Chapter 2: To Use Their Minds Well: Investigating New Forms of Student Assessment

The irony of social inventions is that one-time innovations turn to habit. There is perhaps no better illustration of how insight turns to reflex than what has happened to the practice of educational testing in American schools. Currently, American educators, the most determined designers, advocates, and consumers of standardized testing, are confronting the limits of the testing technologies they perfected between 1900 and 1950— at least in instances like the College Board examinations—as a way of providing more equal access to higher education. In the face of demands to teach thinking to all students and to open the curriculum to more than recall and simple rules, the shortcomings of multiple-choice formats as a model or as a singular probe for thought have become stunningly clear. There is growing, if far from universal, impatience with student assessment that addresses chiefly facts and basic skills, leaving thoughtfulness, imagination, and pursuit untapped. There is equal impatience with testing treated as a matter of pure measurement rather than an evolving discussion of what versions of excellence will be encouraged. Researchers and educators, families and students want assessment that offers rigorous and wise diagnostic information rather than the rankings of normal curves. In this climate, the possibilities of performance assessments borrowed from fields as disparate as business and the arts have become increasingly, perhaps even romantically, attractive. This discussion of how we will measure educational progress cannot afford to be sheerly contemplative. In the spring of 1990, the president