A New Year’s resolution for those guiding the future of education might be to find better ways to assess knowledge and predict student potential. That means finding better ways than tests and exams to measure learning.
Measuring a student’s progress in learning is essential, but some students are good at exams and some are not.
Being good at sitting for exams is a skill only partially related to the acquisition, application and evaluation of new knowledge. It can also be the critical key to the next step in an individual’s life.
Exams come in many forms: essay, multiple choice, open-book, practical (such as a driving test), case study, even oral or interview exams.
The major problem with most forms of exams is that they mainly measure what an individual is able to remember at a certain time, at a certain place under certain conditions.
And there are many reasons why people forget or cannot bring to mind stuff they actually know, or at least knew before they walked into the exam situation.
In thinking about this column, I was trying, and failing, to dredge up what I remembered about the hierarchy of learning.
But my brain had frozen. Had I been in an exam situation, looking at a blank page would have only made matters worse.
But with a few keystroke clues, I was able to find immediately what I could not recall — Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning.
Bloom described knowledge as a progression from basic facts through comprehension, application and analysis, to more sophisticated thinking and learning abilities.
Exams and tests tend to measure basic recall and, sometimes, comprehension.
The higher levels of thinking such as synthesis of recalled facts — putting facts together to represent new understandings — are not measured effectively by most exam or test formats.
As the grandmaster of the English language, Winston Churchill, said about his experience with exams: “I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”
Forgetting what we need to know under high-pressure situations is not that uncommon for examinees.
The brain can store a vast number of memories, and yet we sometimes can’t find those memories when we need to, especially in an artificial high-pressure situation.
Edward K. Vogel, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Chicago, points out that in the past several decades, cognitive psychologists have determined that there are two primary memory systems in the human mind: a short-term, or “working” memory that temporarily holds information about just a few things that we are currently forced to be thinking about.
Long-lasting memory is the brain’s “hard drive,” which can hold massive amounts of information gained through a lifetime of thoughts and experiences — but only if we know where to find it when we need it.
Teachers have long known that rote memorization of facts, the kind of thing exams and tests demand, can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten.
It is an educational irony that by 2018, what an individual knows and retains will have been supplanted, for all practical purposes, by an individual’s ability to access information, almost instantaneously, and then apply it immediately to the task at hand.
In my case, Bloom’s taxonomy and what to do with it was back within 20 seconds of Googling “hierarchy of learning.”
That raises the question as to what an individual’s unsupported knowledge base needs to be and how, in a variety of contexts, to measure that complexity. It also raises another question about how reliance on exams as indicators of potential might be costing us more than we can afford in terms of human potential.
As Albert Einstein explained: “One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
A worthwhile New Year’s resolution for leaders in education? Let’s find more reliable ways to more legitimately assess progress in learning and student potential for learning more.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
