THE THREE P's
How "Authentic' Will the New Pupil Testing Be?
Wednesday, June 30, 1993
By Robert Holland
In a little-noticed release the other day, the State Department of Education
awarded $125,000 to each of three groups of Virginia school divisions for the
purpose of creating what it called "authentic" tests of student learning for the
whole state. The first batch of new tests would be for the early childhood
years (defined as kindergarten through third grade), which is where DOE's
10-year World Class Education timetable logically begins.
There was much more behind this than a routine spreading of a bureaucracy's
cash-green fertilizer. Citizens attempting to follow the course of school
reform should be aware of the following national context:
*"Authentic" is a code word for testing that will mesh with Outcome-Based
Education. OBE stresses group mastery of common outcomes, and "affective"
measurements -- how students feel and think about "relevant" issues, as opposed
to what they know. The contrast is with something a curmudgeon might call
"effective education."
*New tests are to drive a new curriculum for all schools. That's the
declared objective of the New Standards Project, in which Virginia is one of 17
participating states.
*Traditional standardized testing, which has provided benchmarks for
(sometimes embarrassing) comparisons among schools and school districts, has
been targeted for obliteration. No lesser lights than the presidents of
the Educational Testing Service and the American Federation of Teachers said so
in a joint Boston appearance some time ago.
This is not to imply that all Virginia participants in the testing project
necessarily buy into such an agenda. Some simply may be taking an
open-minded, constructive look at alternatives to multiple-choice testing.
But at higher bureaucratic echelons, where key "reform" decisions are being
made, all systems are go for a radical transformation of testing.
"Authentic" assessment takes the shape of "essays, open-ended
questions, demonstrations, hands-on tasks, and portfolios of work that may be
accumulated over a year or more," according to Joan Herman, a UCLA testing
expert. What's wrong with those supplementary ways of evaluating student
work? On the individual and classroom level, nothing at all --indeed, many
of the best teachers gauge their students' work in a variety of ways besides
multiple-choice and true-false tests. (Essays could be particularly
rigorous were it not for the so-called "whole language" movement, which
holds that students should not be penalized for incorrect spelling, grammar, or
punctuation.)
The problems lie in potentially scuttling -- as a common yardstick of
education -- one-right answer tests requiring a command of the basics, and in
shifting to the attitudinal realm. In a federal research paper, Ms. Harman
wrote that the "authentic" tests, "rather than measuring lower-level skills and
rote memory," measure such things as "metacognitive processes and attitudes" and
immerse children in tasks having "real-world applications."
What, then, of Virginia's prospective "authentic" tests for early childhood?
The very term implies that tests of what pupils can recall after repeated drill
are somehow fake. But is memorization really so hideous, especially at this
building-clock stage? As Thomas Sowell writes in his superb new book,
Inside American Education:
"It is hard to imagine how a small child, first learning the alphabet, can
appreciate the full implications of learning these particular 26 abstract
symbols in an arbitrarily fixed order. Yet this lifelong access to the
intellectual treasures of centuries depends on his mastery of these symbols.
His ability to organize and retrieve innumerable kinds of information, from
sources ranging from encyclopedias to computers, depends on his memorizing that
purely arbitrary order."
In sum, is anything more "relevant" or "authentic" than the ABCs or the Three
Rs?
Although an advocate, Ms. Herman candidly concedes potential pitfall for
"authentic" testing. One major consideration is cost. "Standardized
multiple-choice tests cost $1.50 per child. The new Three Ps (performance,
products, portfolios) test cost upward of $10 per child to administer and score.
Multiplied by millions of pupils, that becomes real money. Furthermore,
Ms. Herman adds, there is no proof that "authentic" assessment yields valid
standardized results. And a single year-long "hands-on" project does not
provide the variety of sampling of traditional testing.
More chilling are intimations (in documents retrieved from education
databases) of a movement into the touchy-feely realm by the 800-pound gorilla of
assessment, the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey. For
example, ETS lately has been compiling 1,560 "personality and affective
measures," such as rating for "coping skills," "self-esteem," and "need for
affiliation." ETS' Project STACI (Systems Thinking and Curriculum
Innovation) is devising computer simulations to lead students to see the
"interconnectedness of human events," and its STELLA (Structural Thinking
Experimental Learning Laboratory With Animation) offers Macintosh software to
encourage "higher-order thinking skills" across disciplines. Writing in
the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, an
ETS associate lauds the idea of instilling "social competence" in children -- or
"developing systems" as he prefers to call the young folks.
Is it a stretch to see a threat to liberty and family rights in attitudinal
testing? Actually the danger is clear and present, and is well documented
in Education for the New World Order (Halcyon
House, Portland, Oregon) by respected Washington writer Bev Eakman. The
book tells of the long, courageous battle of one Pennsylvania parent, Anita Hoge,
against the infiltration of psychological testing into schools in the guise of
"affective ed."
Virginia parents clearly will be within their rights to demand that they be
kept fully informed on the purpose, direction, and content of the New Testing.