A ray of light on the problem of assessment
The term assessment has been on my mind these past couple of months, in no small part due to the fact that New Yorkers have been debating how to evaluate teacher impact, the degree to which teaching can be assessed relative to student performance, and even the reliability of test scores as predictors of future success and learning. I’ve especially enjoyed the perspective brought in by the Finnish school system, which is very unlike the U.S. model in its rejection of standardized testing in preference for classroom-based tests created by individual teachers.
We’re talking the NYC public school system here, not academia, so hardly anyone is debating whether or not teachers should be evaluated and student performance should be assessed. (I’ll get to the much more ambivalent feeling on assessment within higher ed below.) And although the media like to present the matter of teacher assessment as a battle between the politicians (who blame teachers for poor student scores) and teachers’ unions (which point to larger systemic issues affecting learning), I believe most reasonable people would agree that teachers, parents, and neighborhood life all have an impact on how well children learn.
The central difficulty of assessment stems from the how: How can we manage to boil down the complex activities of teaching and learning to something quantifiable? (more…)