In an article posted to his blog on April 30, 2010, Education Minister Dave Hancock attempts to answer the question, "Are Diploma Exams Fair to Students?" It is an important question that is also being asked by teachers and many students on a number of groups on Facebook.
While there is some very valuable information contained in the post, many of the arguments advanced by the minister deserve a response. The question of fairness needs to be judged relative to the experiences of students writing diploma examinations, and the minister's blog does not accurately represent their experiences.
Hancock misses the mark when he discusses the high stakes nature of the exams. He argues that "it is entirely appropriate to check that students have learned what they are expected to learn over the course of their time in school," but ignores the fact that this check for understanding is a one sitting three-hour test. There is no way that the amount of learning can be accurately represented by this one exam. It is simply too much content, being assessed by one small assessment which is weighted way too heavily. Furthermore, the single shot opportunity to prove a year's worth of study is taken with no regard for other stressors that might be affecting the student that day. Hancock's assertions that this practice prepares students for further high stakes testing in university ignores sound practice, insinuating that K - 12 assessment practices should be diminished to bring them in line with first year post-secondary education practices. Finally, teachers of courses with diploma exam teachers know that high achieving students are more likely to stress out and ignore their health needs as opposed to being "overconfident and not study[ing] enough prior to the test" as the Minister claims.
Another questionable aspect of the program is the equating process and efforts to "maintain consistent standards over time." As a result of this process, the grade achieved by a student on the test is not necessarily the same as the grade they are awarded. The story of a student from Calgary recently demonstrated that students who sit an exam that is deemed to be easier than those previously administered will automatically be deducted marks before they even bubble in their first answer. One might ask why, with all the people employed by the department to develop tests (including test item writers, psychomatricians, editors, exam managers and more), Alberta Education cannot insure that the few dozen secured tests it must develop in the course of a year are consistent with each other and representative of the curriculum before being administered. Could it be that these tests are not nearly as reliable as advertised?
Which brings us to some interesting questions about funding. The government has never been completely clear about the amount of money that is being spent on provincial testing. Even this week, the minister released two pieces that reported two separate figures for spending on provincial testing. His blog post reports expenses of $14.5 million in testing while his update for educators, Thinking Outside the Books, reports that $22 million was spent. The fact is that expenses related for testing are not reported categorically in any readily available financial document from the government.
The minister states that we do not "have standards of assessment of a sufficiently high caliber that are widely understood by teachers" and that teachers may not be "marking students on a common consistent basis." He uses these arguments to justify the emphasis of diploma exams. While the Alberta Teachers' Association doesn't necessarily agree with the assertions, we do recognize that the solution to such issues should not be an emphasis on standardised testing, but rather a commitment to teacher professional development. Imagine how education could be improved for our students, if $22 million per year (over $600 per teacher in the province) was devoted to professional development instead of testing.
If the department chose to focus the time, energy and financial resources it devotes to standardised testing to improving instruction and the classroom learning instead, we could make real meaningful change for students that mattered. It might be different if the government actually chose to be informed by the test results it takes so seriously. For example, the minister wonders why there is a "serious decline in writing skills over the past five years." Could it be that graduates writing these tests since 2005 have demonstrated declining writing skills because they are the victims of irreparable education cutbacks implemented through the mid 1990s when this cohort was entering Kindergarten?
Further points of contention on the blog post relate to the design and administration of the diploma exams themselves.
There is a lot of confusion about the difference between norms based assessment and standards based (criterion referenced) assessment. Criterion referenced assessment looks at the knowledge, skills and competencies that a student is expected to know and compares the progress of the student to those standards. With a criterion referenced assessment, it is possible for every single student who writes the exam to receive 100 per cent, so long as every student demonstrates competency. A norms based assessment is designed to compare each student with his or her peers (often referred to as "The Curve"). In this case the mark tells more about how the student deviates from the normal student as opposed to how much of the curriculum they have mastered. The Diploma examinations are highly engineered and designed, when the developers get it right, to have an average of 65 per cent and to discriminate the weaker students from the stronger students. In actuality they are highly effective norm-based assessments, but they are not "a tool for identifying attainment of standards" as the minister purports.
The removal of written response questions in mathematics and science has further degraded the value of the examinations. Students who are more able to demonstrate their knowledge using an open format are constrained to one of four choices - three of which are designed to exploit common student errors. Hancock's praise of the new Physics 30 which requires students to "explain why they used a specific calculation to solve a problem" is negated because the students can no longer explain that knowledge in their own words; they can, however, bubble in a, b, c or d-not much of an explanation. There is no doubt that the removal of written components had little effect on the averages, but this does not mean that individual students were not harmed by that change in policy and it is cold comfort to writers for the minister to claim that in the average justice is done.
The emphasis that is being placed on the exams and the pressure put on teachers is not imagined, even if it is only implied. Unfortunately parents do read the Fraser Institute reports ranking schools based on test results and school jurisdictions and principals pay a great deal of attention to the Accountability Pillar results released every year. Even having Alberta Education Learner Assessment staff at teachers' conventions and specialist councils places unnecessary emphasis on standardised testing as opposed to student instruction, which is why the Association has decided not to host sessions that promote increased reliance and attention to these flawed instruments. It is this emphasis and these stressors that are most damaging to student learning, as the system gets distracted from the important and valuable curriculum in favour of even more "teaching-to-the-test."
Above all else our students would be best served for a successful 21st century future if the entire system returned its focus on student learning and the responsibility for assessment was returned to competent classroom teachers where it rightfully belongs.
written by Jenny, May 04, 2010
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