Teaching to an appropriate test
In a comment on my previous post, Chris Correa asks some great questions, and I think they deserve their own post by way of an answer. Chris wonders:
I firmly believe that such an assessment is feasible. The monatery constraints are ones of political will, not unreasonable numbers. For insance, the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, a highly open-ended and high-level exam, cost approximately $35 per student in the last year of its existence (by way of comparison, the current multiple-choice dominated Maryland State Assessment costs about $15 per student).
Setting aside design costs for a moment, if you're testing at grades 3, 5 and 8 and we assume that's about 10 million kids, that's only $350 million nationwide per year. We spent about $450 billion on education annually. Even if you test grades 3-12 (~30 million), you're only talking a bit over $1 billion a year. Of course, this is the crudest of thought experiments and there are significant development and grading costs, but my point is this: Money is not what's preventing us from having rigorous, high-level assessments.
The single most important characteristic of thinking-oriented assessments is getting underneath the surface of what a student says or answers to what a student knows, and if he or she can utilize that knowledge fruitfully. In my opinion, there should never be a test item unaccompanied in some fashion by the question, "why do you think that is the answer?" There are various types of assessments that provide this depth, so we're not talking about reinventing the wheel, either; for instance, standardized assessments like the MSPAP and New Standards exam, and the numerous performance assessments.
I'm not a psychometrician, so I don't want to presume to talk yet about the minute nuts and bolts of what my ideal assessment would look like. I don't entirely know yet. But I do know the skeletal features I need to see, and they are ideas that are barely a whisper in today's assessment environment.
UPDATE 3/7: A Government Accountability Office report (PDF) from 2003 found that it would cost all the states approximately $5.3 billion over 6 fiscal years to design, proctor and grade tests with a mixture of multiple-choice and numerous open-ended questions. In other words, somewhere around $900 million a year. Again, money isn't what's stopping us.
What would be an example of a test item/standard that would encourage teachers to teach about the "complexity that go into truly grasping the distinction between fact and opinion"?
Could a test be constructed so that teaching to the test would be a good thing (in terms of higher order thinking), or do you think it's impossible given realistic time/money constraints?
I firmly believe that such an assessment is feasible. The monatery constraints are ones of political will, not unreasonable numbers. For insance, the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, a highly open-ended and high-level exam, cost approximately $35 per student in the last year of its existence (by way of comparison, the current multiple-choice dominated Maryland State Assessment costs about $15 per student).
Setting aside design costs for a moment, if you're testing at grades 3, 5 and 8 and we assume that's about 10 million kids, that's only $350 million nationwide per year. We spent about $450 billion on education annually. Even if you test grades 3-12 (~30 million), you're only talking a bit over $1 billion a year. Of course, this is the crudest of thought experiments and there are significant development and grading costs, but my point is this: Money is not what's preventing us from having rigorous, high-level assessments.
The single most important characteristic of thinking-oriented assessments is getting underneath the surface of what a student says or answers to what a student knows, and if he or she can utilize that knowledge fruitfully. In my opinion, there should never be a test item unaccompanied in some fashion by the question, "why do you think that is the answer?" There are various types of assessments that provide this depth, so we're not talking about reinventing the wheel, either; for instance, standardized assessments like the MSPAP and New Standards exam, and the numerous performance assessments.
I'm not a psychometrician, so I don't want to presume to talk yet about the minute nuts and bolts of what my ideal assessment would look like. I don't entirely know yet. But I do know the skeletal features I need to see, and they are ideas that are barely a whisper in today's assessment environment.
UPDATE 3/7: A Government Accountability Office report (PDF) from 2003 found that it would cost all the states approximately $5.3 billion over 6 fiscal years to design, proctor and grade tests with a mixture of multiple-choice and numerous open-ended questions. In other words, somewhere around $900 million a year. Again, money isn't what's stopping us.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 11:31 AM.
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