It seems to be an almost natural law that everything in education goes in cycles. Do you remember those "one shot" High School Leaving Matriculation Exams? Students were solely judged "en masse" on a final examination which created the tyranny of teaching and cramming for that all important test.

Having moved away during the "free" 70s from "formal" testing, we now seem to be moving back into rigidity with ever greater emphasis on summative examinations. Once again, testing is seen as a kind of quality control, based on the assumption that learning is somehow a product whose qualities can be specified, like a properly functioning washing machine or car. Examinations are again taken as the sole sign that significant learning has taken place and that a high price tag ought to be attached to such a test.

There is a strong current in our present day society that considers public schools to be incompetent.

Students' performances, judged on what is called a "criterion referenced measurement", are equated with a school's productivity. Of course, schools are accountable but should accountability be based on the industrial metaphor? Schools are in the business of educating children, not training children to do well on tests.

Learning in school is different from skill training. Without question, it does take in the mastery of many skills, but it also involves critical thinking and logical reasoning. General education is not the same as a training course in cable splicing in which simple objectives can be clearly stated and achieved because they can be reduced to single dimensions.

Schools exist to teach pupils to widen their perspectives and challenge their imaginations, not to dull their minds by single dimension learning in a mechanistic and narrow way resembling the process of industrial activity. Unfortunately, far too many of our broad, province-wide examinations fall exactly into that mode because they rely far too much on single dimension items and rarely require students to use extensive reasoning, reading and writing skills.

The danger is that teachers, wishing to ensure their students successfully complete Ministry-set examinations, will go back to the old idea of "teaching for the exam", emphasizing rote-learning and the memorizing of unrelated events. The result will be that Johnny, by the time he reaches CEGEP, still can't read, and what is worse, still can't reason or think critically.

The present tendency to concentrate on summative testing to the exclusion of all other evaluation denies the fact that all significant learning has always been a "do-it-yourself" job, focused on answering some need or solving some problem. Learning rarely follows logical and sequential patterns, but is instead often random, spontaneous and part and parcel of the individual's personality. Try to fit students and teachers into a corset made of summative tests based on terminal objectives and one has the perfect recipe for further educational alienation.

In this context we should be reminded of the observation made by Robert F. Mager, that "...it is true in general that the more important an objective is, the more difficult it is to state." This being the case, such concepts as critical thinking are often absent from our programmes because they cannot be adequately put into measurable objectives.

Of course, schools are accountable. The question is to whom: the parents? the industrial process? the students? What are tests for: evaluation for instructional purposes? as a classification device? for certification? as an incentive? Have you ever observed students getting back a grade? Are they interested in the effectiveness of the test? Did they know what they were tested on? Did they know the objectives they studied for? What is the pay-off for them? A test must be appropriate not only in relation to the objectives, but also in relation to how the students will respond to it.

Schools operate in a largely artificial setting where rules, "sound traditions" and, now, renewed emphasis on uniforms and formal testing reflect social concerns about stability and order in a society in a state of flux. For many parents and educators, schools are unruly places and unfortunate breeding grounds of new life styles of which they don't approve. Too much turning the clock back and too much irrelevant summative testing and schools will become increasingly dreadful places.

 

Originally published in the PAPT - Sentinel, January 1993, vol.9, nr.1