The proceedings of this blog began back in September with an invocation of the metaphor of exorcism. Some might have found that strange, but the comparison seemed apt to this old altar boy because impressions and ideas, objections and observations, frustrations and fancying associated with the world of testing do afflict me like distracting spirits. […]
Month: January 2022
NO tests but for learning
NO exams but for education When I set out to craft thirty-one straight posts on the blog Testing: A Personal History, my outline of topics designed to effect the exorcism of my educational measurement experiences seemed to fit within that January timeframe. I was wrong. Again. This erroneous estimation is of a piece with 28 […]
Question Authority Because Authority Should Ask More Questions
In yesterday’s post, the issue of increasing disregard of the authority that is necessary to create a meaningful test occupied my daily rant. But even then the need to consider the other side of authority — whether those with the decision-making rights about educational measurement seek sufficient counsel from the people who actually take the […]
Are Problems With Tests Really Problems With Authority?
An unexpected telephone conversation this morning, on the 27th day of for this blog, exposed me to a loved one who trusts what Joe Rogan and his guests say about the pandemic. In other words, that person believes that those voices speak with authority. To do so requires a corresponding belief that the so-called official […]
The Baseball Hall Of Fame Is A Meritocracy; Our Society Is A Ganglion Of Oligarchies
Being a baseball fan my whole life, the conversation about yesterday’s most recent Hall of Fame (HOF) induction interested me because I think that institution for whatever its other faults acted in accordance with its meritocratic nature. Critics of yesterday’s election results missing that point also mistake how arguments for admission to a meritocracy should proceed.. To say that […]
Myths of Meritocracy Are Entangled in Myths about Testing
The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin, a foundational text of modern assessment design, the science behind the making of tests, lays out the components of a formal argument that leads to a claim. (And remember the whole reason to have a test is to be able to make some claim about what someone knows […]
MailBox Monday #3: Tests, Time, Teachers, and Inertia
It is a beautiful but cold Monday morning here in Princeton New Jersey. Well, just barely morning as I am writing this a shade before noon. But my ebullience arises in part from finally shedding my obsession (as noted in y’day’s post) with reading critiques of the SAT. Earlier today, I gleefully informed the Google […]
Dog’s Breakfast or What My Algorithm Hath Wrought
According to Merriam-Webster, a Dog’s Breakfast is defined as “chiefly British. : a confused mess or mixture.” I don’t know about the British part because we certainly heard the phrase in our exclusively Irish household where I knew that it meant something that was thrown together. (The first use of the term cited by OED is […]
Mind Reading with My Granddaughter
The photo above is of my granddaughter and I walking to her nursery school this past October. Ever since she was born in 2018, the connections to what I know about learning obviously bubble up when I see her playing or hear her first babbling and now talking. And we are talking really TALKING. Mirror […]
Cognitive Gadgets Are Not Lego Toys
Let’s review the bidding here as we enter the bell lap in. our January Jolts with more than 2/3 of of the thirty-one pledged posts now up. The posts so far have included: An avowal that everyone has a personal history of testing, which means we all have experienced tests. Some wondering why our takes […]