Educators have advocated weaving testing and learning into games for years. Where does that initiative stand now? The question occurred to me in reading Ethan Mollick writes highly engaging posts about a variety of subjects often intersecting with the world of education. In this recent post, he wrote, “Hire good gamers! Video game performance can […]
Author: testingapersonalhistory
Nepotism, Networks, and Nature Outgun Test Scores
You cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Or is it possible that the saying really should be that venerable canines like your correspondent cannot unlearn their old tricks? This conundrum confronts me almost daily as my neural tentacles quiver at the sight of some factoid or phrase they were trained to retrieve — and […]
Do Tests Cause Cheating?
Survey: 37% of Students Say Their Schools Didn’t Try to Stop Cheating This publication, The Cheat Sheet, offers lots of interesting tales of cheating. They seem to be UK based as evidenced by stories like this one: Cheating Cases Almost Double at Oxford Oh, it only increased from 35 to 77 cases, but still… Oxford!!! And […]
The Reaction Was Swift
“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 […]
More to say
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 […]