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