Testing as Therapy:  Education Invades the Affective Domain

Wednesday, March 10, 1993

By Robert Holland 

Imagine this:  A school system scuttles or downgrades tests requiring pupils to compute the area of a triangle, name the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and identify the use of metaphor in writing. 

"That kind of testing only rewards memorization and drill in "lower-order" skills," the system's superintendent declares, after checking with trend-setters at the big foundations and ed-schools.  "We want a new kind of assessment that will test students' ability to engage in 'higher-order' thinking -- to work together for a greater society:  environmentally pure and culturally diverse." 

So in place of tests of achievement in reading and math comes an evaluation of 38 outcomes for pupils within seven Dimensions of Living. 

A test for "Personal Well-Being and Accomplishment," for example, calls for "student completion of affective inventories." 

Huh?  Here's a translation from the edubabble:  "Affective" means emotions and feelings as distinct from rational thought.  This is a realm into which educrats are plunging pell-mell without a psychiatric license.  So students sill their guts, and their innermost ruminations go into Big Brother's database. 

A test for "Interpersonal Relationships" calls for "teacher observations of student interactions."  Thus, a gifted student who doesn't work well in a group must learn to mix before moving to the next level.  Individualism yields to group goals. 

ANOTHER TEST requires students "to explore other cultures, including some aspects of language and customs."  By "other" we assume that tracing the English roots of common law would not qualify. 

And so this new testing scheme goes.  Here verbatim, are still more new tests.

*A student journal of his leisure activities.

*Student response to a vignette requiring the analysis of conflict and a discovery of cooperative resolution.

*Student[s'] self-reporting on their responsible use of the environment.

*Teacher observation of the group process during a collaborative project. 

The "higher-order skills" you see, turn out to have far less to do with academic skills than with politically correct attitudes.  Basically, psychological testing is replacing the basics.  After pushing this for decades, the behaviorists finally have the New Age-yuppie political climate and the right-sounding jargon :outcomes-based education."  OBE to score big. 

Unfortunately, I am not making this up.  All this and more was in a draft of a "Framework for the Virginia System of Educational Assessment," dates last December 9 [1992] and circulated to Virginia schools by the Department of Education. 

Happily superintendent of Public Instruction, Joe Spagnolo now says of the draft that "we tore it up." because of reaction from educators statewide -- reaction such as, no doubt, "how in the name of John Dewey do we measure that?"

Thank Heaven for common sense.  Indeed, the last, best hope for education may be that many classroom teachers know where the latest gobbledygook from Ed-Central belongs -- same place the confiscated spitballs go. 

The bad news is that Spagnolo says "we are still committed to pieces of this design and the state will be back with another draft.  The December 9 version said the department tests.  Students should be given credit for, among other things, their "cultural strengths."  A prime concern is "equity." 

Pardon me, but that sounds suspiciously like a quixotic quest of equal outcomes through dumbed-down curriculum and evaluation. 

A NEW SYSTEM of assessment is supposed to be Step Two toward the World Class Education that Wilder administration officials from the Governor down have been touting.  Step One is a Common Core of Learning with all those warm-fuzzy outcomes, dimensions, life roles, and high-order skills, but it, too, has been undergoing heavy rewrite. 

World-Class Education is greatly to be desired, but you don't achieve it by decree any more than you gain altitude by standing on the roof and flapping your arms.  All Virginians need to be debating far-our changes that are being obscured by a thick fog of educationese. 

Do most Virginians really want to scrap well-defined Carnegie units for high school graduation (such as four years of English, three years of science, math and social studies, et.) and replace them with 38 nebulous outcomes such as working well in groups, respecting a diversity of values, and thinking globally? 

In Ed School Follies, written after a year-long tour of teachers' colleges, Rita Kramer concluded that the goal of schooling "is not considered to be instructional, let alone intellectual, but political...The school  is to be made into a republic of feelings -- as distinct from a republic of learning. 

Virginia's education leaders ought to put all the touchy-feely junk in the shredder and insist on uncompromisingly high academic standards.  Otherwise we are going to have education that is not world-class, but Third-World-Class