Students Ability to Get er Done: Rethinking the Purpose of Public Education
From the very beginning of our experiment in democracy, from early champions like Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, civic education and nation building were major reasons people supported public schools. Unfortunately, this view of education has recently fallen on hard times. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, has written a splendid article on this point.
Currently, several national efforts are under way that focus on revitalizing civic education. The Civic Mission of Schools. The report identifies six proven practices of effective civic education:. Aligned with these six research-based practices, the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools has been designed to make civic education relevant and meaningful for young people.
My colleagues and I recognize that each generation must be persuaded of the benefits of democracy and the need to guard against the erosion of its principles and protections. Understanding how our democracy evolved is a crucial educational goal. The framework has many suggestions for making abstract concepts concrete—free speech, press, and religion; free, fair elections, and a broad franchise; due process; and the rule of law. Students grasp the importance of these constitutional guarantees when they are examined in the context of the historic abuses they remedied.
The framework gives equal weight to examples from world history in which human rights were systematically destroyed by totalitarian governments such as those headed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot—despots who overthrew or ignored democratic rule with terrible consequences for their populations and the world. The framework also calls for students to learn about current dictators who squelch democratic development or impose authoritarian rule. Making civic education relevant is particularly important when discussing current events and controversial issues.
If we want students to become involved and register to vote when they are 18, schools must help them understand how their act of voting contributes to preserving our democracy. I witnessed an interesting example of this need during a visit to an inner-city 12th-grade class in Sacramento. When I asked how many were 18, about two-thirds of the 30 students raised their hands.
This is how the conversation unfolded:. I agreed but offered a counterargument. Voting is a collective pact with fellow citizens, especially those who want the same things you want. If members of your group all agree to vote, then your positions will be better represented; if you stay home, people with different interests will certainly prevail. The students thought my argument made sense, but they said no one had made that case to them before.
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This perfectly illustrates the need for convincing the next generation that it takes their personal involvement to sustain a democracy. At the close of the Constitutional Convention, a woman approached Benjamin Franklin to ask him what sort of government the delegates had proposed—a monarchy or a republic. Florida is among several states that have passed bipartisan legislation supporting efforts that bolster civic education.
I was privileged to serve on the task force. Key players from the group are now organizing county committees composed of educators, political representatives, and business leaders to advocate for greater inclusion of civic education in schools. Civic education needs to be reinstated as a major aim of our schools. Historically, it was one of the major rationales for providing a liberal education for all in the sense of helping students reach their potential and develop crucial character traits. Fareed Zakaria recently offered a detailed explication of this idea in his book In Defense of a Liberal Education.
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Daniel DeNicola contends that a liberal education has transformative power. In his Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education , he interprets it through the lens of five paradigms:. DeNicola combines these five into the general goal of helping each student learn to flourish. Evaluating school quality based solely on the results of reading and math tests distracts us from this worthy aim. In his book, DeNicola also rebuts critics of the liberal arts who negatively influence educator and public attitudes by claiming, among other things, the illegitimacy of a common cultural heritage.
The article explains how Seider determined which character education strategies had the greatest success: Marc Tucker, president of the National Center for Education and the Economy, is another eloquent advocate for a broader approach to public education. In a blog , he explains why economic preparation is not enough:. But I want much more than that [education for jobs].
I want graduates who have a good command of the great sweep of history, who not only know what happened at critical junctures in history but who understand the interplay of factors that produced those turning points and can draw from that understanding of history the implications for the conflicts and choices the United States must now deal with. I want students who understand how and why liberty and freedom developed in some societies and not others, how fragile that achievement can be and what it takes to preserve freedom and democratic government when it is under attack.
I want students who are not only familiar with the greatest works of art that humans have ever created, but have also gained the skills needed to create art and play music themselves. I want students who are good not just at solving problems someone else has defined for them, but who can frame problems for themselves in forms that make those problems solvable. I want graduates who will take the initiative and get it done without the need of detailed supervision. I want students who are good team members and good leaders.
I want students who know the difference between right and wrong and who will do what is right whether or not anyone is looking. I want students who can think for themselves, who can think out of the box, who can look at a complex problem and solve it by bringing to bear an angle of vision on that problem that is fresh and original. I want graduates who are eager to learn from others but not cowed by authority. I want graduates who are not afraid to be wrong, but who work hard at getting it right.
