Getting Assessment Right in the Common Core Era

From the Marshall Memo #435

“Better thinking about assessment can help us change our culture of teaching and learning from ‘know and be able to do’ to ‘understand and be able to explain,’” says former Chicago principal and University of Illinois/Chicago leadership coach Paul Zavitkovsky in this thoughtful article in Catalyst Chicago. He approves of the Common Core State Standards and believes they will help us move students toward deeper understanding and higher-order intellectual skills. But more-demanding curriculum standards aren’t just about adding to what our students already know. “[T]he evidence from modern learning science points in a different direction,” says Zavitkovsky. “It says deeper understanding typically starts by letting go of something you already ‘know’ so you can reincorporate that knowledge into a deeper, more comprehensive system of explanation.” 

For example, despite what we learned about the solar system in school, most Americans still believe that the Earth gets warmer in the summer because it moves closer to the sun, and gets cooler in winter because it moves further away. “That’s a good guess, but bad science,” he says. “One explanation for why we keep getting this one wrong is that most of us aren’t very smart. A better explanation is that common sense and intuition trump formal knowledge until there’s a compelling reason to let intuition go.”

Zavitkovsky draws the analogy to curriculum standards. For generations, our intuition told us that school is about adding skills and information and filling gaps in students’ knowledge, and over the last two decades, we’ve created thousands of state standards and hundreds of assessments. “So we trusted our intuition, we doubled down on our bet, and we lost,” he says. “Now we have a choice. Do we double down again, or do we let go of some comfortable intuitions and start putting our money on a different horse?”

Zavitkovsky says four well-worn intuitions are part of our current approach to curriculum and assessment. “If we don’t find a way to get past them,” he says, “they’ll kill the Common Core.”

• Intuition #1: Mastery of skills and procedures is the main show. Not so! TIMSS (Third International Math and Science Study) videotapes of teachers around the world showed that higher-achieving countries regularly engage students in an active struggle to understand core math concepts and procedures – while U.S. teachers spend large amounts of time reviewing material and practicing mathematical procedures without expecting students to grasp the underlying concepts.

• Intuition #2: Commercial test design is objective, precise, and scientific. No Child Left Behind led states to define standards of what students should know and be able to do and hire testing companies to produce items that matched. The content strands and tests that emerged, says Zavitkovsky, “reflect a skill-based mindset that is out of sync with modern learning theory and runs contrary to the goals of the Common Core. An old adage in systems theory is that, ‘Your system, any system, is perfectly designed to produce the results you’re getting.’ In recent years, we’ve done a more perfect job of designing our system so that it reduces what we teach to discrete skills and procedures. Without confronting that bias, we will continue to assess and report learning in ways that will doom the Common Core.”

• Intuition #3: The best way to improve assessment at scale is to do that job for teachers so that teachers have more time to “just teach.” A striking irony of the No Child Left Behind era is that, just as we were outsourcing assessment to test companies, research showed that frequent, high-quality on-the-spot assessment in classrooms is one of the most powerful ways to improve teaching and learning. Finland picked up on that finding, prioritizing it in teacher development, and has vaulted from the middle of the pack to being one of the highest-achieving nations in the world. Meanwhile, the U.S. seems to be repeating previous mistakes, with the PARCC and SMARTER consortia producing multi-state tests without working to help teachers improve their classroom assessments. 

• Intuition #4: Standardized testing is inherently sterile and inauthentic. Some educators have jumped to the conclusion that we should abolish large-scale tests. Not so fast! says Zavitkovsky, citing Grant Wiggins’s recent article pointing out that the best test items reveal student misconceptions and require interpretation and transfer (see Marshall Memo 328). The problem with state assessments has less to do with the items than with how the results are reported, says Zavitkovsky. “Reporting that pre-packages results for teachers denies teachers access to more nuanced aspects of student thinking that hold the key to deeper learning.” 

“The surprising implication of Wiggins’s analysis,” he continues, “is that standardized testing doesn’t have to be the Darth Vader of school reform. Released test items and full reports of student responses can actually deepen the way we think about teaching and learning in ways that other forms of assessment cannot. They can also give us better insights about how to improve local assessment practices in ways that directly support the goals of the Common Core.” Analysis of assessment data should do more than produce lists of who should be taught what tomorrow, he says. It should “support collective analysis and adult learning. The purpose of that learning is to produce more thoughtful and challenging assignments that can only be created by classroom teachers and collaborative teacher teams.” 

The Common Core standards pose the biggest challenge to American schools since the Progressive Era of John Dewey, Zavitkovsky concludes. “To succeed where Dewey and others have failed, we need to build coordinated systems of local and external assessment that work together to support ambitious learning by students and adults. Insisting on more thoughtful reporting of state and district assessments will be an important first step toward scaling up improvement of local assessment, where the pay-offs can be huge and where the potential for improvement is enormous.” 

“Testing and the Common Core” by Paul Zavitkovsky in Catalyst Chicago, Mar. 12, 2012, 

http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/news/2012/03/19/19935/testing-and-c...