Schools Look for a Real Test of Student Knowledge

For Frank Till, a complex and growing national debate over how to test American students on what they know can be crystallized in the homework his son brought home from a junior high school social studies class last week.

Till, assistant superintendent for San Diego city schools, described the class textbook as a dispirited listing of facts, compiled almost as if it were a beginning college term paper, each chapter followed by a rote test on dates and names.

“There’s nothing in the book or (in the tests) about how to apply the facts, to compare what happened in Constantinople, for example, to Europe or in early America,” Till said. Why not take social studies, as well as other subjects, and break away from the emphasis on bits and pieces of information to show more students that learning can be exciting as well as challenging?

A number of school districts and state education departments nationwide--San Diego’s among them--are trying to encourage such changes, in large part by changing the nature of the multiple-choice, standardized tests long used to measure student achievement. For years, such tests have driven the way things are taught in the classroom and how textbooks are written.

At the same time that an uneasy American public continues to question whether its students have benefited from the many reforms--and large sums of money--applied to education since the early 1980s, educators are moving away from the multiple-choice philosophy used to satisfy those demands for accountability.

Already, for an increasing number of students in California and across the nation, hourlong essays and open-ended answers to math questions are replacing the fill-in-the-bubble sheets.

No longer do many students search down an “a-b-c-d-e” list to pick out a correct answer. Instead, they find themselves challenged to describe the way they would solve a math or science problem, or to show how they can use facts and grammar to write cogent, logical positions addressing a social or political argument.

California schools Supt. Bill Honig, who oversees the annual California Assessment Program testing, which takes the state’s educational pulse, is in the forefront of influential officials advocating these changes. He and others argue strongly that multiple-choice evaluation measures only limited basic skills and fails to accurately gauge a student’s real ability to think and reason--skills the nation’s future high-tech work force must have to succeed.

The new CAP writing test for all eighth- and 12th-graders in public schools now requires essay exams in one of several areas--autobiographical, reports of information, problem solution among them--instead of answering multiple-choice questions about grammar, syntax and style.

The CAP direct writing assessment has led districts throughout the state to revamp their writing instruction to emphasize more essay and problem-solving exercises, in math and social studies classes as well as in English. The state’s new framework for teaching reading emphasizes literature rather than grade-level reading books, and calls for teaching spelling and grammar mainly within the context of reading, not as separate skills.

The state of Vermont is moving toward a requirement that all students prepare annual portfolios of their work, folders compiled throughout the year that would show a student’s intellectual growth and performance in a variety of areas. Connecticut is designing math and science assessments that might take up to a semester for students to complete.

Such testing, known as authentic assessment, approximates more closely the types of problems and issues that students will face in future jobs. As Rand Corp. education director Linda Darling-Hammond put it two years ago, there is no multiple-choice list available for someone to fill out at his or her desk each morning.

Some educators argue that the reform push is proceeding backward, that changes in curriculum to emphasize more thinking and creativity should proceed ahead of any testing changes.

“The issue should not be just better tests, but rather should be centered on what is valued in the curriculum,” Grant Wiggins, a senior associate with the National Center on Education and the Economy in Rochester, N.Y., said last week at a testing conference in San Diego.

In fact, the school districts at that conference--San Diego; Dade County, Fla.; Rochester; Seattle; Santa Fe, N. M.; Louisville, Ky., and Baton Rouge, La.--pioneered efforts to improve student achievement through various reforms, including more teacher responsibility for selecting subject matter and more school site authority for deciding budgets, before the latest testing debate developed a full head of steam.

Those districts together have received almost $3 million in the past four years from the private Matsushita Foundation, an offshoot of the Japanese maker of Panasonic products that sponsored the conference as part of its goal to reform American educational practices.

But all administrators concede that, like it or not, standardized testing drives the curriculum and that such top-down changes will bring improvements much faster than relying on incremental reforms at the individual school or district level.

“Authentic assessments are performance tasks that will drive the curriculum in the right way,” Honig said. “Teaching to these tests is what we want, because the tests and the curriculum are aligned. These tests are 100% connected with real world, on-the-job performance.”