I want students who are not only tolerant of others who are different but who value those differences. I want graduates who set high standards for themselves and never give up until they reach them. I want students who are ambitious but will stop to help others who need help. I want graduates who think of themselves not as consumers but as contributors. The idea of broadening educational goals has become much more widespread. The discussion of context is organized around four broad themes:.
Any assessment is based on three interconnected elements or foundations: To understand and improve educational assessment, the principles and beliefs underlying each of these elements, as well as their interrelationships, must be made explicit. At the same time, education policy makers are attempting to respond to many of the societal changes by redefining what all students should learn. These trends have profound implications for assessment. Existing assessments are the product of prior theories of learning and measurement. While adherence to these theories has contributed to the enduring strengths of these assessments, it has also contributed to some of their limitations and impeded progress in assessment design.
Alternative conceptions of learning and measurement now exist that offer the possibility to establish new foundations for enhanced assessment practices that can better support learning. The following subsections elaborate on each of these themes in turn. Some of the key terms used in the discussion and throughout this report are defined in Box 1—1. Educational assessments assist teachers, students, and parents in determining how well students are learning. They help teachers understand how to adapt instruction on the basis of evidence of student learning. They help principals and superintendents document the progress of individual stu-.
The cognitive sciences encompass a spectrum of researchers and theorists from diverse fields—including psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and neuroscience—who use a variety of approaches to study and understand the workings of human minds as they function individually and in groups. The common ground is that the central subject of inquiry is cognition, which includes the mental processes and contents of thought involved in attention, perception, memory, reasoning, problem solving, and communication. These processes are studied as they occur in real time and as they contribute to the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge.
And they help policy makers and the public gauge the effectiveness of educational systems. Every educational assessment, whether used in the classroom or largescale context, is based on a set of scientific principles and philosophical assumptions, or foundations as they are termed in this report. First, every assessment is grounded in a conception or theory about how people learn, what they know, and how knowledge and understanding progress over time.
Second, each assessment embodies certain assumptions about which kinds of observations, or tasks, are most likely to elicit demonstrations of important knowledge and skills from students. Third, every assessment is premised on certain assumptions about how best to interpret the evidence from the observations to draw meaningful inferences about what students know and can do. These three cornerstones of assessment are discussed and further developed with examples throughout this report.
Even though these fundamental principles are sometimes more implicit than explicit, they are still influential. In fact, it is often the tacit nature of the foun-. Advances in the study of thinking and learning cognitive science and in the field of measurement psychometrics have stimulated people to think in new ways about how students learn and what they know, what is therefore worth assessing, and how to obtain useful information about student competencies. Numerous researchers interested in problems of educational assessment have argued that, if brought together, advances in the cognitive and measurement sciences could provide a powerful basis for refashioning educational assessment e.
Indeed, the merger could be mutually beneficial, with the potential to catalyze further advances in both fields. Such developments, if vigorously pursued, could have significant longterm implications for the field of assessment and for education in general. Unfortunately, the theoretical foundations of assessment seldom receive explicit attention during most discussions about testing policy and practice.
Short-term issues of implementation, test use, or score interpretation tend to take precedence, especially in the context of many large-scale testing programs NRC, b.
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These developments have sparked widespread debate and activity in the field of assessment. The efforts under way in every state to reform education policy and practice through the implementation of higher standards for students and teachers have focused to a large extent on assessment, resulting in a major increase in the amount of testing and in the emphasis placed on its results Education Week, Societal, economic, and technological changes are transforming the world of work. The workforce is becoming more diverse, boundaries between jobs are blurring, and work is being structured in more varying ways NRC, a.
This restructuring often increases the skills workers need to do their jobs. For example, many manufacturing plants are introducing sophisticated information technologies and training employees to participate in work teams Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, and Kalleberg, Reflecting these transformations in work, jobs requiring specialized skills and postsecondary education are expected to grow more quickly than other types of jobs in the coming years Bureau of Labor Statistics, To succeed in this increasingly competitive economy, all students, not just a few, must learn how to communicate, to think and reason effectively, to solve complex problems, to work with multidimensional data and sophisticated representations, to make judgments about the accuracy of masses of information, to collaborate in diverse teams, and to demonstrate self-motivation Barley and Orr, ; NRC, a, Many routine tasks are now automated through the use of information technology, decreasing the demand for workers to perform them.
