Tomorrow's Testing: Measure what students are learning

The test is tomorrow. The report card comes out next week. I’m just a B/C student. You’re going to fail if you’re not careful! You can’t think about school without thinking about grades, tests, assessments.

Is it just for competition? Punishment? Reward? Is it authoritative, scientific measurement? Is it all too harsh? Is it dumbed down and grade-inflated? How can we think fruitfully and helpfully about assessing our students’, our children’s, performance and achievement? This short series of three posts takes on that question.

The first purpose of assessment is both its most obvious and perhaps its least understood.  We want to measure what students are learning.  Of course, this includes whether they have learned the lessons for the week or the unit which will often be tested with pencil and paper through a quiz, test or paper.  We will also check back on that learning to see how much of it ‘stuck’ with review assessment later on and cumulative assessment where the later work will presuppose that students are able to do the earlier work.

Consider two vital extensions of this assessment.  First is when we try to assess not only what students know, but also what they can do with that knowledge.  Identifying how deeply students have learned can be described through tools like Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels.  Does a student recall information?  That is often a beginning for learning, but then it moves forward and deeper from there.  Can the student apply that knowledge, draw conclusions, analyze, synthesize and evaluate?

We work to grow our students as thinkers and communicators.  Assessing how they are growing in these ways requires more than the standard knowledge-based quiz.  Along with knowing something, we look to see that our students can do something with it.  Further, we want to know how they are integrating that knowledge with the comprehensive foundation of a Christ-centered worldview. 

Secondly, our assessment is looking for what ‘value-added’ growth the student has experienced.  This can be as specific as seeing what students learn about a subject over the course of a year.  Rather than just ‘taking a snapshot’, we want to ‘shoot a video’ which shows cumulative learning over time.  Value-added assessment can also be as general as measuring how our students are growing as thinkers and communicators, how they are growing in biblical discernment and ethical decision-making, how they are growing in knowing how to learn in new areas on their own.

These are the sorts of assessment challenges for which teachers are teaming together to apply the varied gifts, experiences and perspectives of their teaching teams. Comments on the other two purposes of assessment (motivating student learning and modifying teacher instruction) will follow in later articles.