Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 36)

cost and ef⇒ciency than for educational value. “They don’t truly measure what a student knows or doesn’t know,” he says, “or whether students have a depth of understanding so that they can apply their knowledge.” Real Solutions to Real Problems John Bransford Forget the Facts. Can You Learn? Researchers at Seattle’s University of Washington are creating a new kind of assessment that would turn our age-old ideas about learning on their head. Contrary to popular belief, says project leader John Bransford, learning basic facts is not a prerequisite for creative thinking and problem solving—it’s the other way around. Once you grasp the big concepts around a subject, good thinking will lead you to the important facts. So, along with colleagues at the university’s Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center, a laboratory sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Bransford is building assessments of what he calls “preparation for future learning.” “What we want to assess is how well prepared people are to learn new things in a nonsequestered environment where they have access to technology tools and social networks,” says Bransford. Compared to typical standardized tests, for which seeking new information would be considered cheating, he says this model is “way more motivating, much more interesting for students, and much more valid in terms of what people really need to do when they get out of school.” In the computer-based tests, students are presented with complex problems that might have more than one good solution. One test challenges students to assume the role of animal-endangerment expert, ﬁelding questions from ﬁctitious clients around the world about how to protect local species. Another makes them virtual genetic counselors, dispensing advice to couples about potential risks to their children. They need enough conceptual knowledge to decide what kinds of questions to ask; then they search the Web for information and create whatever charts or diagrams will help them meet the challenge. Scoring is done with rubrics. Fully realized, this kind of assessment would be linked with curriculum. Rather than moving along a metaphorical conveyor belt from one lesson to the next, Bransford says, students would spend time developing expertise in a subject. Through repeated challenges, they’d build up strategies and resources over time, just as a worker would on the job. The researchers are trying out the test now with students in North Carolina and Washington State; they aim to have a prototype science test ready by the end of this school year. —GR In the past, states haven’t had much choice in the kinds of large-scale assessments available, nor have they asked for much. That’s about to change. Test makers in multiple corners are creating more complex assessments, ones that, if tied more closely to curriculum and instruction, could paint a clearer picture of student learning. They’re building these assessments to measure the twenty-⇒rst-century skills we so urgently need, aiming to gauge a child’s readiness for the real challenges that await. If tests like these succeed, they could not only provide better information about children’s readiness for real life but also give educators incentive to do what they want to do anyway: teach kids in engaging ways to be well-rounded people and lifelong learners, not drill the life out of school with dry test preparation. A number of researchers are building tests that could be models—or at least one piece of a larger model. John Bransford and Andreas Schleicher, head of the Indicators and Analysis Division at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), maker of the PISA exam, believe students need dynamic problems to solve, ones that require real-world research and allow them to learn on the spot, not just apply prior knowledge. A static problem, for instance, would ask test takers to say from memory how to save a certain endangered bird species. A dynamic assessment (in a real example from Bransford’s lab) asks students to use available resources to learn what it would take to prevent the white-eyed vireo from becoming endangered. This is a novel question that demands students independently dig for information and know enough to ask the right questions to reach a solution. Bransford says he doesn’t believe the old trope that students must master a battery of content-speci⇒c facts before they can have a prayer of learning higher-order skills. “Just the opposite,” he says: Students need to understand big concepts in each discipline, such as the relationship between a species’ life cycle and its risk of extinction, but from there it’s the higher-order skills that lead them to the pertinent facts. At ETS—which writes the SAT and Advanced Placement exams, among others, and administers ⇒fty million tests a year— Randy Bennett is ⇒eld-testing assessments that make use of about thirty years of psychology research on how children learn. It’s research that he says has been largely left out of test design. The key strategies he has found include asking students to integrate multiple skills (such as reading and making comparisons) at once, presenting questions in meaningful contexts, and using a variety of information forms, such as text, diagrams, and symbols. Eva Baker, codirector of UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, proposes one more: Never have someone present a solution without explaining why they chose it. It’s not so different from the kind of assessment Jennifer Simone would like for her students. She’d like the exam to use more formats than just writing, including visual or spoken components. “You would have to take the time to have a student interview, allow students to have an oral response,” she says. “That’s how we teach them reading.” Technology is what will make this revolution possible. Already, computers have enabled Bransford, Baker, and others to create interactive questions, search environments where students can ⇒nd new information, and simulations to make problems more engaging and real. These tools can record students’ answers as well as their thought process: what kind of information they sought, how long they spent on each Web page, and where they might have gone off track. The British government has created a computer-literacy test that challenges teens to solve realistic problems (how to control crowds at a soccer match, for instance) using online resources. The more sophisticated these tools become, and the more adeptly test makers use them, the better assessment will be. So, progress is coming—in some cases, has arrived—but as the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher says, “It’s a long road, and we’re at the beginning.” The biggest hurdles are time and money (richer tests require more of both to design and administer), and that rarely tamable beast, politics. The next version of NCLB, due later this year, could pump federal money into pilot projects to help states create richer assessments, paired with richer curriculum—but only if that clause survives the political battle to come. Stephen Dunbar, the Iowa test author, has doubts that more complex tests can be done on a large scale. Though the effort is worthy, he says, the cost and time to create and score open-ended questions, and make 36 EDUTOPIA APRIL/MAY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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