From THE PEDAGOGY OF THE 21st CENTURY By William A. Draves and Julie Coates © LERN Chapter 6. Grading and Assessment: Tests Every Week The system of grading and assessment of student learning that most institutions use

today is the one created for the factory school of the last century.

The way learners are assessed in this century will be transformed and have these

characteristics:

-Focused only on learning and knowledge.

-Objective, created by evaluation specialists, tested, and with cumulative data by different

student demographic characteristics for benchmarking.

-Behavior, including time, attendance, work done and late work will not be considered.

-Multiple assessments will respond to differences in how we as individuals test.

The result will be that grading and assessment will not only more accurately reflect

what a student has learned, but grading and assessment will become integrally part of the

learning process.

There are a number of problems with the current system of grading and assessment.

The problems include that the current system is:

-Measuring inputs. Time, work, timeliness, number of words and other inputs are

measured rather than learning and knowledge outputs.

-Subjective. The current system is relying too much on teacher judgment and

assessments that are not norm-referenced and tested.

-One size fits all. The current system is oriented towards the concept that one size fits all,

with the same test administered to all students in a given class at the same time with no

choice in test delivery options.

-Behavior oriented. Behavior unrelated to learning and knowledge, much of which is

hard-wired and can arguably be attributed to neurology, is given too much weight in

grades and assessment.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, the current system of grading and

assessment was created largely in response to the need for education to prepare students

for work and life in the factory and office.

The Carnegie Foundation took a leading role in the creation of time as a measurement

of educational attainment. By 1910, nearly all secondary institutions in the United States

used the "Carnegie Unit" as a measure of secondary course work.

The Carnegie Foundation contracted with Morris Llewellyn Cooke to explore ways to

measure education at the higher education level. His resulting work, “Academic and

Industrial Efficiency,” was published in 1910 and became the basis for the Student Hour

used by colleges and universities. (1)

Again, the motive here was to standardize educational measurement and faculty

workloads. Cooke established the collegiate Student Hour as "an hour of lecture, of lab

work, or of recitation room work, for a single pupil."

So the very foundation of education in the last century became a measure of time.

One’s educational attainment was largely measured by time, time as an input.

Grades also served the interests of the factory, and helped solidify the factory school

model of the last century.

The grading system of A (excellent), B (good), C (average), D (below average) and F

(failure) was based not on objective scores, but on a comparison with other students

(sometimes referred to by students as “the curve”).

This was helpful to the factory, where a major personnel issue was the assignment of

people to various levels of jobs within the factory. Thus, a student who was a “C”

student, and thus average, became a factory worker on the assembly line. A student who

was a “B” student and above was more likely to be able to become a foreman or

supervisor in the factory. And the “A” or excellent students went on to college and

became the managers and professionals in the factory and office.

In terms of high school education, by the 1920s society deemed a high school degree as

essential for working in the factory, and made high school education “universal” with the

goal of everyone graduating from high school.

In terms of college and university, society deemed that only around 25% of our nation’s

youth needed to be college graduates, and thus part of higher education’s mission in the

last century was to keep 75% of the youth out of college.

The resulting system, whether intentional or not, can arguably be said to have worked

extremely well. Not only did the United States become the world’s richest and most

powerful nation, but the system was employed basically with the same tenets in other

industrial societies around the world as well, boosting the standard of living for citizens

in Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia and other industrialized nations.

The problems with the existing system of grading and assessment were virtues in the

last century, when the most valuable work sector was the factory worker, and offices

were run like factories. Consider:

-Time inputs were the measure of productivity in the factory. It is no coincidence that the

tardy bell in high school rang in many schools at the same time as the factory whistle

blew, signaling the start of the factory shift. Attendance and time put in were measured

in the factory with time clocks, and attendance and time were what produced factory

goods by the workers.

-The teacher as evaluator of student achievement reflected the supervisor’s role in the

factory. The supervisor evaluated workers. Teachers served as supervisors, the same

function that foremen served in the factory and office supervisors or “middle

management” served in the office.

