Earlier this week Seth Godin released a manifesto on education called Stop Stealing Dreams. You can download a printable version or view an online version. I follow his blog and I’ve written about a couple other of Seth’s works (Tribes and What Matters Now). I enjoy reading his ideas and am often challenged by his perspective.
Seth’s education manifesto is arranged as a series of short, numbered sections that resemble blog posts. In one section (10. Frederick J. Kelly and your nightmares) he tells the story of Frederick J. Kelly. Seth credits Kelly with developing the multiple-choice test item. He then goes on to say that Kelly “disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned.” According to Seth, we continue to use multiple-choice tests because its “the easy and efficient way.”
I agree with part of what Kelly said. Yes, multiple-choice items assess only a portion of the curriculum; in particular recall of facts and skills. However, this important item type should not be abandoned. In my opinion multiple-choice test items share a place with a number of other item types: constructed-response items, performance tasks, and technology-enhanced items. Every item type has its strengths and weaknesses, so why throw one out? I think that we should be looking for ways to have many item types and student experiences work in concert to provide valid and reliable information about what each student knows and can do.
Thankfully, I’ve been working for better than a year on projects that help achieve this vision. I’m grateful for these opportunities because I feel like I’m “doing something” about bad testing practices. However, this is change on a scale I’ve never seen before. This means that this transition won’t be perfect, or pretty, or fast. However, if we can sustain the change, I am confident that educational assessment will become a powerful tool to improve student learning.
Do you think that educational assessment can be transformed into a positive change agent in the field of education?