Education school test concept : Hands student holding pencil for testing exams writing answer sheet ... [+]
The coronavirus pandemic supercharged efforts to create new schools and school models. Learning pods, microschools, homeschool co-ops, hybrid homeschools, forest schools, and other efforts that defy easy description have been popping up all across the country. (Here is a helpful hub of information from the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.)
As new learning models have proliferated, so have questions about how these schools fit into the overall American education system. One important question that has emerged as new schools have grown is: How can students demonstrate what they have learned?
Traditionally, we think of students getting “credit” for a course. In most cases this means sitting in class for a particular length of time, often the standardized 120 hours that define a Carnegie Unit. (The Carnegie Unit actually began as a way to standardize university teaching, as the Carnegie Foundation managed pensions and needed to determine who qualified for them. It later pushed for high schools to adopt the same standard.)
Seat time is a poor measure for new school models. Many of their offerings don’t align neatly to what we have traditionally thought of as courses. They often integrate multiple subject areas simultaneously, combining history and literature or math and science in the same “course.” Second, they also experiment with the school schedule and calendar, often meeting formally for less time than would traditionally be needed to meet a Carnegie Unit.
That said, it is important that students have some way to prove that they have learned stuff so that they can apply to college or prove their qualification for jobs.
The general solution to this problem has been to try and move to competency-based credit, that is, assigning credit for completing a course when a student has demonstrated mastery of its subject matter, regardless of how long it took them. But the specifics of competency-based credit have been challenging, even in traditional classrooms. Creating good competency-based assessments for new learning models is even tougher.
After listening to numerous groups discuss how they’re trying to tackle the problem, it seems to me that there are one of two ways to do it: the narrow way and the broad way.
The narrow way of certifying student learning is by creating credentials for each bit of knowledge they acquire or skill that they master. Sometimes called “badges” or “micro-credentials,” it allows a student to demonstrate, bit by bit, what they have learned. Badges can accumulate and anyone interested in what the student knows can simply take a look at their digital sash and get an idea of what they know and can do.
The Khan Academy, for example, has numerous badges that students can earn as they progress through the platform’s online learning software. CoderDojo also has a set of badges that students can earn to demonstrate what they have mastered in the world of computer science, including Javascript, Python, and Html.
There is much to recommend in this approach. It gives the opportunity for those knowledgeable in a field to identify what mastery looks like and create measures of it. It is also very flexible, with students able to piece together what they need to know when they want to.
There are some drawbacks, though. Developing, measuring, and validating hundreds or thousands of individual credentials is onerous. Colleges or employers would need to do their own due diligence on each to see if they are legit. And, education might become more like a role-playing board game collecting chits and completing quests than an integrated intellectual pursuit.
Perhaps it would be better to utilize broad measures of student competency. Rather than measuring every single course or even every single skill or bit of knowledge, we could create broad exams to be given at established points in a student’s career. This de-links assessments from specific grades or courses, allowing for lots of different paths to get to the final destination. But, it does provide standard, comparable measures that students could use to demonstrate that they have learned what they need to.
For examples of broad approaches, one could look to the periodic assessments administered in other countries, but we have an example closer to home. The Classical Learning Test, a new college entrance exam, was designed by members of the classical learning community to validate what students have learned. It consists of sections for verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and quantitative reasoning. Now more than 200 colleges accept it. One could imagine other schools or school models working together to create a standardized exam aligned to their educational philosophy. It doesn’t have to measure every jot and tiddle, but it does have to prove that a student leaving the school has mastered what they need to know for success in whatever they are doing next.
Broad assessments have their issues as well. If the assessments become tightly linked to a desired outcome, like enrollment in a top college, there will be large incentives to teach to the format and content of the test. This would, somewhat ironically, lead to a narrowing of the education that students achieve!
Whether educators want to go broad or narrow, measuring, certifying, and legitimizing student learning is going to be essential if new school models want to become an established part of the American education system. Life does not end at the end of high school and students need to have some proof as they seek to matriculate to either the educational or work world that follows.
