Yes, the world has changed.
Almost everything is available online. Most of my reading is done
online - in part because I can adjust the font size.
So, while
perusing the Internet late at night, I found this article on Medium.
“How the Obsession with Testing is Hurting Learners and
Teachers.” Look for it here - Obsession
with Testing
The author Mike Crowley begins his piece with this
quote -
“Standardized tests can’t measure
initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity,
effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical
reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes. What
they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and
functions, the least interesting and least significant aspects of
learning.” — Alfie Kohn
While Alfie Kohn has his own
agenda, Crowley makes some very good
points.
“Performance data is not
inherently a bad thing: how it is used, the decisions that are made based
on it, and its potential implications for turning learning into a sterile,
empirical act might well be. A critical insight into dealing with
performance data is expressed in Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure
becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
“
And that’s just the reason that
over-testing becomes irrelevant. It’s a question of oversampling
to determine success, and that very act of oversampling undermines the
success it seeks to measure.
Better to have students prepare
examples of their work and display it in a portfolio of work. The
entire process with portfolios is different, better, and reflective of
personal and community values. Most important, portfolio work is
relevant.
Crowley says it well when he writes,
Student
voice and choice, creativity and alternative credentials must have a role
to play. If the measurement of school effectiveness is one of the purposes
of gathering data, then it should not end when the student leaves
school.
And right there is the case for portfolio
assessment.