“The reaction was swift” Now there’s a cliche. We are three times more likely to come across that phrase in newspapers than to read ‘the reaction was slow’. and as George Orwell advised in his essay Politics and the English Language over seventy-five years ago, “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech […]
Author: testingapersonalhistory
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After thirty posts in thirty days in January of this year, I knew my connection with the overlapping subjects of testing, education, learning, knowledge, and (so-called) merit was not severed or dissolved. They still strike me as important and I still want to try to stir up some good trouble in those regions. At that […]
NO Tests But For Learning: Alphabet Soup and Irish Whiskey
This is it: January Jolt #31. Not a believer of numerology but… 31 is a black number on the roulette wheel that many players consider lucky perhaps because it is a prime number. Prime numbers are numbers that have only 2 factors: 1 and themselves. (Speaking of roulette, who can forget the classic movie line of […]
NO Tests But For Learning: The Provocation Proceeds
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. […]
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 […]