Assessing education takes full toolbox

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/02/2023 (978 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The debate about final exams in Manitoba and across the country has once again surfaced in the public sphere. Education is deeply personal: we have all experienced it, and we all have opinions. We are fortunate to have a public platform to be able to grapple with significant and complex issues.

My Spidey-sense is alerted when folks speak in false dichotomies (it’s either all exams or no exams) and subsequently engage in conversations about the glory days of education. False dichotomies don’t speak to the complexity of the human phenomenon of learning, and the glory days never existed. We are always trying to improve public education, day by day.

Many people have asked my thoughts on whether we should rid ourselves of exams. Should we put an end to stacking learners in gyms and raising the stakes by ensuring that the three-hour bubble is worth 30 to 50 per cent of their mark?

Questions such as “How will learners be prepared for post-secondary if they don’t take exams?” or “How can exams possibly provide rich evidence of learning?” tend to surface in these heated debates. I wish it were this easy to theorize what it means to teach and learn.

Perhaps these polarized inquiries don’t offer enough context for what we want to happen in our schools. I would argue that we should neither use an assessment tool nor kick it to the curb simply because of what it might represent ideologically. We must think deeply about the purpose of the tool. How will it prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the child has learned and that we, as adults, caused the learning?

Summative assessments, such as exams, are designed primarily to assess systems, divisions, schools and teachers. We use the evidence and data provided from these assessments to gauge whether or not we have done our jobs as educators. We established goals at the beginning of the year and we planned accordingly, from end to beginning. The summative tool allows us to judge ourselves as adults. Were we effective?

Assessment tools also have to be carefully designed for the complexity of the learning. As our young people face more significant challenges (climate change, the rise of the extreme right, the ever-growing disparity between rich and poor), our teaching has become more complex.

We are asking learners to think deeply, in solutionary ways, that have a direct impact on the community — at least, this is the aspiration. Public education should be designed to create a public, not serve it.

Given this complexity, we need to ask ourselves whether a three-hour exam has the capacity to draw out the sophisticated thinking we want for our learners, the thinking we have coached them to exhibit. It might very well be an exam, a final performance, a championship game, a thesis defence, or a peer-reviewed article.

In my teaching days, some of the most rigorous pieces of evidence from my learners ended up in this newspaper, as a book launch at McNally Robinson, or read out by Michael Enright of CBC Radio. Sometimes paper and pen will do the trick. Sometimes not.

We need to get past this arbitrary and unhelpful false dichotomy and we need to think about how we, as adults, are assessed on a daily basis. The writers of this newspaper are apprenticed and mentored. The intern during my surgery last week writes both written exams and is apprenticed and mentored. The university colleague who complains about a lack of final exams is assessed by peers and is asked to defend his thinking at conferences.

How can we create summative assessments that fit the complexity of our learners’ thinking while providing us, the adults, with benchmarks for our effectiveness? How can we use summative assessment as a means to push the boundaries of public education so that we are creating just and sustainable societies?

These are the questions we need to contemplate, not the easy, polarized positions into which we often settle.

Matt Henderson is the assistant superintendent of the Seven Oaks School Division.