Assessment is Not a Dirty Word

We live in a time when the word “assessment” is synonymous with “test” and it is regarded as a dirty word, a fourletter word that connotes “high stakes testing,” “teaching to the test,” cramming, and cheating. There is much at stake regarding test results: graduation from high school, admission to college, merit pay for teachers, overhauling schools, and teacher certification programs. Real estate prices fluctuate when pass rates on statewide assessments are reported by school districts and published in the local newspapers, as parents pay a premium to live in school districts with a history of high performance among their students. Therefore, we should not be surprised about the importance placed on testing and assessment in education, nor its controversial nature.

A few years ago, after a lecture on the subject, many of the professors accosted me, shocked that I would suggest developing their tests before the course started and that I went so far as to state that someone else could develop their tests. After all, they were the professor and they knew what they had taught. My response was, “that is exactly the problem with most professor-and-teacher-designed assessments.”

So many teachers and professors teach very important and valuable information, but some of us drift from the curriculum that forms the instructional objectives. We often do not construct assessments that are directly tied to the curriculum we are to teach; rather we test some portion of what we have taught. What would happen if the medical professor spent a lot of time on the heart but really didn’t get a chance to spend any time on the kidneys? Do they still assess learning related to the understanding of the functioning of the kidneys?

If we expect students to transfer their learning to other situations and we know that these situations will be interdisciplinary in nature, as most of real life is, then we must teach them to do, learn, apply and transfer, and assess that as well. Unfortunately, we all too often develop assessments that are easier for us to administer and score, rather than an assessment that contains both the appropriate emphases on specific topics and skills, and that is related to what the final performance outcomes are. For example, while it may be appropriate to assess most beginning drivers with a multiple choice examination focusing on shapes of signs, braking distances, and required actions when approaching a school bus, we would still want a performance assessment of driving skills in various traffic situations. In the same sense, an art student would think it was an appropriate task to produce a drawing, painting or sculpture at the end of the semester, if that was the focus of the class, rather than a multiple choice exam of characteristics of famous styles and collections. In short: the goal is to assess learning in the most appropriate manner based on […]

BROWN, S. Interdisciplinary Assessment in Education, 2008.

“We live in a time when the word ‘assessment’ is synonymous with ‘test’ and it is regarded as a dirty word, a four-letter word that connotes ‘high stakes testing’, ‘teaching to the test’, cramming, and cheating”.