Can Educationally Significant Learning be Assessed?

Abstract

This article argues that assessment is a central feature of teaching, particularly as a means to determine whether what has been taught has been learnt. However, I take issue with the current trend in education which places a significant amount of emphasis upon large-scale public testing, which in turn has exacerbated the ‘teaching-to-the-test’ syndrome, not to mention distorting teaching decisions that are detrimental to the overall development of student knowledge and understanding. Part of the problem with assessment in education seems to revolve around the nature of knowledge and how best to assess human knowledge and understanding. Although much philosophical uncertainty and disagreement exists surrounding the nature of knowledge, I argue that coming to know something is a sine qua non of any education. In saying this, I highlight the limits of assessment by demonstrating how certain activities are resistant to large-scale public testing because they are not easily reducible to facts which can be tested for, or at least in the same way as propositional forms of knowledge. Consequently, my argument is a philosophical one to the effect that assessment, particularly large-scale public testing is incapable of assessing all forms of learning, or even the quality of student understanding because the instruments available are both too blunt and tend to capture a certain kind of knowledge that privileges theory over practice, and mental skills over physical skills.

Keywords:

• epistemology
• knowledge
• teaching
• learning
• assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Plato’s Meno, Republic and Theaetetus (see Hamilton & Cairns, 1961).

2. Other notable examples worth mentioning are The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Brooking Institution’s Learning Metrics Task Force. For the point and purpose of this article, I will limit my discussion of large-scale public testing to NAPLAN as it relates to both my local context and what I know the most about.

3. The obvious question to ask here is Would teacher performance pay in schools exacerbate the ‘teaching-to-the-test’ syndrome? Currently this is a contentious issue in Victoria. At the time of writing the State Government of Victoria would like to introduce teacher performance pay in schools.

4. Tomazin (2013) reported in The Sunday Age more than 150 schools having been caught breaking rules surrounding the administration of NAPLAN. One disconcerting incident is worth noting of a teacher being reprimanded for providing answers to students during tests. This brings a new meaning to ‘teaching-to-the-test’.

5. MacIntyre’s unique brand of communitarianism broadly includes two elements: (1) individuals that belong to a community share common ends and (2) individuals that are members of the community derive their sense of identity from belonging to the group.

6. In the article titled ‘Embodied learning’, Stolz (2015a) provides an account of how humans come to understand meaningfully. The key concept outlined is that we ‘come to’ an understanding of something from our own point of view as a result of experiencing it. Since our engagement with the world is not just cognitive or theoretical, but involves the emotional, practical, aesthetic and so on because as beings-in-the-world, we are in open to the world we inhabit through the vehicle of one’s own body.

7. Not only is this a narrow conception of education, it neglects the fact that a well-balanced education necessarily involves the development of the social, emotional, physical and so on.

8. For novel works on practical knowledge, see: ‘The philosophy of G. Ryle and its significance for physical education: Some thoughts and reflections’ (Stolz, 2013), and Chapter 3 from Stolz (2014).