Assessment

In the graduate class that this blog is founded upon and its subsequent focus on Literacy and Diversity, our professor, Dr. Tuck, declared “after all these years of schooling, we still have no real way of knowing if students are learning.”  This has been a central theme in our course readings and discussions.  In a system that must answer to NCLB and its focus on high stakes testing are we truly measuring student achievement?  It would be nearly impossible to find any educator or scholar that feels our current education legislation has provided the proper means to measure if students are learning. 

            The book, Literacy As Snake Oil, especially chapter 4 by Larson and Levine illustrates the flaws of using pre-packaged curriculum with its sole focus on raising test scores does not in fact raise test scores, and certainly does not provide a way for us to know if students are learning but are rather learning how to take a test.   As our readings for week four by Hanenda, Lomawaima & McCarty, and Pearson prove, the one thing we know for certain is that our ESL students are not learning.  Lipman and Apple wrongly blame our lack of understanding on neo-liberalist policies, and Luna and Carini make compelling arguments for using alternative approaches to assessing student learning.  Lynn Gatto believes as evidenced by her Chapter 5 contribution to Literacy As Snake Oil  that she has developed a way to figure out if students are learning by guiding them through the journey of self-discovery, and a student-centered classroom.

I feel defeatist in writing this but I agree with Dr. Tuck, and as a result I really need to change my delivery of instruction.  I teach 11^th and 12^th grade Social Studies and my main goal is to prepare students for higher education by challenging them to become better thinkers, readers and writers.  Unfortunately by the time the students reach me they have developed such bad habits that they are reluctant to change and why should they since these habits have never been corrected and they have been advanced grade by grade.  In a roundabout way I have answered Dr. Tuck’s prompt because one thing I discovered for sure last year is that I did not create better readers and writers.  Their writing was indicative of this yet I was deemed a resounding success as 95% of my students passed the Regents, and I can honestly say that they were not any better at reading or writing than they were before they entered my classroom in September.  Did they learn U.S. History, and learn to work cooperatively? Absolutely and I am proud of that especially my inclusion students but I failed in my ultimate goal to better prepare them for college.

If I were allowed to design assessment without the Regents hanging over my head I would completely eliminate multiple choice tests.  I only use multiple choice questions in order to prepare my students for the Regents as all the questions I put on my tests and quizzes are lifted from old Regents exams.  Ideally my assessments would allow me to gauge if my students were learning by asking them to demonstrate knowledge of the material through reading and writing exercises such as analyzing short reading passages, primary and secondary sources, short answer questions, and long form essays.  We need to let get of the notion that if a student scores a 100 on a 50 question multiple choice test that they have mastered the content when in fact they may simply possess excellent recall ability.  Our society has a national literacy epidemic and all of our teaching and testing should be based on improving this.  Multiple choice and true/false questions do not accomplish this; they are archaic forms of assessment and should be discarded asap.