3.+Student+Assessments

Why no multiple choice?

From Seth Godin:

In 1914, a professor in Kansas invented the multiple-choice test. Yes, it’s less than a hundred years old.

There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots.

In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders."

A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned theidea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.

The SAT, the single most important filtering device used to measure the effect of school on each individual, is based (almost without change) on Kelly’s lowerorder thinking test. Still.

The reason is simple. Not because it works. No, we do it because it’s the easy and efficient way to keep the mass production of students moving forward.

See Authentic Assessment from Big Picture Learning.

From CA Ed Code: code (C) The method by which pupil progress in meeting those pupil outcomes is to be measured.

code From CA Ed Code code (c) (1) **Charter** schools shall meet all statewide standards and conduct the pupil assessments required pursuant to Sections 60605 and 60851 and any other statewide standards authorized in statute or pupil assessments applicable to pupils in noncharter public schools. code Performance Assessment Making a Comeback

Bloom's Taxonomy Wheel of Projects for Learning Outcomes