In the classic Norman Rockwell classroom, tidy students sit in neat rows, listening attentively as a teacher lectures beside a chalkboard. Along with spelling bees and poetry recitations, multiple-choice tests (neat questions, tidy answers) fit perfectly into this nostalgic picture-like pigtails fit into inkwells.
But the world is a lot more complicated than it was when Rockwell painted his images of innocence and simplicity. It's a world where wild salmon are in danger of dying out. Where terrorists' bombs blow away jumbo jets and office buildings. Where people roam the earth from their keyboards. Where kids tuck handguns in their backpacks, just in case.
In a complicated world beset with planet-threatening problems, children need a lot more than unconnected bits of information and isolated skills—the kind of information and skills that multiple-choice tests are designed to measure. They need to learn to think deeply and critically. To analyze and dissect information. To apply knowledge creatively in order to meet the social, economic, and environmental challenges they'll face in the next century.
Classrooms where kids learn advanced thinking skills aren't of the neat-and-tidy variety. Instead, students mingle, share, collaborate. They work on projects, conduct experiments. Teachers confer with the class instead of declaim at the board. Often, there's noise and confusion. Real learning—the kind that leads to insight and understanding—is, after all, a noisy, confusing enterprise. Answers to real-life problems rarely can be plucked from a book.
The assessments that fit this new picture of learning are as active as the classroom itself. Instead of filling in bubbles with No. 2 pencils, students do things: compile portfolios, conduct experiments, write essays, give speeches, present reports. In contrast to the ease and economy of standardized multiple-choice tests, these new assessments are tough to score and expensive to conduct. But it's a price that schools around the Northwest and across the nation increasingly are willing to pay.
At the foot of Southeast Alaska's coast range, where massive Mendenhall Glacier hangs like an ice-blue pendant, the Juneau Borough School District is a leader in innovative assessment. Eight years ago, when the district's primary teachers and a few administrators launched a portfolio assessment project, they were explorers in uncharted waters. They have encountered resistance and dissension along the way. But the success of their journey shows up in hundreds of bright-yellow folders where kids document their progress and reflect on their learning.
Bernie Sorenson of the Juneau central office sees a strong connection between current learning theory, Alaska Native cultures, and Juneau's portfolio project. Brain-theory research shows that humans learn best those things that are meaningful, useful, and relevant. The Tlingits and other groups native to the region built their culture, art, and lore around those very principles. Portfolios, Sorenson says, take learning back to those fundamentals. For it is where classroom experiences connect to their lives that students find meaning. And it is in making meaning that students truly learn, researchers say.
Dr. Judith Arter of NWREL and her colleagues in the regional lab network, writing in a recent "toolkit" of assessment resources, say that the current education reform movement "is fueled by research in education and psychology which supports a changing view of how learning occurs.
"In this new perspective," Arter and her colleagues argue, "the learner actively constructs personal meaning from information and experiences by linking new information with his or her preexisting knowledge and understanding. This 'constructive' learning process requires changes in the interactions between teachers and students in the classroom—for example, more self-reflection, group collaboration, and teacher as facilitator."
In their 1994 publication Old Beliefs About Measurement-Driven Reform: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same, researchers Audrey Noble and Mary Lee Smith write: "The cognitive-constructivist view of psychology and pedagogy aligns with a mode of assessment known as performance or alternative. It rejects as inappropriate the sole use of traditional multiple-choice items that test isolated bits of knowledge and skills.
Changes in instruction bring changes in assessment. "Cognitive-constructivists," they say, "see performance tests as a form of testing that parallels their view of how pupils learn and should be taught."
In multiple-choice tests, students pick an answer. In performance tests, students create an answer. In a May 1992 article in Educational Leadership, Grant Wiggins, research director of the Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure, offers examples of what he terms "authentic" assessments—so called because they mimic tasks real people face on the job or in civic life. A student might, for example, be asked to simulate these roles:
- Psychologist/sociologist: Conduct surveys, perform statistical analyses, graph results, write newspaper articles on the meaning of the results
- Archaeologist: Determine the culture or time frame of a mystery artifact or person
- Newspaper editor and writer: Write articles and editorials set in the studied historical time
- Policy analyst: Predict the future of a country
- Expert witness to Congress: Testify on behalf of or against advertising claims, regulation of children's TV, or a current policy issue
Not only do such tasks unleash kids' deep creative and cognitive powers, they also can spark their interest in ways that, say, memorizing the periodic table of elements or the preamble to the Constitution can't. Observes Wiggins: "Modern theories of teaching and learning demonstrate that students know, understand, and retain more when they learn it in the context of real-life situations. They can also demonstrate the depth of that understanding when the task they are asked to perform mirrors a real-life situation."
In his 1995 book, A Portfolio Primer, Geof Hewitt of Vermont quotes a superintendent who said this about multiple-choice tests: "Students hate them. Teachers hate them. Principals and school boards hate them, and parents and superintendents hate them. But ask a principal why her school uses multiple-choice tests and you'll hear, 'I dislike them, but the school board demands this kind of testing.' The school board says, 'It's the superintendent!' and the superintendent blames the parents."
