We had a discussion about summative testing last week, but I don’t think it went very far in answering Dana’s original question about what to do when one is required to test at 80% of the grade summatively, against all reason. Below are some points that may spur a richer discussion for Dana. Maybe not. But it must be made clear, as many of us feel, that asking teachers to do summative testing in a comprehension classroom is fraught with problems. I should have told Dana earlier on that all I have ever done is give semester and final exams in the form of just another story. I made it look like an exam but it was just a story. It had a listening section, a reading section, but I can’t remember the details. But it looked like a real exam and whenever I turned a copy in it was accepted by “those who ask for but never read what they ask for”. And it feels good to know that when I just make up a story with my kids for the final we are all happy and have fun and nobody seems to mind. If my colleagues ever asked me about a common exam format, which they never did, I would have responded by asking them why on earth they think I would ever want to waste those valuable three hours that could be used to teach them French in order to find out how many words they can’t remember from months before because they never got more than three reps on them in the chapter. Testing by doing a story during the exam period allows me to to align my instructional practices with my assessment practices, as I should be doing according to the best research we have (namely Biggs). Of course, for decades language teachers have never let the research get in the way of a good common exam, so why start doing crazy stuff like that now, right?
Below are some points I would like to offer to get some more grist for the assessment mill that Dana and so many others are being forced to align their instruction with at the present time in their buildings. And if anyone has any concrete ideas for Dana on the 80%/20% summative/formative ratio, please write it in a comment field below. As I said, my idea is just to do a story during the exam period and make it look like an exam.
1. To some degree the vast majority of students in our nation’s schools, even the rich ones, are “poor and unmotivated” by the very nature and definition of what school has become, a testing ground that has little regard for any level of true acquisition.
2. If we continue testing in the way we do, saying the platitude that it “exists to inform teachers how to better instruct their students”, which to me is bullshit, then we will be making a mistake. I want schools to go away from testing and I want them to go away from it now because it is hurting too many kids.
3. There is an idea in support of summative assessment that teachers need a way to show administrators what their students can DO with the language. But my idea is that tests do almost nothing to show administrators what students can do with language. It’s all a big scam that goes back to the corporate interests at the core of the vast testing business.
4. With high scoring privileged kids, summative tests can show how much they “understand” and yes you can then design instruments to align them with the Big Brother proficiency scale indicators, but such results have a kind of false quality about them that, in my view, don’t go to the heart of human communication, but rather measure in a kind of robotic way what a kid “knows” (what does that even mean?) after they have sat in our classrooms for a year.
Some follow up general questions:
1. Could not the kids of poverty do as well if they weren’t put in positions where they have been, so to speak, pre-labeled for failure?
2. Does this fact not indict the entire system of testing as biased towards those with privilege? Does this not skew the results literally immeasurably?
3. Are kids of poverty really unable to score high on those tests because they are inherently incapable? What the heck is going on? Many of those kids in poverty are fluent in two languages!
4. Will such results enable their teachers to really change what they are doing in their classrooms to better instruct them? No, they won’t.
5. Isn’t this just another way that the system is rigged against the poor?
6. Doesn’t education have some really deep demons to look into if they are to really serve all the kids, so that we can one day stop looking at them as “low” or “high”?
7. What does [#6] even mean when it comes to language instruction in particular? All kids can learn a language.