Conversely, the demand for workers with high-level cognitive skills has grown as a result of the increased use of information technology in the workplace Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, and Hitt, For example, organizations have become dependent upon quick e-mail interactions instead of slow iterations of memoranda and replies. Individuals not prepared to be quickly but effectively reflective are at a disadvantage in such an environment. Technology is also influencing curriculum, changing what and how students are learning, with implications for the types of competencies that should be assessed.
New information and communications technologies present students with opportunities to apply complex content and skills that are difficult to tap through traditional instruction. In the Weather Visualizer program, for example, students use sophisticated computer tools to observe complex weather data and construct their own weather forecasts Edelson, Gordon, and Pea, These changes mean that more is being demanded of all aspects of education, including assessment. Assessments must tap a broader range of competencies than in the past.
They must capture the more complex skills. They must accurately measure higher levels of achievement while also providing meaningful information about students who still perform below expectations. All of these trends are being played out on a large scale in the drive to set challenging standards for student learning. Assessment has been greatly influenced by the movement during the past two decades aimed at raising educational quality by setting challenging academic standards.
At the national level, professional associations of subject matter specialists have developed widely disseminated standards outlining the content knowledge, skills, and procedures schools should teach in mathematics, science, and other areas. These efforts include, among others, the mathematics standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics , the science standards developed by the NRC , and the standards in several subjects developed by New Standards e. In addition, virtually every state and many large school districts have standards in place outlining what all students should know and be able to do in core subjects.
These standards are intended to guide both practice and policy at the state and district levels, including the development of largescale assessments of student performance. The process of developing and implementing standards at the national and local levels has advanced public dialogue and furthered professional consensus about the kinds of knowledge and skills that are important for students to learn at various stages of their education. Many of the standards developed by states, school districts, and professional groups emphasize that it is important for students not only to attain a deep understanding of the content of various subjects, but also to develop the sophisticated thinking skills necessary to perform competently in these disciplines.
By emphasizing problem solving and inquiry, many of the mathematics and science standards underscore the idea that students learn best when they are actively engaged in learning. Several of the standards also stress the need for students to build coherent structures of knowledge and be able to apply that knowledge in much the same manner as people who work in a particular discipline. For instance, the national science standards NRC, state:. Learning science is something students do, not something that is done to them.
In learning science, students describe objects and events, ask questions, organize knowledge, construct explanations of natural phenomena, test those explanations in many different ways, and communicate their ideas to others…. Students establish connections between their current. In these respects, the standards represent an important start toward incorporating findings from cognitive research about the nature of knowledge and expertise into curriculum and instruction. Standards vary widely, however, and some have fallen short of their intentions.
For example, some state standards are too vague to be useful blueprints for instruction or assessment.
Others call upon students to learn a broad range of content rather than focusing in depth on the most central concepts and methods of a particular discipline, and some standards are so detailed that the big ideas are lost or buried American Federation of Teachers, ; Finn, Petrilli, and Vanourek, State standards, whatever their quality, have significantly shaped classroom practices and exerted a major impact on assessment. Indeed, assessment is pivotal to standards-based reforms because it is the primary means of measuring progress toward attainment of the standards and of holding students, teachers, and administrators accountable for improvement over time.
This accountability, in turn, is expected to create incentives for modifying and improving performance. Without doubt, the standards movement has increased the amount of testing in K schools and raised the consequences, expectations, and controversies attached to test results.
Currently, 48 states have statewide testing programs, compared with 39 in , and many school districts also have their own local testing programs in addition to the range of classroom tests teachers regularly administer. Moreover, states and school districts have increasingly attached high stakes to test results.
Scores on assessments are being used to make decisions about whether students advance to the next grade or graduate from high school, which students receive special services, how teachers and administrators are evaluated, how resources are allocated, and whether schools are eligible for various rewards or subject to sanctions or intervention by the district or state. These efforts have particular implications for equity if and when certain groups are disproportionately affected by the policies.
As a result, the courts are paying greater attention to assessment results, and lawsuits are under way in several states that seek to use measures of educational quality to determine whether they are fulfilling their responsibility to provide all students with an adequate education NRC, c. Although periodic testing is a critical part of any education reform, some of the movement toward increased testing may be fueled by a misguided assumption that more frequent testing, in and of itself, will improve education.
