School tests fail to capture human complexity
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Monthly Digital Subscription
$19 $0 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*No charge for 4 weeks then billed as $19 every four weeks (new subscribers and qualified returning subscribers only). Cancel anytime.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/10/2014 (3436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The Grade Five class, in early September, listened cautiously then quietly set to work on the assignment. Except Archie. He folded his arms defiantly and refused. A brief discussion established that doing nothing was not acceptable, so I gave him a sheet of foolscap and left him to it. At the end of the class, he handed in his paper — one and a half sides of minute scribbling. It took me the whole evening to decipher his appalling handwriting and worse spelling. He had written a fairly coherent and accurate account of the Great Fire of London.
The next day, I asked his Grade Four teacher about this. No, they had not done anything about the history of the Great Fire, nor had Archie himself done anything on his own. In fact Archie had been a bit of a problem and certainly did not show even modest achievement or interest in school work.
I asked Archie how he had learned about the Great Fire. He couldn’t remember.
Archie was considered a borderline special needs student, yet I found he read quite widely, particularly about war and battles. But in school terms, he did not measure up.
Was Archie a one-off? Perhaps, but how many individuals are there whose idiosyncrasy or talent or interest the school fails to uncover. And what happens to such students? Do we care?
It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that they will likely feel neglected and degraded by their experience of school. Certainly all those whose writings have appeared in recent times in the Free Press advocating accountability and standards have either ignored or been unaware of the Archies.
What is sad, of course, is how willfully blind the advocates of measurement are. In their zeal for accountability they are quite willing to hand over responsibility to anonymous test designers; they accept without question the statistical processes that have no scientific validity. Stephen Joy Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is still one of the best critiques. The arcane mysteries of testing and standardization are based on the concept of standard distribution — the bell curve, with no evidence that it is applicable.
Parents, of course, have their own school experience to enlighten them. It is, I think, a measure of the failure of schools of earlier times that parents (and others) equate learning with a number. They have a superstitions belief that the number represents some truth about a child’s learning.
In Archie’s case, the test may have purported to measure his literacy (and found it seriously wanting), but it certainly did not reveal the extent of his reading — i.e., his literacy according to the real meaning of the world.
The demand for measurement has led to a great emphasis on teaching reading skills to the detriment of concern with what children can and should read, and, more importantly, with what is worth reading.
This, apparently, is what parents want for their children, and it is what they get. They (and others) blame the teachers when the numbers are not to their liking. But no one asks what exactly is measured by these expert-designed tests, and how is it measured? Even more importantly, how do the designers know that the test measurement is a true indication of the knowledge or skill of every individual who sat the test?
It would seem that this kind of accountability is not wanted. All we want is high scores. Who cares about those who are relegated to the tail end of the bell curve and have to fend for themselves to find some meaning in their lives?
Derwyn Davies is a retired teacher with experience at every level of the Manitoba school system. He also served on the provincial executive of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, chairing for a time the Teacher Evaluation committee.