Part I Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V In our play, The Oracle, which ran off Broadway at Theater For the New City this past May, Joe Queenan and I had one character demolish her colleague in an argument thusly: “…But you’re not for me. Not my type. Type! Did you […]
Tag: testing
Does High IQ = High Intelligence?
Who doesn’t love an article about Mensa, the high IQ organization, that covers polyamory, Settlers of Catan, and this marvelously nerdy joke? Schrödinger is driving on the highway and he’s speeding, and a cop stops him and searches his car, and says, ‘Did you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?’ He says, […]
No Tests But For Learning Starts With Getting The Right Tools
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]