Should we abandon the bubble sheet assessments?

An excerpt from The Politics of Education K-12

by Lonnie Palmer

The bubble sheet test proponents frequently miss a key point in the discussion on assessments: the goal of any English class is to make students better readers, writers, listeners and speakers, more confident in their communication skills and hopefully more adept at understanding and dealing effectively with the subtleties of communication.

A theater performance is a more valid measurement of knowledge and skill gains in these areas than psychometrically reliable skills measured by bubble sheet tests. If you are acting in the role of rebel Randle McMurphy (see The Truth About Testing excerpt), and the lines you must deliver require you to show anger and sensitivity at the same time, your acting task will be challenging, and your audience will know immediately if you have succeeded or failed. How could anyone fit that skill set into a bubble sheet test question? You cannot.

The Politics of Education K-12 is available on Amazon.

And Mr. McMahon’s theater performance has the added benefit of providing motivation, structure and purpose to student learning, as anyone who has performed in a play, a band or orchestra concert or for a school sports team in an athletic contest knows.

Have the bubble sheet tests and the endless prep exercises for those tests had a positive impact on most students’ motivation to learn? Not likely. An overemphasis on testing leads to problems. We could easily replace failing instruction in many classrooms with failing prescriptive and even more boring instruction for the benefit of testing.

Mr. McMahon’s play had one other characteristic that bubble sheet tests do not. His class performed that play in 1978, more than 45 years ago, and his students are now in their 60s. How many of them still remember that play and their role in its success? No doubt, every one of them.

How many of them were impacted in some positive and meaningful way as learners, as parents and as workers by their experience in that play? My guess, more than one and maybe more than a handful. How many of us can remember anything meaningful coming from our preparation for and participation in any of the many bubble sheet tests we encountered in our years in school?

One of the characteristics of all effective learning experiences in our lives – including those learning experiences that occur outside the classroom – is that they are memorable. Many teachers do their best to make classroom instruction memorable. But if teachers limit themselves to traditional lectures and bubble sheet test prep activities, their efforts will be forgotten. There are many ways to create memorability: authentic assessments with an audience, academic contests, experimental activities, school/workplace collaborations, etc. Effective learning and teaching require a combination of these strategies.

The Politics of Education K-12 is available on Amazon.

At the same time, anyone who says we do not need standardized tests is kidding themselves. We need reliable, believable, numerical measures of student learning. Without these reliable academic measures educational inequities poverty children face would soar.[i]? The bubble sheet tests with their reliable essays and simple extended problems that include packaged scoring rubrics provide us with reliable, believable, numerical measures, data that can help us make decisions about how to proceed with academic improvement efforts. Without these tests and some common standards that guide testing and curriculum development, we are guaranteed to have a disjointed system of mostly weak standards and tests across the country. And our race to the top will quickly become a race to the bottom.[ii]

The question is: how do we marry those two different measurement systems into something that helps our students learn and increases the odds they will develop the “soft” less easily measured but very important skills and values that came from Mr. McMahon’s class play?

THE END

[i] Robert C. Bobb, “Standardized tests can help combat inequity,” The Washington Post, August 28, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/standardized-tests-can-help-combat-inequity/2015/08/28/0e91e7be-46aa-11e5-8e7d-9c033e6745d8_story.html

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[ii] Harold O. Levy, “The dumbing-down of state testing,” The Washington Post, October 2, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-standardized-testing-shell-game/2015/10/02/1f16c6f8-690b-11e5-9223-70cb36460919_story.html?postshare=771444001226743

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