Read closely: This will be on the test!

Last week I described the importance of teachers carefully balancing two sources of epistemic authority: their own, which is legitimized by their subject-matter expertise, life experience, and fully-developed prefrontal cortices, and that of their students, who best understand their own lives and the world into which they are growing up. I want to focus today on a specific and nearly ubiquitous exercise of teacherly epistemic authority that is, I propose, undermining more productive possibilities for assessing students: the Test.

I took profoundly stupid test last weekend. It was a practice exam for a bus-driving certification course, which I of course acknowledge is an important and serious affair given the nature of the implications for children. The test, however, left me with little appreciation — nor genuine preparation — for this considerably important responsibility.

One category of my complaints are petty: True or false statements ending with a question mark? Really, DMV? But more to my point today was the whiplash between esoteric procedural questions and utterly banal truisms. Take, for example:

A new driver who is looking to operate a 72 passenger, 33,000 GVWR School Bus with air brakes needs to take what written tests?

then

A Vulnerable User is? a) Bicyclist b) Pedestrian c) Road Making Equipment d) Horseback Rider e) All of the above

Of the 50 questions on the tests, perhaps half assessed useful knowledge, understanding, or appreciation that would make me a more qualified, responsible, safe, and caring driver of a bus full of students. To make matters worse, only about half of that half of questions even applied to the specific certification I was seeking! As one rather conspiratorial man in the course repeatedly enjoyed pointing out to us all it is perhaps in the DMV’s monetary interest to make the test hard to pass the first time, but then again, this kind of mind-numbing test-taking is not unique to the DMV.

No, the real tragedy of this encounter was my realization that this test-taking experience was nothing but familiar for every one of us there.

The testing landscape

We are indoctrinated from our earliest days of schooling into a system of measuring our success as learners (and implicitly as people) through:

a. Selecting from multiple pre-written options

b. Prescribed time frames that prioritize speed

c. A focus on short-term memorization

d. Emphasis on individuality

e. Binary right-or-wrong thinking

f. High stakes

g. Both b and d

h. Both f and g

i. All of the above

This type of traditional testing is a weighty expression of a teacher’s epistemic authority because the teacher (or some nebulous source of educational authority embodied for the students by the teacher) has decided what students need to learn, narrowly defined the context in which they need to apply it, and prescribed how the student needs to demonstrate that learning (again: usually narrowly). Students are left completely out of the decision-making process, only becoming involved once they are told what to memorize.

In this system students will trend towards one of two poles:

1. Unquestioningly embracing this measurement of their worth, caring more and more about their achievement as measured by an increasing number of standardized exams.
2. Increasingly rejecting the authority of teachers and school and disengaging from their education completely.

Attempting and failing to find continued success on the road to Pole #1 leads to a quick slide to Pole #2. Even sustained success towards #1 — a journey which is itself no pleasure cruise given the vast evidence of detrimental effects of test anxiety — is a deal with the devil: you emerge accomplished only in rigid, siloed, individualistic thinking and with a maladaptive reliance on external, institutional validation.

But I am not writing today just to punch a very late ticket to the party of criticizing the testing landscape; I have some real decisions to make this week about how to set up testing in my own classes this year.

Messaging Dissonance

I am working on finalizing the syllabi for my math classes and I have to define what my quizzes, unit tests, and midterms and finals will be worth and how often they will take place. Fiddling with these numbers to get my gradebook categories to add up to 100% is easy enough, but the real challenge I have to confront is asking and answering: What messages do my percentages send to my students about what I value, and what lived effects do my decisions imply for my students?

The path that feels most natural to me is to stick to a traditional grade-breakdown (something like 20% quizzes, 40% unit tests, 10% midterm/final with the other 30% for some combination of homework and “participation” for an upper-level high school class) and simply trust that my relational work with students will reassure them that their test-taking is not everything to me and should not be everything to them either.

But I can’t help but think about the mixed messaging this sends to students:

“Sure, 70% of your grade — which is very important for your transcript, which is very important for your college options, which is very important for your earning potential, which is very important for your life satisfaction — is based on how well you can sit down every other week and answer questions about what you were supposed to learn, but really what I want you to get out of this class is an appreciation for learning, a sense of community, self esteem, and a suite of moral capacities and concern for others and our world!”

I do not believe that most students buy this, and I think I am proud of them when they don’t.

This illustrates the first-mover problem of assessment innovation, where agents across organizational levels are reluctant or unable to pioneer new practices while standardized exams continue to gatekeep access to higher education, funding, or social prestige. This armor is showing cracks as more colleges go test-optional and organizations like Mastery Transcript Consortium help schools collectively overcome the incentives towards inertia, but the pressure to conform nests like a stack of Russian dolls: states within countries, districts within states, schools within districts, and teachers within schools, all stuck doing what has previously been done.

While there are plenty of models springing up that are fully trading grades for competencies and tests for portfolios, most teachers — like me — are still working within a paradigm of traditional testing and have to instead consider how we can diversify the ways we assess students while still adhering to traditional testing vocabulary, norms, and policies.

Authentic Assessment

There is absolutely value in traditional testing that I plan to maintain in the suite of ways I assess students. Test-taking skills are still undeniably instrumentally useful for students and to not give students opportunities to practice preparing for and taking long exams would be doing them a disservice. This process is not necessarily devoid of opportunity to cultivate virtue either: teachers can help students develop diligence, patience, and joy in the process of learning while preparing to sit conventional exams.

The insight I hope to continue to act on, though, is that this form of testing need not be totalizing even if my gradebook categories retain familiar names. There is so much room for diversifying the forms which “quizzes” and “tests” take. In “Learning and Leading Theory: A Century in the Making” from The Constructivist Leader Deborah Walker and Linda Lampert call for “Assessment practices are ongoing and cumulative while formats are open-ended and drawn from a variety of settings.”

A term that further describes this shift is authentic assessment, which refers to assessment that engages students in applying their knowledge in real, applied ways. This might include projects, case-studies, simulations, or portfolios. Orienting towards authentic may have start-up costs for teachers creating their own curriculum, but this work is infinitely more exciting than pulling canned questions from a bank.

Can I make a quiz an open-ended application that requires critical thinking rather than a recital of facts? Can I build in a collaboration component? Can end-of-unit assessments center reflection? How can I call in the epistemic authority of my students, giving them agency to define the parameters of what they will learn, how they will apply it, and in what ways they can showcase this learning?

Individual teachers may not be able to disrupt outdated testing infrastructure themselves — and good thing, for I don’t pretend to have the answer to what exactly should replace it — but we can ask ourselves and our students new questions about our assessments as we work to better prepare our students for the lives they will and want to lead.

P.S. There is much more to say about how AI will change the testing landscape. For a beautiful vision check out the work of my friend and colleague Serj Hunt in Beyond Standardised Tests — New Goals in Education: Learner Agency supported by AI pedagogy.