Effective Students and Standardized Testing

In an earlier post, I noted the obvious: that the ultimate goal in all teaching (and therefore in all educational policy) is to produce effective students -- people who can do the things we want them to be able to do. The problem for teachers and policy makers, though, lies in identifying these abilities and then assessing whether students have them. Neither step is especially easy, but the Common Core Standards attempt to achieve both.

According to the developers of these standards, "the Common Core State Standards establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade." In theory, at least, the program "focuses on developing critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills." In other words, the developers have determined that they prefer to cultivate certain skills rather than emphasizing the retention of certain prescribed content. They have identified the abilities they believe kids should have.

In the abstract, I endorse these choices. In my own work, I spend much more time thinking about how to teach kids to do things than about how to get them to remember things. And, really who can object to the idea of improving "critical thinking and problem solving?"

Perhaps the most underestimated or misunderstood truth in education, however, is the extreme difficulty of assessing such things, even if we can nail down what, exactly, the phrases mean. Critical thinking happens only internally, in the brain of the thinker. In order to know whether someone is doing it, then, we have to design ways for her to reveal what is going on her mind. In other words, she needs to communicate with us. As a result, the means of communication we choose are at least as important as the skills we identify. Not only that, but we have to help the student communicate in our preferred medium so that we can see what she is thinking.

No one thinks that the ultimate goal -- effectiveness -- is the same as taking a paper and pencil test.Very few adults take tests as a part of their daily lives; few employers care how well their employees do it, no one does it for fun, and it is not an element of good parenting. The question, then, is why we want anyone to take a test as a way of assessing her effectiveness.

The answer is that we need some proxy for "effectiveness." We need to find the elements of adult effectiveness (critical thinking, for example) and then measure whether people have those elements. Tests might be able to do that.

Also, maybe not.