One of President-elect Barack Obama’s education ideas is to “improve the assessments used to track student progress.” But improving the tests may be tougher than he appreciates ”and the problem may be rooted in the state standards themselves,” says UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham. ”Most people underestimate how hard it is to write good test items that are based on state standards.” Writing at Britannica Blog, Willingham notes:
If you want to assess what students know and can do, it is only reasonable to list your expectations. Make the expectations too broad and they do not help students, teachers, and parents understand what is expected. Make them too narrow and you invite teachers to teach the list of expectations at the expense of everything else.
“I don’t see how these problems can be avoided unless you make the expectations more comprehensive,” concludes Willingham. “That is, instead of writing a list of standards, specify the expectations for contents and skills in more detail—in short, base tests on a curriculum. A curriculum would differ from a list of standards because it would include both the broad conceptual ideas and the specific content, and it would describe how the abstract concepts relate to the specific content.”
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. sounded a similar call early this year in a cover story in the American Educator, which argued that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade. It makes all the sense in the world, for the reasons Dan Willingham describes.
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