December 2005 — Policy/Advocacy
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Building a Better Assessment Program
This brings me to my first policy, which is predicated on two assumptions: 1) Teachers need to know as precisely as possible, as often as they want, how each of their students is doing every day and at key benchmark times; and 2) an assessment program should meet the needs of its users, rather than force the users to fit the needs of the assessment program.
The policy actually sprung from a conversation I had over dinner with Booth Gardner, former governor of Washington state. Gardner is tired of the complaining he hears over the WASL, but he understands the legitimacy of some of the grievances. He has assembled an advisory rump group to come up with some ways to make the program better. When large assessment programs started 25 years ago, if we wanted results back within a reasonable time, the only real option we had was a machine-readable multiple-choice test. What is different today is the capability of the technology.
We have unlimited storage capacity to maintain all kinds of different examples of student work. We can store written essays; audio files of music performances; and video files of dance, exercise, and presentations. In short, we can store almost anything a student does. Likewise, we have the technology to grade electronically open-ended questions, such as fill-in-the-blank, short answer, and essay. And the technology can grade just as consistently and reliably as a group of humans can, in a much shorter time.
To carry out my policies, we need more technology in the classroom and more bandwidth, but that can be handled relatively easily with more money. The hard part is convincing policymakers that we can fairly evaluate students’ knowledge and skills with measures other than multiple-choice tests. We need to develop a trust in technology’s ability to be as accurate and fair as humans. I know the devil is in the details, but if we don’t implement my policies, or something like them, we will never get past focusing on the test to put our attention on learning.
Geoffrey H. Fletcher is editor-at-large of T.H.E Journal and executive director of T.H.E. Institute.
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