March 14, 2018 September 5, 2018 adminComments Off on Assessments will be disrupted: Is a performance approach the future of testing?
Testing's disruption is inevitable and the space is ripe for it, Andreas Oranje, principal research director at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) told a crowd gathered at SXSWedu 2018 this week. He predicated that, in the next 10 years, assessments and testing would be "inseparably connected" to optimal learning, that having the right data would matter more than ever, and that at least 95% of current ed tech offerings would be gone or obsolete because they don't really provide value as tools.
Perhaps most notably, he pointed out that assessments are approximations, but that the closer they get to the real thing being measured, the less inferential distance there is between a student's abilities and evidence of those abilities.
Essentially: There's more of a direct measurement of a student's ability to perform a given task the more an assessment actually involves that actual activity.
That's where performance assessment comes in.
Current standardized testing and curriculum models are not solving this problem. Pecheone cited educator John Dewey's desire for his own children to foster a joy of learning, equipped with the skills and competencies to pursue their own learning, saying that this is at the heart of testing differently.
Texas' experience has been similar, Hood said, noting that "the want to do it is there" among teachers. Those experimenting want something new, but administrators have to figure out what that means and how to prepare them for this while ensuring reliability in what teachers are seeing.