There's more to learning than assessment

This blog goes out to all of the parents out there who are in the throes of trying to help their students get a higher ACT or SAT score, to get in to the college or university of their choice. A big part of this challenge, which students are also subject to in school, concerns the over burdening amount of assessment, assessment, assessment that students are faced with. They face it in school, with the increasing and diverse array of assessments, and they face it on the ACT and SAT with test prep agencies that sometimes seem to spend more time assessing than teaching. 

There are reasons for all of this, ofcourse, and solutions - at least on the college test-prep front. Schools are assessing increasingly due to increasing legislative mandates, created by legislator/business people that are looking for data-driven solutions to waning test scores. The test-prep community, in turn, tends in very large part to be made up of business people, not educators, whose programs are very data-driven. This is not meant to be a hit on business people. I'm a small business person. The point is that data-driven solutions are appropriate in a wide-range of business scenarios, but they are just not particularly appropriate for solving the problem of lagging test scores. The reason? Students are complex. Teachers know this. Getting to the heart of what they haven't learned and why they haven't learned it is complex. A quality control person, for example, might re-tool their factory once a month to address quality issues. Teachers re-tool their classrooms and their teaching methods daily, sometimes even hourly, to address quality issues.

If you understand my aforementioned point regarding the complexity of students, then you'll understand why the massive emphasis on assessment is truly misguided. Testing something, or someone, doesn't necessarily make it perform better - just by testing it again, and again. The related problem, also obvious to many, is that if you spend to much time assessing, you cut critically into the time for teaching, and learning.

This reality of the classroom is also a reality of the test-prep world. Many test-prep agencies out there teach strategies and skills. And if you compare them, these strategies and skills are often quite similar. But when, if ever, do you hear the word "diagnosis?", in the test-prep world or in school? Students learn skills, strategies, and then there is assessment to determine how well they are learning these strategies and skills, but how about getting to the bottom of what it is that students don't understand, and why? That's diagnosis, or being diagnostic, and I am here to say there's a dearth of diagnosis in school and in college-prep. This is where solutions should be found, not predominantly through data.

Changing this reality in education is difficult, but at least students can avoid being buried by assessment when they prepare to take college entrance tests. I will now step down from my soapbox by stating that as the founder and director of Wise-Prep at wise-prep.com, I am out to change the assessment-driven paradigm. I would greatly appreciate your feedback.

Charlie Matthews

Wise-Prep