Monday, February 1, 2021

Tests and Grades

It's time to talk about the necessary evil; we'll call it assessment.  Some people love them; some people hate them; and some couldn't care less.  Ideally, assessment should be used to determine the level of learning to let families decided whether more work needs to be done to improve learning so that the student can progress to the next level.  That's it.  However, as with most things in life, assessment has been politicized, socialized and monetized.

With that said, is there value in assessment?  Of course there is.  We need to know that many occupations have qualified people for the safety and welfare of society.  You know them (not a complete list by any means):  physicians, surgeons, dentists, nurses, firefighters, police, truck drivers, engineers, bus drivers, realtors, trades, lawyers, pilots, veterinarians and teachers.  Personally, we will have to do tests for driver's licenses, hunting licenses, boating licenses.  Although not tests, we do have to fill in a lot of forms correctly such as tax forms, identification forms, wills, insurance forms, many application forms, government forms and financial forms.  So, it's a good idea to have some proficiency with testing.

Believe it or not, assessment has been politicized, socialized and monetized, and continues to be.  In BC, we have FSA (Foundation Skills Assessment) that measures the reading, writing and numeracy skills of students at certain grade levels.  The BCTF (BC Teachers' Federation) has argued against the use of FSA.  The Fraser Institute has consistently published the results of the FSA; ranking the schools for their results.  What do the rankings show?  The private schools score better; this allows the private schools to justify the tuition costs to the parents.  Are the private schools actually better at teaching?  There is no solid data to prove that yet.  There is some justification that because private schools take the better academic students, they will naturally score better.  Also, private schools do not enroll as many students with learning disabilities.  At this point standardized assessment doesn't do much other than politicize, socialize and monetize schooling and marginalizes poorer performing schools which can disincentivize learning at those schools (called learned helplessness).

Even within a school, we see that assessment is politicized, socialized and monetized.  We've seen cliques being formed around academic and athletic levels.  We've seen scholarships being awarded to top academics and athletes.  We've seen students who are "teacher's pet."  All of these can result in demoralizing poor academic students.  Which is why there has been a push by some educators to eliminate summative assessments.  However, some students aren't motivated to learn unless there is some pressure or prize which means summative assessments are necessary.  This is why summative assessments are a necessary evil; there is no solution that works for all students unless we have the ideal teacher, ideal student and ideal parent.

So if we need summative assessment, it should at least be realistic and accurate.  Although we don't want standardized test, we do want assessment to be accurate with standards.  This is important because it will help make decisions.  If teachers gave "A"s to every student, it wouldn't be fair to the student or parent because that student may enter post secondary into a program that they aren't really qualified for; they would probably fail and waste a lot of money on tuition, books and other costs.  Summative assessments should be realistic; that is, not just a multiple choice or fill in the blank.  These tests don't allow the teacher to evaluate the thinking of the student.  When tests are essays or showing solutions, we get a true picture of the thinking involved.  In real life, we solve problems by thinking, not by multiple choice.  To be fair to teachers, it is time consuming to mark tests or essays, so some portion of multiple choice on a test should still be sufficient.

When my boys were younger, they were enrolled in a martial arts school.  The teaching was good, but the assessment wasn't accurate.  This was probably motivated by collecting fees.  Students were advancing their belts even though they didn't do their moves very well; this was to prevent them from dropping out is my guess.  There was a kid who had a brown belt (one below a black belt); yet he couldn't do one proper pushup.  How long do you think his parents will keep him enrolled after he is unable to defend himself in a real fight (not that the school believed in fighting)?  It is important that teachers give students and parents realistic and accurate assessments because false confidence can have financial, safety, and other effects on the students.  And THAT concludes this post.

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