The discussion of testing is a surrogate for what Americans want in their children’s curricula, says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a leading player in nationwide school reform.

Impetus for change has come in part from public disappointment that higher student scores on national multiple-choice tests the past several years have not necessarily meant students are more fit to solve problems independently or to integrate their knowledge. Stories are legion of graduating students unable to handle problem-solving tasks on the job.

Because existing tests--which include the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills widely used in California--emphasize factual recall, school districts and, by extension, individual teachers end up stressing memorization and recall, educators say.

“We know we are going to be held accountable by the public for what (is reported) on the tests,” Till said. Without a change in the major tests, few teachers and probably fewer districts will gamble with a change in curriculum because the reforms will not be reflected on the test, he said.

The issue goes to the heart of how educators view the learning process, said Tom Payzant, San Diego city schools superintendent and president of the Washington-based Council for Basic Education.

“Is learning developmental, in stages which should then be measured appropriately, or is it some fixed ability that students have and we then just teach (and test in the present way) those skills based on that ability?” Payzant asked at the Matsushita conference, one of three held in California this month on the future of educational testing.

Without agreement on the developmental theory, which Payzant and other reformers strongly support, then “districts are going to have a tough, tough time moving toward authentic assessment,” he said.

Payzant would like to pilot programs in San Diego, starting with kindergarten through second grade, de-emphasizing standardized tests over a three-year period to allow teachers to experiment. However, he conceded that, at some point, both educators and parents will want to know how the pilot group students compare with others on some type of test.

“The problem is not standardized testing, it is multiple choice,” said Ruth Mitchell, associate director of the Council for Basic Education.

For that reason, the evaluation department of the San Diego district--the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system--has been designing a new testing plan to gradually de-emphasize its own use of multiple-choice, standardized tests across the entire spectrum of grades.

(CAP testing does not report individual student scores, but measures performance by schools and by districts around the state. Districts use other standardized tests from private companies to compile individual student scores and to make further school-by-school comparisons.)

The plan, parts of which have been presented to private testing companies for possible pilots, would eventually include portfolio compilations in various academic subjects, said Grant Behnke, evaluation director for San Diego.

“For example, the district could set up certain benchmarks in subject areas, such as the need for third-graders to show computation of liquid volume, which we could then test through a performance assessment and not on paper. . . . A paper exercise only shows a student’s ability to read measurements, not actually to show what volume really is.”

Behnke said such tests would also prove more useful for teachers in understanding what their students do and do not know about the subject and how to improve teaching methods.

The move toward the more open-ended testing is not without its problems and critics. Grading such assessments is slower and more costly than machine-scored tests. For example, the CAP writing exams take months to complete and require teams of English teachers throughout the state to receive training in scoring before gathering over a given weekend to grade the essays.

Also, authentic assessment by itself will do little to address the achievement gap between white and Asian students, on the one hand, and black and Latino students on the other, Till and others concede. Blacks and Latinos fare worse on current multiple-choice tests than do other ethnic groups, and, although different types of testing may discover latent creativity and achievement among some students, the overall pattern will be little changed.

Shirley Weber, a San Diego school board member and professor of Afro-American studies at San Diego State University, said alternative assessment cannot substitute for the fact that many minority students still fail to achieve adequately on current standardized tests. Without an adequate base in the basic skills and facts, those students will still be unable to tackle problem-solving and higher-level thinking skills that are central to authentic assessment.

The testing issue also touches on a related national education debate: to what extent students should share a common core of knowledge about history and Western culture. Some critics fear that, under authentic assessment, teachers will spend less time on a common core of information and instead stress concepts and point students to appropriate books and other sources of specific facts only when needed.

But proponents believe that a mix of content and concept will not be that difficult to accomplish.

“You can do both,” said Dale Carlson, CAP manager for the state Department of Education. Good teachers already instill a knowledge of facts as well as the ability to use them in problem-solving, Carlson said.

Added Dennie Wolf of the Harvard School of Education: “The brightest and best students, the students in advanced placement courses, for example, have always had this method (of teaching and assessment). . . . Right now, it belongs only to the very few.”