Some Brief Thoughts on Assessment: Authentic and Otherwise

While participating in a recent discussion thread, the topic of assessment with particular attention focused on  alternatives to traditional tests.In the discussion there was a heavy emphasis on “authentic” assessment, which has become one of the great buzzwords of educationalese that has seeped into general conversation in our profession. Some of the articles and comments that were entered into the mix wound me up a bit, which happens from time to time. So here are some broad thoughts on the topic with more likely to surface, eventually.

First,  I feel as though the word “authentic” has been euphemized to the point of uselessness. Moreover, I take great issue with the implicit assumption in a lot of “authentic” assessment rhetoric that somehow school somehow lies outside the “real world.” I don’t know about everyone else, but I show up to work at a school daily, and it is pretty firmly located in the real world, as far as I can tell, and a lot of others seem to be there too.

To suggest that schoolwork is somehow de facto inauthentic is both insulting and demeaning to everyone that works in education or at least ought to be. Never mind that the liberal arts kind of education most high schools are designed to facilitate is simply neither primarily vocational nor meant to be training for some job that a student might pursue. Nevertheless, this does not meant that tasks, assessments, or experiences cannot have practical applicability in the world beyond the walls of a school, but more often than not these efforts are fictions anyway. They often make an effort to appear or simulate the “authentic” or “real world” but are complete fabrications of the “real world,” wherever it is to be found. Service and vocational work is a different story altogether with different goals and aims. Still, there is something to be said for using aspects of professional work as an example of practices, whereby students may feel more motivation or educators might prove or justify the value of a particular task or learning goal(s).

Regardless, there are a lot of jobs that are subject to testing, which is not terribly dissimilar to the pencil-and-paper kinds that are used often in schools and serve as a basis for denigrating attacks. In fact, I would suggest that many of the tests that required in the adult world are actually worse offenders of the kind of stigma that is suggested of schools. I have personal and anecdotal evidence of professional testing preparations where it is common to hear, “This is what you need to know for the test, but this is how it works in reality.”

Plus, the original professions are laden with tests for admittance for education and entry into professional practice. Want to be a doctor, you have to take a test. Want to be a lawyer, you have to take a test. Well, not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer, so how about some less prestigious work? Want to sell real estate, you have to take a test. Want to sell securities, you have to take a test. Don’t want to go to school anymore and plan to go into the military, get ready for enough tests to make your head spin, often without the benefit of a second chance to pass. For crying out loud, we all had to take multiple test just to become teachers, where wealth and esteem await! Truth is tests are a part of life – period. To pretend otherwise is not only foolish but dangerous.

Despite all of this, I rarely give tests as assessments, because most traditional testing methods show me what a student does not know, rather than what they do, which doesn’t seem the best way to get a sense of what or how much a student is actually learning, never mind the progress they have made. Moreover, tests are most often more focused on assessing content knowledge and are far poorer assessing skills, problem solving, creativity, methodology, process, or any of the other list of things that I think are ultimately more important to a person learning. Also, those intangible factors I began listing contribute far more to experiences students may have in actually doing work that is more instructive than anything I can provide alone as a teacher.

Lastly, I will mention something that I often say to students, which many are probably too young to understand but there are quite a few that do, “At the most fundamental level, self-assessment is really the only kind of assessment that matters.” Thus, I try to constantly guide students to reflect on their own performances and work, learning how to honestly gauge themselves in relation to the task, their natural abilities, work-ethic, learned skills, and more. I try to emphasize and honor the idea that assessment is ultimately not about me, at all. It is, in fact, truly all about them, individually within varying contexts, and that they must learn to know themselves in an “authentic” way.

Thoughts Responding to Some Recent Student Reflections

I have been reviewing a lot of student writing of late, which has definitely eaten into the time I have to spend some time investing in my own writing. I have quite a few things I am itching to pound into words but have been partially burned out, feeling behind, and letting a lot of things get in the way. All this  got me thinking a little about my relationship to the National Writing Project network.

In reading some of the self-assessments and reflections from my ninth grade students, I am finding a common thread, corroborated by the number instances and the individuals writing the same thing. While students are admittedly not the most reliable reporters, I continue to see statements that suggest my students have already written more in my class already then they have in their entire eight grade year, and we are not even through the first semester. Interestingly, many of the students reporting this I would rank a bit higher on any reliability scale. Plus, I know it is probably adolescent hyperbole. Yet with sadness I must admit, this would not shock me if it proved true.

Perhaps more curious to me is I genuinely wonder just how much writing they are asked to do and what the nature of it is. On this point, I am genuinely inquisitive and not looking to just pass judgments. Given the chance I want to have some conversations with teachers not just in the middle school where I teach, but I also feeling some compulsion to make inquiries  of other teachers in the high school, particularly outside the English department. Honestly, I have always been a bit reluctant to do this, for fear that it might seem aggressive and judgmental.

