The Evolution of Assessment in Education
I remember holding my assignment in the air when my name was called, to show I had done the homework. I remember singing aloud to a room full of classmates in “music & voice” class and the teacher gave me an A because I got up and dramatically walked around the room as I belted out the lyrics. And I recall giving it my best in technical drawing, yet never being able to get above a B on anything because the teacher said my handwriting was sloppy.
My grades were not because the drawing was bad, not because I sang well, or certainly not because I did the homework — but rather because I was given a task and it needed to be recorded. The teacher’s justification was shallow and opinionated at best. It was going through the motions, and not until I saw a teacher give responses that made a difference in my learning, did I actually learn from the results — in 11th grade.
In the 80’s & 90’s, education lacked differentiation, multiculturalism, anything project based or even real world applicable, and therefore was keen on a “one size fits all” style of teaching. If the student wasn’t earning A’s, then they just weren’t considered smart or as capable as someone who was.
Some more reflections of assessments from my schooling…
I remember writing notes everyday in chemistry, and having what seemed like the best kept and most written in notebook I’ve ever created from a class. We would take notes for 2 weeks on new stuff, and get a quiz on what we covered prior to — which meant we needed to remember old stuff. The quizzes were multiple choice unless we had to write in an equation.
Today — our chemistry teacher has kids create explosions from mixing chemicals.
I would have remembered that one still to this day, yet I don’t even recall a lab that I completed in chemistry. All those notes, for what?
I never heard the word rubric until I became a teacher. The only time I knew exactly what the teacher would want us to do in order to obtain a perfect score on an assessment, was when the teacher handed us a practice test, and that’s what was given as the actual test as well.
I remember in public speaking, our final speech was graded on pitch, eye contact, and pace. That’s sort of a rubric I suppose. At least I knew what I was being graded on.
Assessments were multiple choice and essay almost 95% of the time.
The remaining 5% were the random performance in drama, singing in voice class, maybe a presentation would be in there from history or a research project here or there — but it was sporadic at best.
In fact, I took a forensic science class and the teacher said that we would learn as much about crime scenes and forensic evidence as we could in the semester, and the final would be an actual “who done it” crime committed in the class by one of the students, and we’re all supposed to figure out who was the culprit and determine why. I was hooked on day one for the entire course. The final didn’t disappoint and we all loved it.
That final was the only one that I ever took that wasn’t a combination of multiple choice questions, fill in short answers, essay based, or my old friend “true or false”. Rumor had it the class was super easy, although I remember learning so much in that class!
Why was it that education was filled with these traditional versions of assessment?
Why didn’t we think that education needed to adapt and that it wasn’t the student who needed to instead? Was this because education was too new? Was it because this is how it always was prior?
Or was it something greater — which exposes a latent root of systemic issues in education, also meaning that it wasn’t supposed to be for everyone.
Thank goodness educators got smarter…
In the 80’s & 90’s, the notion of special education became widely used to educate those with physical differences that warranted another way for instruction to be delivered. That was almost the extent of that definition.
Those that didn’t show grades and scores that were acceptable in the eyes of those that made the decisions in the school, were put in a track of classes that were easier and called “basic” level courses or remedial.
Therefore, if you didn’t perform well on multiple choice assessments, we labeled that as you weren’t able to. You went into a class that had less questions on multiple choice tests and they weren’t given as often.
It wasn’t the process, it was the product that dictated decision making. In all fairness to those in education back then, this was the method of thinking that was utilized to evaluate data when making informed decisions in schools. Kids are failing this class every year, so let’s make the class easier to pass. This was what was called, “dumbing down” learning, or “watering down” instruction — so everyone can “understand”.
I believe that a systemic issue in education is that it was masked with a notion that itss for everyone and represented that chance for life growth in every sense of that possible definition; when if it earnestly sought out to do that we wouldn’t have such inequities in the caliber of schools, payment of teachers, and levels of offerings in areas that need them most.
That said, education began to change, because it was so ineffective on a national scale, that something drastic needed to happen. In the late 90’s, we started learning about how we teach and why we teach it, instead of what we teach as the driving factor for educational focus.
This meant, if we gave a multiple choice test and half the class failed, it may not be because the students don’t know the material, but rather they can’t handle a test with so many questions on the same page, or they are visual learners and need to see it so they can explain it, instead of writing it down. Perhaps they’re a kinesthetic learner, and can act the part better than any Franco Zefferelli version of Shakespearean plays that we all watched in high school, or perform a lab with known results because they know the process.
We shifted focus to the process, not just the product.
Now, we incorporate the learner into our learning equation — and it makes sense.
For those that think because we don’t give multiple choice assessments and essay based finals anymore, means that we are dumbing down our education in America, well then you could perhaps benefit from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he explains that education was always set out to enable the rich to get richer and the poor remain where they are in life — due to the inequalities of schools and educators in the areas that struggled most compared to schools that were in affluent communities.
Thankfully, over the last 40 years, education in America has shifted from doing it the way it always was, to doing it most effectively for all students in the most purposeful way.
Traditional forms of assessment validated a person’s ability to memorize, which is in no way a measurement of their ability to learn and retain information on a long term scale so it can be utilized to formulate new information. This is the main goal of education — and now we are providing means to maximize this based on measuring the process, not the product.
