"Utilization of alternative assessment, which meets district requirements, that is tailored to the individual student and avoids grades, marks or labels that compare and stratify students. "
Our ideal is no standardized testing! No self-fulfilling prophecies! Children learning as their natural development proceeds! And yes, we have ways to measure growth, described in this thread.
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I'll start with reflection and self-assessment, something I had the opportunity to help with in a kindergarten classroom. For pre-readers, it's a series of questions with face-answers: smile, frown, flat mouth. An adult helps read the questions which I recall being like these:
ReplyDelete"I like reading fiction."
"I listen respectfully at morning meeting."
and so on for different activities.
For specific projects there will be
"One think I like about my autobiography was _____." and "If I did it again I would try _______."
I find many deceptive simple ideas at work in alternative education, and this is one of them. When you are doing this with kids who have never been exposed to competitive or punitive assessment, you find that not only are they completely honest, they are right on. They know what they do well, they know when they are struggling. And the process of reflecting is generally pleasant.
You might ask, what comes next? Is there "intervention" or "remediation" etc. My simple answer is, well, a test doesn't do any of that either. My sense is that just having the child ask herself "How am I doing?" from time to time is valuable. These papers are stored in the child's portfolio, and child, teacher, and parent can look at them over time. The adults certainly have the information to be looking for ways to engage kids in both their strengths and their challenges.
I personally think that we all know when our children are 'progressing', ie moving forward, as opposed to standing still or regressing...
ReplyDeleteI believe in an organic growth/learning model that has a unique pattern for each individual child... yes, there are general patterns of growth that trend for all children, but all the variations within that are totally normal and ought not to be seen as indicators of success and failure...
Growth doesnt happen in a straightforward, linear fashion... there are growth spurts and there are plateaus, which is normal... this happens in intellectual growth as well as physical and emotional growth...
What happens - which I think the education system fails to factor in - is that sometimes a being is growing in areas other than the one under observation.... for example, energy might be focused on an emotional growth spurt rather than on intellectual understanding or physical growth... rarely does growth across all aspects of a being occur/flow equally smoothly, in symmetry...
I dont care where my child 'fits' in relation to his peer group... I just want to know that he is moving forward... if he's standing still I would like to know that and be able to help hold the space for him until he is ready to move forward again. If he's going backwards/losing ground on any level, of course I am going to do what I can to change the environment to the point where he can turn that around...
Narratives and portfolios and self-reporting are a far more effective way of monitoring 'progress'.... standardised testing is a cheap, crude, blunt instrument that doesnt give any picture of what is really going on with each child.... no sense of how well a child can think, problem solve, express him/herself, how narrow/wide their understanding is, whether they can extrapolate into other situations, whether they can use both inductive and deductive reasoning...
It seems to me to be rather ridiculous to make a definitive statement/assessment about a child's academic progress based on a bunch of answers given to loaded (and often culturally biased), mis-interpretable, ambigous questions that dont give a person the chance to explain the reasoning behind their responses.... so, the child is having a bad day - has a headache, had an argument before leaving home that morning, is hungry, has test 'nerves' and doesnt 'perform' well under pressure, has a bunch of familial/societal expectations weighing him/her down and fragile self-esteem - and we then label him/her based on his/her 'right or wrong' answers to some contextually and culturally-isolated questions?
That makes absolutely no sense to me at all - such a waste of time, energy and money for a result that has little value...