Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Are All Tests Created Equally?

Listen to a German vocational education teacher telling his American counterparts about project based learning and assessment.  35 seconds in he says, "No multiple choice questions."

I guess he's never met the folks at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of the groups constructing the test that will accompany the Common Core State Standards.  That assessment will use a significant amount multiple choice questions.

It's time we ask whether there are limitations to what multiple choice questions can really do.  (Spoiler Alert:  There are.)

1 comment:

Susann Codish said...

I stumbled on your blog via that insane article in "The Washington Post" about the kindergarten show being cancelled. Your comment about multiple choice tests reminded me powerfully of a book I translated a couple of years ago (it's called "The Art of Space Management" by Roni Oren, an Israeli who was head of HR at several large corporations). In the second chapter, he talks about testing, and I this it's a must-read for teachers (and I, too, worked as a teacher for 18 years, albeit in private Jewish day schools, teaching Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible). I can't post the chapter here because it's too long but if you send me your email I can send it as an attachment.