What gets tested, gets taught

More interesting responses to Sunday's - Lobbying post.

The first comes from Tim Stahmer's Assorted Stuff blog entry  First, Understand The Basic Concept in which he reacts to Tom Hoffman's reaction to my Sunday proposal that quotes ISTE CEO Don Knezek as working against technology integration. (How's that for a chain of events?) In it he concludes:

 But the most disappointing part of this story is the source of the proposal that set Tom off. It comes from the CEO of ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), the largest advocacy group for technology in education. If their leaders are really that clueless, the effort to help teachers truly integrate technology into their classrooms has a very long way to go.

Does looking at information/tech skills as a separate entity mean they can't be integrated into the curriculum as well? I've addressed this question before regarding information literacy skills in a column called Owning Our Curriculum. I'll try to make the same points about technology literacy here that I did about information literacy in the column. (I have a tough time separating info and tech literacy anymore anyway).

1. Info/tech literacy is a basic skill every student should master. It should be treated with the same importance as the other recognized basic skills  of reading, writing and math.
2. Teaching basic skills as a separate, non-integrated subject is viewed as good educational practice. We have reading, writing and math curricula, teaching materials, courses, teachers and tests.
3. Basic skills should be "integrated" (or perhaps a better word is applied) across the curriculum. English teachers want social studies teachers to "teach" writing skills and practice writing, yes?
4. Integrating skills does not eliminate the need for basic skills curricula, teaching materials, courses, teachers and tests.
5. The public expects schools to be accountable for teaching basic skills. The current way of being accountable is through testing. (See more on this below in my response to David Warlick.)
6. What gets tested, gets taught.

 I don't see that integration and viewing information/technology as a separate set of skills to be taught are exclusive. If such skills are only integrated, nobody has responsibility for student acquistion of such skills and everybody has the opportunity to pass the responsibility on to someone else.

In another post, David Walick defends the messiness of authentic assessment in More Loose Change on his 2 Cents Worth blog (and in a reply to the Blue Skunk post Loose Change - follow-up):

...although performance/production based assessment is messy, messy is what teachers do. Certainly multiple-choice/true-false assessments have always been a convenient crutch to many teachers. But project-based/product-based teaching, learning, and assessment were much easier to implement before high-stakes testing. The critical change is that communities have lost confidence in their teachers (for no good reason), and education has begun to lose confidence in itself. I think that we need to empower teachers and then turn education back over to them, the experts.

I don't disagree with David, but I would also say there is a place and need testing as well as assessment when it comes to I/T skills if they are to me taken seriously by educators. I am huge fan of Rick Stiggins and his  Assessment for Learning work. Hell, I offer workshops on authentic assessment of I/T skills myself. Good, messy assessments using well-designed tools are critical to the teaching and  learning process. They are good for kids, promoting growth, not simply categorization.

The problem is that we live in a society that believes in testing. And quite honestly, a degree of accountability shown through testing is not all bad. (See Exposing Shameful Little Secrets.) Our problem is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of testing and the results are being used in the implementation of NCLB punatively. This is a problem with test expectations and result use, not testing in itself.  And hey, you want something taken seriously by teachers just put it on the next high-stakes test. That is the reality as much as we may not like it. Let's use the system we are working under while also trying to change it.

One last thoughtful response comes from Wesley Fryer on his Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog posting Standards and accountability are not the answer. Again, I empathize and agree with much of what Wes says, but he doesn't give me a plan for making the kinds of changes he wants to see. Give me something actionable!

One last lengthy comment came from librarian Diane Chen regarding professional organizations and lobbying which I need to reflect on a little since it challenges my original post for quite another set of reasons.

I hope the conversation continues. 

Comments

[Janice Friesen]

My main response is YES-What is tested is what gets taught! I think that Doug sees it from the inside. In Missouri when Fourth grade had the social studies test, Third Grade avoided this topic. They were tested in Communication Arts and that is what got classroom time. As much as I hate standardized testing I do think that it has a huge effect on what happens in classrooms.

Janice

[Todd]

Wait, wait! Don't you think you have that backwards? You're putting the test BEFORE the content? Shouldn't you test what you have taught, not teach what you will test? So we're to teach to the test because we'd just screw things up otherwise?

And of course standardized testing has a huge effect on what happens in the classroom. It's rapidly becoming the central focus and we have to ask whether the kids of skills required to do well on standardized tests are the kinds of skills we want future members of society to have. Don't we want people who think outside the box? Don't we want students to use their knowledge to solve problems in interesting ways, not necessarily in the exact same way we have marked down as the answer (A, B, C, or D)? Just because standardized tests have an impact on the classroom does not make it a positive one or a desirable one.

You mention things being taken seriously by teachers. So you don't think that teachers take their job seriously unless it's on a test. In California, *none* of the speaking and listening standards are tested, yet most of us do teach them because they are important to life after high school.

And what about the expectation that students take things seriously? Parents? I like the high school exit exam for exactly that reason: there's a reason for students to be interested in instruction related to that test. On all other standardized tests, where's the incentive for the student to take the test seriously? And if I have a student who realizes that her performance on the test means absolutely nothing to their academic achievement and that her grades in her regular classes are far more important, should I really expect her to take a 3-hour standardized test as seriously as her biology exam that Friday? In fact, shouldn't I reward that critical examination of the task placed in front of her? And yet my school would be held "accountable" for that student not doing so well on the test. From what we've seen at my school, we managed about a 60-point API jump mostly by changing the campus attitude toward the test. You'd better believe that student incentive (or lack there of) for taking the test accounts for a large reason schools do so poorly on tests.

You're right in saying that the problem is that we live in a society that believes in testing; that is the problem when we have delivered tests that do not measure what they proport to and yet we all seem to think they do. And that's what we call "school accountability." You're right; that is a problem.