-One test or evaluation served all students, because in the factory all workers were, and

had to be, the “same.” The factory was intentionally standardized with “one way” to

produce goods in order to maximize efficiency. So students were preparing to work the

same way, and be the same. Whether or not students were individuals or learned

differently or tested differently was largely irrelevant to the needs of the factory.(2)

-Behavior was integrally related to success and the productivity of the factory. One could

say that behavior was even more important than learning and knowledge in the factory or

even the office. Attendance was essential, showing up on time critical, turning work in

on time an absolute necessity, and behavior outside the acceptable norm simply

inefficient and a hindrance to effectiveness of the factory and office.

In the knowledge work society of the post-industrial nations of the United States,

Canada, Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia and others, none of the characteristics of the

testing and assessment system of schools are relevant and of virtue today. Instead, they

are all obsolete and either irrelevant or a hindrance to the most valuable work sector in

the 21st century, the knowledge work sector.

Time input, in particular, is obsolete. We know now that attendance does not equal

learning, and that someone sitting in a chair for eight hours does not necessarily learn

more than someone sitting in a chair for four hours. We know that time is no longer a

valid measurement of learning.

Less time is now valued more. The educational system of the last century had as a

central tenet that the more time one put into one’s education, the higher the level

achieved. In this century, employers actually value the opposite. The sooner one learns

something, the more quickly one achieves a level of knowledge, the more profitable for

the company and the more productive the individual. So learning something in four

hours is actually better in this century than learning the same amount of material in eight

hours.

Even continuing education for workers today is based on an out-of-date system called

Continuing Education Units, or CEUs. Spending 10 hours learning something qualifies

for 1.0 CEU. Thus, if someone learns a given material in 5 hours, one is only rewarded

with half the CEUs as the person who takes twice as long to learn the same material.

Complicating learning at the professional, higher education, and even elementary and

secondary levels is that an increasing amount of learning is done online. Almost all

colleges and universities have online classes available for their students. Online courses

are increasing at the secondary level as well. But it is almost impossible to measure time

spent learning online. Only a few agencies can measure time online with retinal scanners

measuring eyeball time or fingerprints on the mouse pad. Even when that is feasible for

educational institutions, it is still irrelevant to learning outcomes.

Teachers are awful at getting grades correct. Nancy S. Cole, at the time President of

the Educational Testing Service, along with Warren Willingham determined that GPA

(grade point average) was roughly equal to test score results for only about 45% of

students (47% for females, 44% for males). (3) If we were grading teachers at grading, a

45% would be an “F,” or failing.

Cole and Willingham document that some 28% of students get better grades than their

test scores indicate they should receive, and that 28% of students get worse grades than

their test scores indicate they should receive. We can debate whether giving a student a

better grade than she or he deserved is worthwhile. There can be little debate about

whether giving a student a worse grade than he or she deserves serves any purpose.

Giving students worse grades than they deserve keeps too many of our smartest students

out of college, prevents them from graduating from college, and thus creates a skilled

worker shortage in some of our most valued profession such as science, engineering and

technology, occupations critical to a knowledge economy in the 21st century.

Here we suggest that the way learners will be assessed in this century will be

transformed to be:

-Focused only on learning and knowledge.

-Objective.

-Excluding behavior as a criterion.

-Employing multiple assessments.

Tests will be:

1. Benchmarked.

The system to evolve will be composed of thousands of tests in thousands of different

subject areas. Visually think of these tests as hurdles in a foot race.

The structure of knowledge in the 21st century is clearly towards units and subunits. So

when a student has mastered a subunit or unit, she or he will take a test. If the student

passes, that hurdle has been jumped and the student will move on to the next level.

Passing a test will no longer be based on a comparison with other student scores. In the

knowledge society, one’s work is judged by a standard or benchmark, irrespective of

whether every other student passes or fails the same test.

