Skills vs. Assessment

This is the first year that my daughter has experienced rigorous testing. As a third grader she lost somewhere around three weeks to learn how to take standardized tests. Yes there is a skill to test taking, and there are some people who are much better at it than others. But are we teaching to the test?  Personally, I'm an over-thinker. I do horribly on those tests. However, give me a real project, an essay question, or any other substantial content to produce from scratch and you will find a completely different person underneath that low-test-score exterior.  Will my daughter suffer as I did? Or will she be more like her dad, a genius at multiple guess but it takes every ounce of energy and brain power in his body to write a paragraph. Learning styles, did anyone say learning styles? According to Michael Simkins,"we can get some initial gains on tests by teaching to the test and practicing test taking skills. Ultimately, though, we're going to hit an achievement wall." He goes on to suggest that teaching higher order thinking skills is really the way to get over that achievement wall.

Meanwhile in our school district some schools have already started Saturday school programs to help students who aren't testing to the required level. I've been told that Saturday school will be a requirement soon for many children. So, let's take a huge number of students with ELL backgrounds, difficulty focusing and any number of other barriers and put them in school more to simply aggravate their feelings of inadequacy. I wonder how those ELL students might do on the same test given to them in their first language. What if the kids who had trouble concentrating had more time to burn off energy so they could come back to focusing (oh, wait, we just took that time away because we took their Saturday...) All of this extra school is linked to the fear of lost funding and NCLB. Do we really need more seat time or could it be the quality of the seat time that students get that should be adjusted? Smaller class sizes might help the struggling kids but the funding was pulled for that... As an educator I have never agreed with standardized testing as a means to determine applicable knowledge and even less so when I consider the skills today's students need to lead in tomorrow's world.

Arthur C. Clarke questioned, "How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?" So how do we know what to teach our kids? Perhaps that's the point. It isn't the content that is important so much as the set of skills that go along with the content. According to the article 21st Century Skills: Will Our Students Be Prepared? written in the Tech & Learning Journal back in 2003, we are continuing to look for the same skills as were needed in 2001. Those skills are focused more on higher order thinking. Time to revisit Blooms Taxonomy, revised.

Anyone remember the last time they needed to take a multiple guess test at work? I don't. But, just a few days ago I had to make a complete presentation to a room full of university administrators demonstrating both knowledge and creative ways of approaching difficult situations. I had to defend/sell my approach to get their buy in on making some changes to a program currently in place. The following day I needed to write a memorandum of understanding. Nope. No multiple-guess skills needed.

As Alvin Toffler so succinctly stated, "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." So, if we want to close the gap in our divide and we want our struggling students to "catch up" is it really more hours of school that they need in order to learn how to learn. Are we going at this the right way by giving them more seat time? Does cutting funding to existing art, music and language programs to add 4 year old kindergarten really "fix the problem?" What do you think?