Getting to NTFBL (No Tests But For Learning) will take time and enormous energy to flip the current status quo overwhelmingly favoring summative assessment. But we can start with formative assessment’s greater adoption by classroom teachers. Formative assessment seeks “to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching […]
Tag: learning
If the ‘learner is at the center’ then shouldn’t all tests already be for learning?
Former ETS colleague Kate MIllet published an intriguing article recently here that pointed me towards the Big Education report where I read this sentence: “When the learner is at the centre, it is their strengths and needs, passions and interests that become the focus for transformation, wherever that learner comes from and whatever system they […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
My Blue Genes
My Blue Genes is the name of a fictional company sponsoring the podcast in the play Genealogy written by Joe Queenan and myself and presented as taped here in less than perfect fashion when it premiered at Broom Street theater in Madison WI this past November. shows like Finding Your Roots inspired Joe and I […]
MailBox Monday # 2
Our mailbox is bustling this week and even better many of the comments come from dear friends whom I have known for over half a century. In fact, the photo above is from where Mark attended school — the Abigail Adams Schoolhouse — while growing up in Weymouth Massachusetts. We met at Manhattan College in […]
Hope IS A Strategy
The word ‘dialogue’ cops 2,380,000 hits on Google all by itself, which indicates to me that people mean a lot of different things when they use the word… Dialogue. One of the purposes of the blog Testing: a Personal History was to attempt to establish a dialogue about testing. My meaning of dialogue, however, tracks […]