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Perhaps the most important among the criticisms is that although testing is
supposed to be about learning,
it is very different from learning in a number of important ways.
As a consequence, tests test what tests test
rather than what has been actually learned.
So testing becomes a game and quite a strange game at that.
In fact, some people learn to play the game better than others.
>> A second assessment mode that I want to mention
is called criterion-referenced assessment.
And in fact, in an ideal world,
this is what standards-based assessment is about and should be about.
And when I say in an ideal world, we still have standardized assessments, and
we still put people across normal distribution curves as we did in the past.
But nevertheless, ideally, standards based assessment is criterion-referenced,
which means there are some students who haven't achieved a certain standard yet,
and there are some students who have.
We describe what that standard is, it's possible for
everybody to achieve that standard sooner or later.
Therefore, once you meet criterion, you can then move on to the next standard.
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That's roughly the ideal behind criterion-referenced assessment.
Now, in fact, with standards-based assessment, we do have standardized tests,
we do put people across normal distribution curves, and
we often forget this underlying principle.
Principles also expressed historically in a movement, which is old now,
called Mastery Learning, which is anybody can master a particular skill.
And the classic model of the normal distribution curve, what it does,
it assumes an inevitable inequality.
And whether you assume that inevitable inequality is based on what you've learned
or whether you assume it's based on underlying natural capacities,
there is this underlying assumption of a natural inequality, and
we're going to measure you against others.
So in order for some people to do spectacularly well at that
end of the bell curve, we need quite a lot to be mediocre,
we need something to be not so good, and we put a lot of statistical effort into
differentiating people in these kinds of ways.
So unfortunately, with standardize assessment,
we still do a lot of that even though the underlying principle behind criteria and
reference didn't stand as based assessment.
May have always designed being designed to be something quite different.
Here's an example now from the Australian curriculum,
in fact, of a piece of student writing measured
against the standards in a criterion-referenced assessment regime.
In other words, what we can do is we can describe in quite specific ways
the nature of this text and therefore say that the student,
on the basis of our analysis that takes, has reached the standard or not.
Now, let me tell you that a little bit of the history of
standard-based assessment and where we are today.
In the United States, one of the big initiatives in terms of
standardized assessment was No Child Left Behind of 2001.
So that was something that was introduced by George W Bush.
And he, in fact, the political history of it was he came to the presidency in 2000,
he had a hostile Democratic congress.
So I thought, what can I do?
I want to be the education President.
And in fact, No Child Left Behind was something that was created jointly with
Senator Edward Kennedy, and it's as much a Kennedy creation as a Bush creation.
So it's a complicated history, and I want to talk about it for
a second as illustrating a lot of the dilemmas about assessment.
Because subsequently, No Child Left Behind was reviled and hated,
because it imposed this testing regime on schools and
upped the ante in terms of the number of assessments that were around.
So, it became pretty unpopular.
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the 2015 Act under the Obama regime,
called Every Student Succeeds, the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Which in fact is the same idea of Every Student Succeeding, and
No Child Left Behind is essentially the logic of criterion-referenced assessment.
That everyone can reach this standard,
we don't need to put people across this normal distribution curve.
And if they're not reaching it, It's the school that needs to be held accountable.
So it's an interesting shift away from the underlying historical logic of
standardized assessments and IQ tests and all that kind of stuff.
The logic of inequality, both of these are interesting shifts away from that.
But Ironically, we're still driven by these darn tests.
Its a very complicated political situation.
But one very interesting obscure measure of the nature of
No Child Left Behind was a conservative reaction against it.
So there's a book, which is worth reading
just to be reminded of what the old regime of testing really was.
It is said by a man by the name of Phelps called Correcting Fallacies of
Educational and Psychological Testing 2009, where he and
the other authors in this book simply riled against No Child Left Behind.
They say, how could we ever assume that every child could meet the same standard
given the fact there are these inevitable inequalities in ability and
capacity, it's utterly naive to think we could ever
have every child succeeding as the 2015 Act says.
And it's a strident argument against standards and
criterion-referenced assessment.
So the irony is however much we've been caught up in a politics,
which reviles and is angry about the testing regime and No Child Left Behind.
And it's true, we've been let down by these darn standardized tests
that from another perspective, there are actually quite
a substantial shift in the logic of the way education works.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
