Best,

-kj-

Thanks so much for the thoughtful comment. I agree with you on everything you said. You should see the pictures I am making in my head. They are great.

I think I will move a copy of this comment over to my obstacles wiki which I really need to work on. It belongs there.

It was great meeting you and I look forward to continued conversations. Best to you….

Anne

That “cloud” you mention rumbled on the horizon of many of our conversations. Lots of times, when we talk about testing as being an obstacle to education reform, I think we are suggesting that we just do away with it. I can’t see that happening in the near future, can you? The accountability movement isn’t just going to go away. It does however need to be re-focussed.

In a former life :-), I was a development team leader for Ontario’s Education Quality and Accountability Office, (EQAO), - Ontario’s testing agency. At that time, we were creating performance-based assessment tasks. These tasks were rich enough to:
-motivate students to demonstrate their skills and knowledge;
-allow for scaffolding of demonstrations of learning;
-allow for demonstrations of learning to emerge at all (four) levels of achievement.

These rich tasks were very time-consuming to develop and hence very expensive. My team could easily spend several days developing (and refining) one task. It was also time-consuming, (read expensive), to train teachers to score these assessments. I think the cost was justifiable in terms of teacher professional development alone. The professional learning that happened throughout the development, field-testing, and scoring of the performance-based assessments was immeasurable!

While Ontario still calls upon the expertise of its teachers to develop and select test questions, and score assessments, I have seen a change in the nature of the assessment tasks. They are shorter, more “content” focussed, rely more on multiple choice questions, and are lacking in richness. They take less time to develop, less time to administer, less time to score and are therefore less expensive. In my opinion they also yield less valuable data.

What if we were instead to provide students with a rich context and challenge them to use any tool(s) at their disposal to demonstrate how they explore information, engage with “texts”, process ideas and create products? Would it follow that richer tasks completed over a longer period of time would lead to richer demonstrations of learning? And if so, would those richer demonstrations of learning yield more valuable data? And what if we used that data, not to “measure” schools but to inform instruction?

Can’t you just picture using a rich “text” such as a story, video clip or podcast with students as a jumping off point, with the challenge to demonstrate their understanding in the most effective way they could? Some students might use multimedia software to create another part to the “story”. Others might pull in RSS feeds and repackage critical information related to the “text”. Others might use their blogs to engage in a series of interviews or commentaries. And yet others might choose to create a virtual world to breathe life into the characters and settings. Any one of these scenarios would allow students to demonstrate the breadth and depth of their understanding, the effectiveness of their thinking skills, and the complexity of the connections made between the “text” and the world beyond the text. Now that’s an assessment! Why can’t we do that on a large-scale?