Funny, I seem to remember taking tests when I was a kid
An Associated Press story published Tuesday quoted an East Chapel Hill High School teacher offering this familiar lament:
"What we're noticing with kids more and more is an attitude that if it's not on the test, they don't want to learn it. Testing has taken the spontaneity out of learning."
You know, I noticed that, too -- back in the 1960s when I began to figure out how things worked in elementary school.
And then in high school and even at college in the 1970s. ...
A lot was riding on tests, and if you were smart you tried to anticipate what was going to show up on the test so you could study for it and make a good grade.
If you were pretty sure certain material would not be tested, it just wasn't worth your time to cram it into your head.
Did that remove some of the spontaneity from learning? I'm afraid it did. And, I have to say, especially in regard to my college career, I wish I had devoted more time and energy to learning for its own sake rather than to accomplish the purpose of earning course credits and keeping up a certain GPA.
But it's important to measure what students learn. Testing is one way to accomplish that.
Is it a narrow method of evaluation? It can be, if teachers are too specific about what students are expected to know. But if teachers tell students that anything and everything mentioned in class or contained in a reading assignment may show up on an exam, the students are given a powerful incentive to learn as much as possible.
Maybe that strips the classroom experience of some spontaneity. But so do lesson plans.
Or maybe it can spark spontaneity, if even obversations offered by students themselves during classroom discussions can appear on a test.
How would this be for a high school earth science essay question: Summarize the points made by Sue and Bobby during their impromptu discussion of global warming last week. With whom did you agree, and why?
I know EOG tests don't allow that kind of latitude. But they are designed to evaluate how much subject matter students know. How else are we going to find out, short of conducting one-on-one interviews with each kid at the end of the school year?
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