For example, British, Canadian and American educators with the Commission on the

International Learning Unit have proposed a testing and assessment standard called the

International Learning Unit, or ILU. The benchmark for passing a test is 80%. If a

student gets 80% of the questions correct, the student passes. (4)

Whether or not the International Learning Unit becomes the standard, some standard

will be accepted by educational institutions for its validity, transferability, and ability to

compare various tests and assessments.

2. Frequent.

Instead of one test, or infrequent tests, testing will occur as frequently as the student

wishes. When a student is prepared to take a test, she or he takes the test. This will be

done as often as weekly. (5)

Re-testing. For most tests, retesting and taking the test over again will not only be

allowed but encouraged. The idea is for everyone to pass, for everyone to learn good

grammar, for everyone to spell correctly and do multiplication correctly.

Pre-tests. Pre-testing will become common, giving each student (and the student’s

teacher) a beginning measurement of learning and knowledge. From the pre-test, the

student and teacher can determine how much the student has learned moving forward.

Quiz-outs. Students will be able to quiz-out on certain units and subunits simply by

taking the test for that unit of material. In this way, students remain challenged and

optimize the use of their time in studying material which is new.

3. Objective.

Tests will be created by the best test-creation experts. They may be teachers, they may

be testing experts. They may be amateurs, unpaid citizens with a particular excellence in

a given subject or particular gift in test creation. (6)

Tests will be constantly evaluated, with data compiled in every way conceivable to

provide feedback on relevance and reliability, as well as combining test scores with

student demographics to show variances among different kinds of people.

4. Multiple assessment choices.

If we learn differently, do we test differently? The correct answer is “Yes.”

Thus, the word “test” is used here as an evaluation or assessment because it best

conveys what the assessment accomplishes. But a “test” will not merely be a multiple

choice, true or false, fill in the blanks kind of test. Those tests will be offered.

But these kinds of “tests” will also be available for each content area:

-Essays and papers

-Oral exams

-Online comments

-Individual projects

-Group projects

-Practice or demonstration of skills (examples: taking blood for a nursing student; fixing

a flat tire for a bicycle mechanic).

-Reflective journals

-Analysis of case studies

-Debates

-Role Plays

-Games

-Drag-and-drop exercises

-Gaming and virtual world demonstrations

-Physical construction of objects

-And others.

Tests will be constructed for different learning styles, such as the various learning

styles of visual, kinetic, auditory, and sensory.

Tests will also be constructed to address various physical abilities and disabilities.

Some students will choose to use blue pencils, sit in windowless rooms, have a lizard

present, or take them at 3,000-foot elevations.

5. Given when ready.

Tests will be given when the student is ready to take the test. As Mike Baker,

Education Editor for BBC News writes, “Instead of preparing pupils for the high stakes

tests at the end of each key stage, teachers' focus would be on assessing when a child is

able to move up one level in the national curriculum grades. When they think a child is

ready, they can put them in for a test that will be set and marked outside the school. They

will not have to wait, as now, until pupils reach the end of a key stage at seven, 11 or 14.

This will mean ‘several shorter, more focused, and more appropriate tests’ for each child,

rather than one big test at the end of the key stage. (7)

Most tests online

Most tests will be taken online. But students who test best in-person, orally, or

answering questions from a teacher, will also have those opportunities.

With online tests, creating, disseminating and evaluating a thousand tests in 10,000

subjects is both feasible and cost effective. With hundreds of millions of students in post-

industrial countries taking the tests, there will be a sufficient sample for each kind of test

from which to evaluate its relevance and effectiveness.

In summarizing grading and assessment for the 21st century, the way learners are

assessed in this century will be transformed. Grading and assessment will be focused only

on learning and knowledge. The new system of testing and assessment will be more

objective, exclude behavior as a criterion, and employ multiple assessments.

Pedagogically, best of all grading and assessment will become integrally part of the

learning process. It won’t just measure learning but actually enhance each student’s

learning.