Guy Fawkes posted a diary yesterday called "Getting Schooled, Not Educated.". In it, he made the following point:
Students of mine, when asked, talk openly of learning just enough for the test and then forgetting all of it.
When we talk about "testing" in secondary school, what we're usually talking about is standardized tests; e.g., the Regents Exams in New York, or things like the SAT and ACT. The context is usually the issue of teacher and school evaluation, i.e., judging the quality of a teacher or a school by how well its students do on these state- and nation-wide tests.
I want to take a somewhat different approach to the concept of testing, and look at it not as a means of assessing schools, teachers or students on a state- or nation-wide scale. My issue is the use of testing as a primary means of assessment in academic classes on the school level. Particularly as an English teacher, I always felt that everyday work was significantly more important, and more valuable, than cumulative testing as a means of assessing actual literacy.
As a high school English teacher, I always emphasized everyday work over testing. In fact, I didn't even give a "test" at the end of a reading, if I could avoid it (although in some places I was required to do so). I was far more interested in performance-based assessments; I required students to keep a reader-response notebook, so they'd not only have to read, write and think about a segment of the text every day, but would also have a record of that thinking at the end and be able to use it to produce a final work product, such as a critical essay (e.g., modeled after the ELA Regents exam, a so-called "Critical Lens" essay). Students were to keep all of their everyday work (classwork and homework) in a single notebook, which I collected periodically and assessed holistically based on specific performance criteria. The notebook was worth a substantial portion of the grade; ultimately, no student could pass my class without doing the everyday work.
See, the situation Guy Fawkes describes in the snippet above, that is not learning. Memorizing a set of facts so that one will "know" them on a particular day may result in a passing score, but ultimately nothing will actually be learned. Requiring everyday work with respect to a literary text, studying literature as it is meant to be studied (read -> think -> write -> discuss -> repeat), that produces actual literacy. When my 9th or 10th graders moved on to 11th grade and took the ELA Regents, the books they chose to write about on the "Critical Lens" were the books they had read in my class. These were the books that they knew, that they remembered, that they were able to write about intelligently from memory on an exam as much as two and a half years later. I still get emails from former students about those books (indeed, I got a number of them a year ago when J.D. Salinger died, about both A Catcher in the Rye and W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, in which Salinger is a character).
I've known high school students, apart from those I taught, who have told me that they either passed all of their English classes, or got straight-A's therein, without ever having actually read any of the literary texts they were assigned. Instead, they used secondary sources (like SparkNotes and Wikipedia), picked up the basic facts through what the teacher told them in class, and in doing so "learned" enough to get the multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blanks answers on the test correct at the end of the unit. The year I taught on Long Island, I was not only required to give students that sort of objective test, I was required to give them the answers in advance, in the form of a "review sheet" that they would fill out but that I would correct and complete in advance of the test. In effect, there was really no need for a student to read the book at all, at any time during the process, let alone think about it, write about it, or discuss it with other students, since they'd be given the answers to the test in advance anyway and needed only to memorize them in time for the test. Under no circumstances was I permitted to ask these students a question on a test to which I had not already given them the answer. "Don't make them think," my supervisor told me. "Just give them the answers, let them get a hundred, so they'll feel good about themselves."
One thing we sometimes forget about high school students, that they themselves are not even aware of, is that when you're in high school, you're not so much learning the content or subject matter of your classes as much as you are still learning how to learn. Much to their credit, the designers of the New York ELA Regents Exam (the one given from 2000-2009) recognized that fact, and made it a non-content-specific exam, making it instead a pure test of skill and performance, a test of how you read and write, not what you read and write. I made this point repeatedly over the years to supervisors who still insisted on treating English Language Arts as a content area, rather than a performance area. On the first three Regents tasks, the students would have to read and write about passages they had never seen before and had no way to read in advance, and on the fourth, they would have to write about the books they had read, whichever ones they chose, from memory. My giving them the answers about whatever they're reading now, will not help them work their way through a text on their own when they sit down for that Regents exam.
In my view, the English Regents worked better than most tests, standardized or in-school, because it was not a test of what kids know as much as it was a test of what kids can do. And it was never the same test twice; the passages and the "Critical Lens" changed from one administration to the next, so the old exams became useful teaching resources. Some people say "we learn by doing." We certainly learn a lot more by doing than we do by testing.
It can be challenging, however, to get high school students to engage with everyday work. One reason for that is they get so accustomed to the cumulative-testing model described above that they figure they don't need to do the everyday work, and in many cases they turn out to be right. In that Long Island school I mentioned in particular, no one, not even the adults, saw the value in doing everyday work; all that mattered was passing the test (and "feeling good about" oneself). I was allowed to assign it, but not to base a substantial portion of the grade on it, and certainly not to have a student fail for not having done it. Passing the test was all that mattered.
What we have, I think, is a disconnect between passing and learning. We say we want the latter, but what we really want is the former; the latter is no longer a prerequisite to the former. I honestly believe that if secondary schools shifted their focus from testing onto everyday work, and developed performance-based assessment criteria for that everyday work, perhaps even eliminating testing altogether, we'd see a lot more actual learning.