At the same time, criticism of test policies may be predicated on an equally misguided assumption that testing, in and of itself, is responsible for most of the problems in education. A more realistic view is to address education problems not by stepping up the amount of testing or abandoning assessments entirely, but rather by refashioning assessments to meet current and future needs for quality information. However, it must be recognized that even very well-designed assessments cannot by themselves improve learning. Improvements in learning will depend on how well assessment, curriculum, and instruction are aligned and reinforce a common set of learning goals, and on whether instruction shifts in response to the information gained from assessments.
With so much depending on large-scale assessment results, it is more crucial than ever that the scores be reliable in a technical sense and that the inferences drawn from the results be valid and fair. It is just as important, however, that the assessments actually measure the kinds of competencies students need to develop to keep pace with the societal, economic, and technological changes discussed above, and that they promote the kinds of teaching and learning that effectively build those competencies.
By these criteria, the heavy demands placed on many current assessments generally exceed their capabilities. Current assessment practices are the cumulative product of theories of learning and models of measurement that were developed to fulfill the social and educational needs of a different time. This evolutionary process is described in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4. As Mislevy , p. Early standardized tests were developed at a time when enrollments in public schools were burgeoning, and administrators sought tools to help them educate the rapidly growing student populations more efficiently.
As described in Testing in American Schools U. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, , the first reported standardized written achievement exam was administered in Massachusetts in the mid th century and intended to serve two purposes: Thus it was believed that the same tests used to monitor. Yet significant problems have arisen in the history of assessment when it has been assumed that tests designed to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and schools can be used to make judgments about individual students.
Ways in which the purpose of an assessment should influence its design are discussed in Chapter 2 and more fully in Chapter 6. At the same time, some educators also sought to use tests to equalize opportunity by opening up to individuals with high ability or achievement an educational system previously dominated by those with social connections— that is, to establish an educational meritocracy Lemann, The achievement gaps that continue to persist suggest that the goal of equal educational opportunity has yet to be achieved.
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Some aspects of current assessment systems are linked to earlier theories that assumed individuals have basically fixed dispositions to behave in certain ways across diverse situations. According to such a view, school achievement is perceived as a set of general proficiencies e. Current assessments are also derived from early theories that characterize learning as a step-by-step accumulation of facts, procedures, definitions, and other discrete bits of knowledge and skill.
Thus, the assessments tend to include items of factual and procedural knowledge that are relatively circumscribed in content and format and can be responded to in a short amount of time. These test items are typically treated as independent, discrete entities sampled from a larger universe of equally good questions.
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It is further assumed that these independent items can be accumulated or aggregated in various ways to produce overall scores. The most common kinds of educational tests do a reasonable job with certain functions of testing, such as measuring knowledge of basic facts and procedures and producing overall estimates of proficiency for an area of the curriculum. But both their strengths and limitations are a product of their adherence to theories of learning and measurement that fail to capture the breadth and richness of knowledge and cognition.
The limitations of these theories also compromise the usefulness of the assessments. The growing reliance on tests for making important decisions and for improving educational outcomes has called attention to some of their more serious limitations. One set of concerns relates to whether the most widely used assessments effectively capture the kinds of complex knowledge and skills that are emphasized in contemporary standards and deemed essential for suc-.
The limits on the kinds of competencies currently being assessed also raise questions about the validity of the inferences one can draw from the results. If scores go up on a test that measures a relatively narrow range of knowledge and skills, does that mean student learning has improved, or has instruction simply adapted to a constrained set of outcomes? A second issue concerns the usefulness of current assessments for improving teaching and learning—the ultimate goal of education reforms.
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On the whole, most current large-scale tests provide very limited information that teachers and educational administrators can use to identify why students do not perform well or to modify the conditions of instruction in ways likely to improve student achievement. Such tests do not reveal whether students are using misguided strategies to solve problems or fail to understand key concepts within the subject matter being tested.
They do not show whether a student is advancing toward competence or is stuck at a partial understanding of a topic that could seriously impede future learning. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a student could answer certain types of test questions correctly and still lack the most basic understanding of the situation being tested, as a teacher would quickly learn by asking the student to explain the answer see Box 1—2.
A third limitation relates to the static nature of many current assessments. It was one of the dates I memorized for the exam. Want to hear the others? I know the English began to settle in Virginia just after , not sure of the exact date. It would take a little while to get expeditions organized, so England must have gained naval supremacy somewhere in the late s. Most people would agree that the second student showed a better understanding of the Age of Colonization than the first, but too many examinations would assign the first student a better score.
