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.