Now I know I make the kids write a lot, although I try to be careful about believing my own hype on this, not to mention “a lot” is a pretty relative term. Still, I am growing a little weary reading accounts of how minor the writing demands are, be it middle school, other departments, or even within my own department. I guess my suspicions are mounting again on this front, which happens from time to time.

Part of what may be fueling all this suspicion and concern is my steadfast feeling that many teachers simply do not consider themselves writers, which brings me back to the Writing Project. One of the core values of the Writing Project effort focuses on the teacher as a writer. Many a Writing Project teacher is likely to echo the idea that it is hard to teach anyone how to write if you are not engaged in writing yourself. Thus, if many of my colleagues just don’t think of themselves as writers how much instruction are they really able to provide?

What’s more, it seems to me that as I informally look around writing is almost synonymous with assessment. Is it any wonder that I encounter so many fourteen year-olds that are reluctant or weak writers? Almost every time students put pen to paper it is to produce work destined to become fodder for teacher’s judgments, teachers who do not consider themselves writers but seem to believe they know good writing when they see it. Even more disconcerting is when the only real value of student writing has is merely a means for extracting some knowledge that they should have obtained. Talk about a recipe that would make anybody gag, not to mention a mess of mixed messages.

I certainly don’t feel like I am breaking any new ground here, but I guess I have been feeling some of this more acutely as of late. This seemed as good a place as any to show it. It all makes me want to stop reading student writing and get to writing some more of my own.

Some Recent Thoughts on Grading

So as part of an yearlong effort, my high school is trying to examine grading practices. I am not entirely sure where it is all leading, but I thought I would post some of my thoughts from a recent online discussion that our school is having regarding the question, “How do you ensure that students’ grades are an accurate picture of their learning in your class?”

I am not terribly sure I like the question, or at least I think it is a weak question that obscures a path to an much deeper answer that is far more worthy of a stronger, more fundamental question. That being said, I have been giving a lot of thought to the nature of questions lately, how they are formed, how they shape the thinking that follows, how to craft better ones. Nevertheless, here were my initial thoughts.

On a fundamental level, I think that grades are deeply flawed in their ability to provide an accurate picture of learning in a class. They are far too abstract and are unsystematically abstracted from student learning. So from that standpoint, I am not convinced that the systems that are generally in place, both here and elsewhere, can actually accomplish this aim at all. The common grading system is far too laden with competing factors that render it Byzantine at this point.

Yet, the only way that I know to provide an accurate picture of learning through the use of “grades” is by engaging in consistent and rigorous conversations with students about goals and objectives, means by which those will be assessed, and always providing opportunity for the student to remediate those assessments in some way. Without those three elements I would challenge the accuracy and validity of any grade.

There will always be some measure of subjectivity or bias, but the assessor can take measures to limit or control them in an effort to be as objective as possible. Often it is not easy, nor is it nearly as scientific or coldly mathematical as we might like. There is an artificiality to grades that belies the spectrum of understanding or the potential for learning. Yet we, as the institution of education, continue to try and make the best of a bad situation, with highly questionable results.

Interestingly, I had a colleague read this before I posted it, worrying that it might seem too wonky or inaccessible. For some reason, I felt a bit more tentative about declaring some of my deep-felt thoughts about grading. Truth is I hate grading. It is absolutely the worst part of my job as a teacher. Most fascinating is knowing I am not the only one that feels that way.

I have written about grading in the past, some experimentation that I have tried and the results, and I even recently discussed some of my thoughts about all this with my classes. While I am still delaying a lot of grading this year, I am not making as big a deal about it with the students. Amazingly, there have not been as many outcries or much visible frustration yet. Yet, I made an effort to reassure all my students that they needed the opportunity to make mistakes in order to learn and that grades tend to get in the way of those efforts. They seemed to get it on the surface, at least.

Quite simply, I wish there were only three grades that expressed something along the lines of “not good enough or meets a/the ‘standard’,” “good or meets a/the ‘standard’,” and “beyond good or exceeds a/the ‘standard’.” I mean that is generally how we all nearly simplify any kinds of assessments in life, and I am not just talking about school or teaching. When I think back to every evaluation that I have gotten in a workplace, prior to becoming a teacher, that is about what those assessments amounted to. Sure they might have used fancy language or adopted some “quality” lingo and prepackaged form, but what always mattered most were the conversations that I had with the person or people doing the evaluation. And in every case those conversations were driven by the three qualifiers I outlined above.

I wish we could adopt something like this in schools. Instead we continue to insist on fragmenting the simple for increasingly more discrete pseudo-measurements, as if it is all so scientific, analytic, and smoothly translates into mathematical numbers. Yet to me that is all about sorting and nothing to do with assessment, and we have built entire institutional and societal norms on dubious methods of measurement.

The more distance a grade is from the context of the class and the teacher that give it the more distorted that grade is. Still, so much false value is placed on them and they are used as the currency for so many judgements. To me grades, as they typically exist today in schools, are the central properties in a increasingly widening distortion field.