hacking education

I can fix standardized testing

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:23:00 -0700

Interesting post from the Washington Post last Friday about the shortcomings of standardized tests. I concur and believe that I have a solution that can help move us past our dependancy on standardized tests. Drop your email at MotionSpark.com to stay informed on my new startup.

We often forget that there is nothing fixed or natural about “school” but that, like all institutions, it evolves in response to historical circumstances. In the case of standardized testing, the multiple-choice exam has had an impact far beyond the crisis that inspired it, and a reach and application far beyond what its inventor intended.
Institutions of education should be preparing our kids for their future — not for our past. In the Internet age, we are saddled with an educational system that was designed for the industrial age, modeled on mass production and designed for efficiency, not for high standards.
We know that bubble tests address only a quarter of the kinds of knowledge students master in schools. For low-income kids, who have limited resources for college costs and thus little reason to think that their test scores matter to their future, the exams can seem irrelevant. For them, low scores can denote not just a possible lack of knowledge but also a possible lack of motivation to concentrate on the exam. Affluent kids, if they pay enough and take enough test-prep courses, can get higher scores.
We are not teaching and testing our students for responsible participation in the interactive digital age.

We’re facing a crisis in education today, much like Kelly faced in 1914. The U.S. high school completion rate is dropping slightly in real terms, and dramatically relative to other industrialized nations. But even more serious is the rate at which teachers are leaving the profession. Teacher attrition has increased by more than 50 percent in the past decade, and it is often the best teachers who leave first, many citing the demoralizing testing requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Right now, we have teachers, out of self-preservation and to protect their schools and their students, teaching to a test that was designed in the era of the Model T. We are 15 years into the information age. Now is the time to begin to rethink how we assess learning for the challenges of the digital world that lie ahead. It’s not as simple as filling in the bubbles.

hacking education

I can fix standardized testing

A cast of believers. Zinch acquired by Chegg.

Still waiting for the Wikipedia University

Mozilla badges reminiscent of Boy Scouts

Chegg finds a competitor for the "whole education lifecycle"

Chegg piecing together the student graph

will.i.am's robot is better than your robot

The future of education... 100 years ago

Debt fears drive US youth away from college

Is Online Learning Better?

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, a new study confirms some earlier findings about the efficacy of online learning in two-year colleges...

The Changing Rules of Education

Gamification: The future of Education

Tuition

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

Sal Khan on LinkedIn

Meet George Jetson

How layoffs hurt students

Amazing Leadership = Amazing Results

Khan on TED

The evolving field of education