The Big Picture & Testing

Something that stood out when reading "The Big Picture" by Dennis Littky, was the author's viewpoint on testing. I've struggled with testing since I was younger, but I have never really considered the reasons for this anxiety until this program. The picture became even clearer this week while reading Littky's book, and by reflecting about recent testing issues at work.

This last week I received pretest and posttest results from a recent class my team developed. The class had been previously piloted and had received very positive feedback, so I expect great test results. This course was highly visible among all levels of management, so there was an even greater pressure to deliver. Anyway, the students scored, on the average, in the mid 70 range for the pretest. For the posttest, the scores where only a few percentage points higher- only a marginal improvement. So what does this say? I was really concerned that our test scores yelled out "no real improvement!" But was that really the case? After reading "The Big Picture" I am reminded of the limitations the standard multiple choice test. My team started asking all the questions. Was the test too simple? Was is too difficult for some? Did it really reflect the content that was learned? I really don't think we can answer these questions. There are just too many factors to consider. It is an obvious problem with standardized tests - they cannot show with certainty what was really learned. The very design of the test is too subjective.

So what can be done? We had numerous activities throughout the course. Why not measure the results of these activities as evidence of learning. Similar to Littky's examples, we could have students present some of the content and evaluate accuracy from there.

What is difficult is that traditional testing is expected by my organization. My hope is that I can slowly introduce alternate means of evaluation and help reduce this testing madness.