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Reliance on test scores as a measure of success

Most of society, and that includes much of the world of business and philanthropy, treats test scores and graduation rates as indicators of educational success or educational problems. Thus:

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The tacit definition of a child being left behind is one who does not score adequately on appropriate tests.

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A failing school is one that does not meet a minimum annual score, or that fails to meet annual averaged targets assessed by the performance of all students on a variety of tests.

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Similar thinking applies to the achievement gap and other issues, including international comparisons.

Missing the link between test scores and genuine understanding

The fact that some people score higher on tests than others, and some countries perform better on international comparisons of test scores than the US, is interpreted to mean that the goal of education should be to raise test scores by focusing on them directly. That is simply wrong. It confuses apparent productivity with authentic productivity. It is roughly akin to focusing on profitability without dealing with the underlying processes that make a business productive.

In essence, for the most part high test scores are the indirect consequence of teaching for depth of understanding. Most of the countries that beat the US on test score results do not, by and large, teach for higher test scores (South Korea is an exception). They teach for understanding, and use test scores as part of a set of useful indicators to help them along the way. Higher test scores are a natural consequence good teaching and powerful learning.

Revisiting Assessment

Clearly it is difficult to assess outcomes objectively, but that is just like the problem that faces us with assessing expertise in every profession. Those are not easy questions to answer, but they happen to be the right sorts of questions to ask. That is why some leading universities are discarding SAT scores, and why the students of some non-traditional and home school environments are functioning very well in higher education.

The bottom line is that some types of outcome have to be demonstrated by real world performance and/or adequately sophisticated tests.

One key is to grasp the fact that good assessment does not just occur at the end of teaching. Really good teachers, using an adequately integrated process, have multiple opportunities to ask students questions, provide guidance, request revisions and generally coach them in an ongoing way. This is active processing, and it is at the heart of formative assessment. In addition to making the learning deeper, it is a constant opportunity for teachers to find out – in multiple ways – what students do and do not know, and what they can and cannot do.

In addition, there are many precedents and a long history of developing performance assessments in education around the world. The process is not neat and clean and easy, nor can it ever be completely objective. There are many problems, ranging from test anxiety to the fact that people can demonstrate competence in some ways but not in others. Performance assessment is, however, the indispensable corollary of any system of education that aims to actually teach for the development of real world capacity. Performances of many types are integrated into the assessment programs of each of the examples of great education on this site. And, where results on standardized tests are also needed, the students pass with flying colors!