Besides giving few clues to what kids actually can do, these much-maligned multiple-choice tests have weak ties to classroom practice. Written and scored by big, national testing companies, they tell District A how it ranks in comparison to District B, and they sort students on a bell curve. But because they are tests of general achievement and ability (some question their validity even in this area), and because scores come back weeks or even months after testing, standardized tests don't give teachers feedback that is quick enough or specific enough for altering practice to meet kids' needs.
The best assessments, experts say, are those that are themselves learning experiences. Ideally, learning and assessment are blended together so skillfully that they are indistinguishable. Arter and her colleagues describe the day-to-day melding of teaching and assessment, assessment and teaching, as a spiral that never ends—a "seamless web" in which assessment is woven invisibly into instruction.
Assessment, rather than being a goal post at the end of learning, should be the guidepost along the way. "Assessment drives the curriculum," Doug Archbald and Fred Newmann write in Beyond Standardized Testing. "It signals what counts. When we test for trivial or inauthentic achievement, teaching and learning are corrupted and 'teaching to the test' becomes a dirty word. But if we test for authentic forms of achievement, teaching to the test is appropriate and desirable....Tests, projects, and performances that demonstrate authentic academic achievement are valuable not only as assessment devices, but as guides to focus and inspire teaching."
Active learning is one big factor igniting performance assessment. The other is the standards movement. Educators at the local, state, and national levels, heeding the demands of citizens and politicians, are writing standards of mastery in every subject area. These standards—ranging, for example, from the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics goals to Washington state's Essential Learnings—provide clear and visible targets.
Assessments, in turn, are being designed to gauge whether students are reaching those targets. It's not good enough anymore, many education critics charge, for districts to demonstrate that School A scored higher than School B, or that Ashley scored higher than Heather on a standardized test. Because such rankings aren't anchored to anything solid, they don't really tell citizens and parents how well students and schools are performing.
"With the...discontent from employers and parents about the effectiveness of America's schools, the call for accountability information has been growing for more than a decade," Richard Jaeger and his colleagues write in a 1996 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment. "In fact, this widespread concern has contributed directly to the movement toward a standards-based education system, including assessments to monitor students' progress in attaining performance standards."
Around the country, a number of states are collaborating to develop and assess standards. The New Standards Project, a joint venture of the National Center on Education and the Economy and the University of Pittsburgh, involves districts and states with more than half the nation's student population. Participants are "devising tasks, inventing portfolio systems, and debating assessment measures in preparation for a national assessment system that highlights literacy, math, science, and other curriculum areas," according to Hewitt, who is one of the designers of Vermont's pioneering effort in portfolio assessment.
Another multi-state project, the State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards, has nine projects to develop innovative assessments. And an Urban School District Consortium launched by the American Federation of Teachers has pulled together a large number of members to develop performance assessments.
In the Northwest, Washington is in the midst of a massive effort to set standards and design assessments to match them. In 1993, the Legislature created a Commission on Student Learning and charged it with developing clear, challenging academic standards (the Essential Learnings) and finding better ways to measure schools' success in helping students meet those standards. The assessment system will have four major components: state-level assessments; classroom-based assessments; school and system context indicators; and staff development. Across the state, 16 professional development centers have been established, most of them managed by the nine Educational Service Districts. Dr. Richard Stiggins of the Assessment Training Institute calls Washington's initiative "probably the most notable effort in the nation right now" in the area of staff development for assessment.
And Oregon's Educational Act for the 21st Century, passed by the Legislature in 1991, requires students to earn certificates of mastery in order to graduate. Portfolios and structured work-related activities are part of the required assessment mix.
Arguably the most revolutionary and far-reaching aspect of the new assessments is students' changing role. No longer just passive test-takers, kids are becoming active self-assessors. They are devising rubrics and rating their own work. The teacher in Norman Rockwell's classroom never dreamed of asking her students what their idea of good writing was. She never challenged them to develop criteria for judging their work. She didn't say, "Now tell me how your essays have improved and how you might make them even better."
Geof Hewitt remembers how it was. "Miss Clough used to give me a C- and I had to guess whether there was a relationship between that grade and the number of red marks, scattered like measles, she'd incubated all over my pages. It was a guessing game, trying to psyche out what Miss Clough liked. And, worse, I played no role in offering an opinion."
When kids are brought into the assessment loop (not left guessing what mysterious brew of ingredients Miss Clough stirred to produce a final grade), they can take charge of their learning. Assessment experts suggest that students should be fully versed in the standards they're expected to reach. But they go even further: Students should help choose and define the criteria against which they'll be measured. Finally, they should learn to judge their own work against those standards and criteria.
"When a teacher's responses indicate that she has all the knowledge and ownership of all the correct responses (and that there is only one for each situation) and that the student's job is simply to receive the knowledge, students do not learn to become reflective, to self-evaluate," write Francine Stayter and Peter Johnston in a 1990 publication, Reading and Writing Together: New Perspectives for the Classroom. "Being able to self-evaluate puts students in control of their own progress, which is central to becoming independent learners."
In order of which they appear:
Aaron Katzeek, a student at Harborview Elementary School in Juneau, Alaska, writes a letter to himself reviewing his strengths in language arts.
J.B. Bouschor of Juneau reflects on his growht as a reader and writer.
Photos by Peter Metcalfe. Illustration by Jennifer Brady-Morales.
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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