When assessing knowledge, one needs to understand how the student connects pieces of knowledge to one another. Once this is known, the teacher may want to improve the connections, showing the student how to expand his or her knowledge. This limitation exists largely because most current modes of assessment lack an underlying theoretical framework of how student understanding in a content domain develops over the course of instruction, and predominant measurement methods are not designed to capture such growth.
A fourth and persistent set of concerns relates to fairness and equity. Much attention has been given to the issue of test bias, particularly whether differences occur in the performance of various groups for reasons that are irrelevant to the competency the test is intended to measure Cole and Moss, Standardized tests items are subjected to judgmental and technical. The use of assessments for highstakes decisions raises additional questions about fairness NRC, c.
If the assessments are not aligned with what students are being taught, it is not fair to base promotion or rewards on the results, especially if less advantaged students are harmed disproportionately by the outcome. If current assessments do not effectively measure the impact of instruction or fail to capture important skills and knowledge, how can educators interpret and address gaps in student achievement?
One of the main goals of current reforms is to improve learning for low-achieving students. If this goal is to be accomplished, assessment must give students, teachers, and other stakeholders information they can use to improve learning and inform instructional decisions for individuals and groups, especially those not performing at high levels. To be sure, assessments by themselves do not cause or cure inequities in education; indeed, many of the causes of such inequities are beyond the scope of the education system itself.
However, when assessment fails to provide information that can enhance learning, it leaves educators ill equipped to close achievement gaps. While concerns associated with large-scale tests have received considerable attention, particularly in recent years, the classroom assessments commonly used by teachers also are often limited in the information they provide.
Just as large-scale tests have relied on an incomplete set of ideas about learning, so, too, have the kinds of assessments teachers regularly administer in their classrooms. Often, teachers adhere to assessment formats and scoring practices found in large-scale tests. Standards-based reform continues to stimulate research and development on assessment as people seek to design better approaches for measuring valued knowledge and skills.
States and school districts have made major investments to better align tests with standards and to develop alternative approaches for assessing knowledge and skills not well captured by most current tests. Teachers have been offered professional development opportunities focusing on the development and scoring of new state assessment instruments more closely aligned with curricular and instructional practices.
Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The quest for alternatives to traditional assessment modes has led many states to pursue approaches that include the use of more open-ended tasks that call upon students to apply their knowledge and skills to create a product or solve a problem. Performance assessment represents one such effort to address some of the limitations of traditional assessments. Performance assessment, an enduring concept e. Even with such alternative formats, however, there has been a constant gravitation toward familiar methods of interpreting student performance.
For example, Baxter and Glaser analyzed a range of current performance assessments in science and often found mismatches between the intentions of the developers and what the tasks and associated scoring rubrics actually measured. Particularly distressing was the observation that some performance tasks did not engage students in the complex thinking processes intended. As a result of these limitations, the growing interest in performance assessment was followed by a recognition that it is not the hoped-for panacea, especially in light of the costs, feasibility, and psychometric concerns associated with the use of such measures Mehrens, ; National Center for Education Statistics, The cumulative work on performance assessment serves as a reminder that the key question is whether an assessment, whatever its format, is founded on a solid model of learning and whether it will provide teachers and students with information about what students know that can be used for meaningful instructional guidance.
Simply put, steps have been taken to improve assessment, but a significant leap forward needs to occur to equip students, parents, teachers, and policy makers with information that can help them make appropriate decisions about teaching practices and educational policies that will assist learning. Fortunately, the elements of change that could produce such an advance are already present within the cognitive and measurement sciences. Several decades of research in the cognitive sciences has advanced the knowledge base about how children develop understanding, how people reason and build structures of knowledge, which thinking processes are associated with competent performance, and how knowledge is shaped by social context.
During this same period, there have been significant developments in measurement methods and theory. As presented in Chapter 4 , a wide array of statistical measurement methods is currently available to support the kinds of inferences that cognitive research suggests are important to draw when measuring student achievement. In this report we describe examples of some initial and promising attempts to capitalize on these advances.
However, these efforts have been limited in scale and have not yet coalesced around a set of guiding principles. In addition to discerning those principles, it is necessary to undertake more research and development to move the most promising ideas and prototypes into the varied and unpredictable learning environments found in diverse classrooms embedded within complex educational systems and policy structures.