Tag Archives: testing

Don’t Fear the STAAR

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What is a test? It’s supposed to be an assessment. It’s a moment designed to tell you, “This is where you are in your educational development.” (Admittedly, a multiple-choice test isn’t a very good assessment; among other problems, there is a 25% margin of error when the student has no knowledge of the question. But making the test a better assessment is a different article.)

Assessments are helpful for a very important rule in pedagogy, hierarchy. Or, as I like to say it, “Meeting the student where he is.” As an educator, you need to find the place where the student’s knowledge meets his ignorance, and teach there. If the student hasn’t mastered addition and subtraction, don’t teach him multiplication. If he can’t read Green Eggs and Ham, don’t start studying Crime and Punishment. A good assessment can help you find out where the student is on the subject’s ladder of knowledge so you can best help him get to the next higher rung.

The problem of testing is not so much the test itself, but rather how schools and teachers “prepare” for the test. Oftentimes this test prep involves simply repeatedly working through sample tests. This makes two pedagogical errors: 

The first error involves the very thing the test is supposed to help you with, hierarchy. If the student is being tested on multiplication and does not understand addition, repeatedly working through sample test multiplication problems is a bad strategy. If the student reads at the level of Dr. Seuss, repeatedly asking comprehension questions from sample test passages written at the level of Dostoyevsky is not helpful. In both cases, the truth that an individual’s current knowledge is built upon more fundamental knowledge (hierarchy) is ignored.   

The second error is the very thing education itself is supposed to help you with, teleology, keeping in mind the goal of education. The goal of education is not discussed nearly enough, but for now let’s borrow a working goal from Horace Mann: “Education is to inspire the love of truth as the supremest good, and to clarify the vision of the intellect to discern it.” If this was our goal of education, then every course, every lesson, every word out of the teacher’s mouth should be a means to achieving that goal. Now if the assessment is measuring the student’s progress toward that goal (which it should), why are we engaging in test preparation as something distinct from regular teaching? Either the test is not gauging our progress toward that ultimate educational goal (which is bad), or our everyday teaching is not done with our ultimate educational goal in mind (which is criminal). 

So don’t fear the test. But beware of “test preparation.” My experience is that most educators are conscientious professionals. As such, they should be able to explain the following: If the test is assessing the normal educational process, why is test preparation so important and prevalent? And if they can’t, as professionals, they should welcome the discussion.   

Test Data and Objectivity

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According to Leonard Peikoff in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:

To be ‘objective in one’s conceptual activities is volitionally to adhere to reality by following certain rules of method, a method based on facts and appropriate to man’s form of cognition.

My understanding of objectivity is that it is a realization that knowledge is an interaction between reality and man’s consciousness. The rub is that in any act of cognition, you need to take into account at least two identities–the relevant fact(s) you are looking at, and the nature of your consciousness.

When thinking on the nature of one’s consciousness, there is much to consider: consciousness is an integrating mechanism (it should integrate facts without contradiction, i.e. use logic), consciousness needs to take into account context and hierarchy, and consciousness must take into account purpose.

So, how does one objectively look at standardized test data? First one must ask, what are the relevant facts to look at? It turns out, it is more than just “the data.”

  • The nature of the test (For example: Since the test is multiple choice, a student can have no clue about the knowledge assessed, and still have a 25% chance of demonstrating that he does indeed have the knowledge assessed. Also, the “passing” grades for these tests are all in the 40-50% range, bringing into question their efficacy as assessments.)
  • The nature of the students (For example: My coworker found that the students on our campus are much more likely to miss the last 5-10 questions on the test, regardless of the subject. This points to a fact about our students that we already knew–they have poor cognitive endurance.)
  • Our purpose as educators (What is the result we are after as educators? Is it a student who does well on the assessment? Or, is it a critically thinking, productive, confident, and happy young adult with a reverence for knowledge? What is the relationship between these two options? Does one lead to or encompass the other?)

Dr. Peikoff also mentions one usage of the term “objective” in common use today that I think is telling:

People often speak of “objective reality.” In this usage, which is harmless, ‘objective’ means “independent of consciousness.”

But here is where I think harm is indeed done. Objectivity for most people is the goal, but since they see objectivity as meaning “independent of consciousness,” they do the exact opposite of what objectivity requires. Instead of using their consciousness more by making sure to apply it to all the relevant factors, they see it as a distorting factor and actually make a point to use it less.

