My heart palpitated – everything I understood about data-driven decision-making and unbiased quantitative surveys was being thrown in my metaphorical face. My mind raced to produce a pithy argument but instead I opted to wait, and listen to my peers.

This was the scene in my office, a couple of days ago, as I participated in a Blackboard session about rhizomatic learning.  I must have looked tense, staring intently at the screen, jaw clenching.

Based on the tenor of the ongoing discussion in the Blackboard chat, I was not the only one.

The slide displayed a simple question: “Do we need to measure learning?”

Furious replies flooded the screen, and my exclamation of “yes, definitely!” was drowned by a chorus of “no!”

In hindsight, this makes perfect sense. Although I am not a teacher myself, I have the strong impression that my teacher colleagues are beleaguered by standardized test prep that seemingly does more harm than good to their curriculum & students.  I agree that it has taken the essence of teaching and twisted it, for policy’s sake. Perhaps assessment is not the same as measurement, perhaps we should wrest the reins of control from the “robots” and place them back into the hands of competent and caring human teachers.

Please excuse my classroom naiveté and indulge me in a thought experiment.

Not so long ago, women and people of color were excluded from the realms of proper education, literacy, and even personhood.  There were, and are, many inherent biases in the way children are taught, not the least of which is a teacher’s expectations.  There is a place for qualitative assessment, however, too great an emphasis on qualitative evaluation could deny minority students the chance at academic success.

The unintentional biases of teachers is a hot subject, and there are many studies that show that it is indeed an ever-present phenomenon (see references below). In a world shaped by racial and gender disparity, it is unrealistic to assume that these presumptions do not find their way into the classroom.

This is not to say that standardized tests do not contain their own set of biases. Perhaps biases are more easily controlled. Upon the discovery of bias, a test question might be more easily modified than the subtle attitudes of countless teachers and instructors. But in this thought experiment, “the robots” of standardized testing don’t care if your name is “Latasha,” or “Marie,” or “Jackson,” or “Gomez” – they will output the test results according to the same scoring algorithm as the “Mark”s and “Gibson”s.

I have to admit, this thought experiment may have little basis in the realities that teachers face in preparing their students to pass standards. During my research for this post, I came across Heinemann’s cogent rebuttal of the equity of standardized testing, that suggests that the standardized test format is inherently biased, and that students would benefit from a switch to a more customizable, portfolio-style evaluation methodology.  Perhaps this is true, and a hybrid approach would be best. However, I continue to believe that the proper use of standardized testing could have a place in providing greater academic opportunity for historically marginalized groups of people.

Further reading:
Gender bias in teaching
http://www.education.com/reference/article/gender-bias-in-teaching/
Recognizing (Almost) Invisible Gender Bias in Teacher-Student Interactions
http://www.alicechristie.org/pubs/Christie-Gender.pdf
Teacher-Student Interactions and Race in Integrated Classrooms
http://cliftoncasteel.info/2.pdf
Differential Treatment of Students by Middle School Science Teachers: Unintended Cultural Bias
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.3730740404/pdf
Why is there no study of cultural equivalence in standardized cognitive ability testing?
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/47/9/1083/