, why not just give the pupils a few examples to work out and see if they can do it? Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, a simple process like this becomes derailed when it is used to produce grades. As we pointed out in Argument Number Three, grades are school’s way of rewarding the virtuous and punishing the miscreant. To look at it another way, testing that results in grades does nothing to improve instruction. In fact, as we shall see shortly, testing, especially standardized testing tends to downgrade instruction and interfere with learning.
Suppose you tell me a number of facts and then say Now I’m going to see if you were listening. Uh oh, you should have told me beforehand that there would be a test. Back in the days when I was teaching, the kids would often ask, is this going to be on the test? In other words, do we have to pay attention or not? Since grades have become the measure of success or failure, what’s going to be on the test becomes the important issue, not whether something is interesting or worth learning. Socrates would ask his disciples questions, not to see if they knew the answer but to provoke thought and enquiry. There were no “answers.”
The ubiquitous practice of scoring on the bell curve further undermines the possibility of testing to improve learning. Suppose all the students score 100% perfect on the test, does this mean that the teacher has done a great job and that the kids all know what they are supposed to know. No, it doesn’t. It means that there is something wrong with the test. The bell curve dictates that some must fail, some must be on top, and most must fall somewhere in the middle. If the scores aren’t distributed this way, then the test is either too easy (they all get it right) or too hard (they all get it wrong). One result of bell curve grading is that the teacher will teach to the top few learners, the “A” students. They’ll get the hard stuff and the other kids will distribute themselves as predicted.
The next step would be to have all the kids in all the schools take the same test. Enter so-called standardized testing—administering the same set of questions to a large group in order to determine individual competence or qualification. Though this kind of testing goes as far back as ancient China, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the easily gradable multiple-choice, true or false type of test became mainstream. Around 1926, the College Board (then the College Entrance Examination Board) abandoned essay-type tests, which require considerable time and personal judgment to evaluate, in favour of multiple-choice. By 1936, the process of grading was speeded up by the invention of a rudimentary scanner (the IBM 805). By this time as well, thousands more students were moving to cities and attending high schools. So, simplifying and standardizing tests became increasingly attractive to teachers and school administrators. The same test could be administered city-wide, state-wide, even nation-wide, allowing for comparative evaluation of the performance of schools and teachers.
In seeking the background of the growing obsession with testing, the influence of Alfred Binet cannot be ignored. In 1906, along with his collaborator Théodor Simon, he developed a test which was designed to identify children who were mentally deficient and would require special training. This was followed, ten years later, at Stanford University, by the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale, widely know as the IQ Test. It was, and still is, widely administered and used as a way to predict academic aptitude. The notion of establishing norms of behaviour and ability as well as means of sorting individual children was reinforced by the work of Arnold Gesell. He and Frances Ilg, after exhaustive studies of children and even primates, published several books which laid out “norms” of child behaviour appropriate for given ages. An Atlas of Behavior (1934) and The Child from Five to Ten (1946) sent parents flipping through the pages to see if their child was “normal.” Both the IQ Test and Gesell and Ilg helped establish the notion that measuring devices could be created that would enable institutions, like school, to sort children into usable teachable categories. Further to that, such innovations led to the belief that there are testable standards for just about everything.
At the same time, starting in the late 19th century and continuing to the present, practitioners thought that human endeavours like education and psychology could be seen as “sciences,” employing scientific methods. Data gathering, experimentation, and testing are used as ways to determine process, assuming that results would be predictable. But human beings are not like chemicals, rolling balls, or pigeons; they are endlessly complex, variable, and unpredictable. This thinking has led to the constant parade of flavour-of-the-week teaching methods. I only mention team teaching, child-centred education, programmed learning, behaviour modification, traditional schools, and whatever comes next. Each has been proclaimed as THE perfect and effective method, scientifically designed and proven, only to be dropped when it became clear that it wasn’t working. Treating education as a science makes about as much sense as trying to applying the scientific method to determining who was the better composer Mozart or Beethoven.
Once the machines for reading and grading the multiple-choice tests were up to speed, there was no looking back. By the 1940s, multiple-choice standardized tests were being administered district-wide and being used to rate schools, teachers, and students. Needless to say, the creators and publishers of such tests saw and seized an enormous profit-making opportunity and lobbied government accordingly. In a Toronto Star article in 2003, Marita Moll wrote “The standardized testing movement now consumes millions of dollars and hundreds of hours that could be better spent on basic educational resources—like text-books, teachers and adequate support services.”
Imagine, then, the boon it was to the test-makers when George Bush introduced his No Child Left Behind legislation in 2001. This meant that standardized tests not only had government sanction but also would determine which schools, in which states, would get more money. The administration of tests was now mandatory. NCLB was based on the notion that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals would somehow improve educational outcomes. The idea being: This is how high you have to jump, and I’m going to test you to see if you can do it. All those who reach the goal will be rewarded, and those who don’t will be humiliated. All well and good if you are selecting high-jumpers for Olympic competition. However, kids in schools are not high-jumpers and education is not like setting a bar to be jumped over at a certain height. The complexity of the human brain dictates that individuals learn in different ways and at different times. It is pointless to try to teach someone something in which they have no interest—even if you bribe them with rewards and punishments.
An unavoidable result when standardized testing is used to rate schools or teachers, is that success at the test will become the goal of instruction. (In British Columbia, the right-wing think tank Fraser Institute is ever so fond of publishing rankings of schools based on test results. They cheerfully ignore the fact that schools in high-income areas invariably rank higher than their less privileged counterparts.) And if getting good grades is the be all and end all, why not cheat? Diane Ravitch has put this well in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” (NY 2010):
Of all the ways of gaming the system, the most common is test preparation. Most districts, especially urban districts where performance is lowest, relentlessly engage in test prep activities. … For weeks or even months before the state test, children are drilled daily in test-taking skills and on questions mirroring those that are likely to appear on the state test. The consequence of all this practice is that students may be able to pass the state test, yet unable to pass a test of precisely the same subject for which they did not practice. They master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself.
And, I dare say, we all know about “cramming” for exams—short-term memory quickly forgotten. This is what passes for learning in our schools and universities.
Anyone who has seen Todd Solondz’s movie “Storytelling” will remember how “randomly” filling in the little multiple-choice balloons may have astonishing results. Students are encouraged to leave no question unanswered: Even if you don’t know the answer, take a guess and fill in something; a wrong answer is no worse than a blank. And, speaking of “wrong” answers, multiple-choice true-or-false tests imply that for every question there can be but one “right” answer, there are no in-betweens or shades of grey. The ultimate conclusion is to define an educated person as someone who knows all the answers. This ignores and even discourages thoughtful questioning and discourse.
As Marita Moll also wrote in the article mentioned above, “Fortunately, an informal ‘count me out’ movement against excessive testing is gathering momentum around the globe. Hundreds of teachers in Britain have recently voted to boycott the tests. Hundreds of parents in Alberta have requested that their children be exempted from the tests.” This may even suggest that parents and teachers are awakening to the fact that their communities have lost control over the education of their children. Like curriculum, tests are now devised by “experts,” often serving commercial interests, who determine what should be learned and how that learning should be demonstrated.
The teacher who asks his or her students a few questions to see if they have understood what was being taught or puts out a couple of long division examples to find out who needs help, is in a different world from the teacher who must administer the timed standardized test, while watching with an eagle eye to catch anyone who might be cheating.
No wonder the usual answer to the question What did you learn in school today? is Nothing.