This explains the popularity of any kind of test that can be transferred into a number. The number is considered objective, because no conscious effort was required to generate the number. Whereas an essay, a situation in which the student could more fully display what he does or doesn’t know, is considered not objective because the assessment of an essay requires an act of consciousness to assess it.

Of course, the tests, in the name of objectivity, are almost all multiple choice; and in the name of objectivity, the various numbers the tests generate will be debated and will somehow generate school policy. At this stage of our public school culture, the process is unavoidable. Let’s just make the effort to honestly and rigorously analyze all the relevant factors and keep the process as truly objective as possible.

Sisyphists and Principles in Education

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According to economist Frederic Bastiat in his essay “Effort and Result,” there is always a ratio between an effort employed and a result obtained. As expected, people in most tasks try to increase their results while minimizing their efforts. This is what Bastiat calls progress. However, in some cases, people do the opposite. Their approach to a task causes an increase in effort, with a simultaneous decrease in the result. To the extent that people do this, Bastiat calls them sisyphists, since if they were entirely consistent and succeeded in creating a maximum effort with zero results, they would be like poor Sisyphus, engaging in a life of toil that produces no benefits.

Bastiat, being an economist, was referring to sisyphists in the realm of economic policy, usually advocates of a protectionist policy, those who put artificial obstacles like tariffs in the way of producers and consumers. While this is certainly a relevant discussion to have today (see President Trump’s views on free trade), my concern, being an educator, is the presence of sisyphism in education.

During this time of the summer, the more conscientious school districts are looking forward to the upcoming school year, discussing appropriate strategies to serve their students best. Sadly, for most, this will be based on a break down of the school’s/district’s state test data. Why sadly?

There are many problems with state testing data, but that’s for another post, and not really relevant here. Assume that the data is good and reasonably accurate if you like. Let’s also assume that the data indicates that students in the district are underperforming on a certain test, or even a certain part of a test, since each test is broken down into multiple categories. Now what? The answer will be something like, “We need to teach the material assessed by that part of the test better, or longer, or differently.” Why? “Because the students need to improve their scores on that part of the test.”

But notice, where is our attention?  Is it on how we can best spend our time with the student so that he has the knowledge and reasoning capacity to flourish as an adult? Is it on how we can develop a culture of excellence in our classrooms, a culture whose fundamental is students and teachers taking their learning and creating seriously? Is it on how to best foster intellectual independence in our students? In our teachers? While it could be the case that an analysis of state test data could lead to these fundamental questions, I suspect this rarely, if ever, happens. And yet, the answer to these fundamental questions is the real driver of a school’s success. So why not start there? After all, addressing these fundamental questions is difficult and time-consuming. Instead, it appears that a primary purpose of the organization is using test data to drive our ability to increase test scores. This is an obstacle. We are becoming sisyphists.

Not only is the emphasis on test data an obstacle, it is a red herring. Can you imagine an honest, conscientious staff at a school thinking they had successfully created a culture of excellence and intellectual independence amongst themselves and their students, such that students left the school as beneficiaries of their education (not products), ready to flourish intellectually as an adult, and yet were proved wrong by test scores? I can’t. If we are worth anything as educators, a focus on test scores will only tell us something we should already know (that in some area we need improvement), or allow us to evade our poor job if by chance the test scores are acceptable, which is entirely possible considering what counts for passing on these tests. In both cases, it diverts our focus away from a principled approach to education. Our attention will be directed away from how to address those fundamental questions that truly determine the success of a school. We will have hampered our ability to create legitimate educational results because our focus will be on something other than proper goals.

Bastiat saw sisyphists as people who needlessly (even purposefully) create obstacles, but this formulation misses the root cause. What sisyphists do is change the goal of an organization (or emphasize a contrary or derivative goal). To those who still cling to the old goal, the steps to the new goal seem like obstacles which increase effort and minimize results. So, if we are not going to be sisyphists in education, we need to make clear our goals as educators and ruthlessly integrate all that we do to the service of that goal. So, let’s do it. Is our goal to be educators whose vision is driven by state test data—the test data-driven approach with a change in that data the implicit goal? Or, is it the explicit goal of helping foster knowledgeable, intellectually independent thinkers who can flourish and be happy as adults—the principled approach?