Kathleen Scalise, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who studies how computers can be used in learning, has mapped out a taxonomy of testing innovations that includes a range of nontraditional types of questions. One...shows 15 bubbles containing words like “Congressmen,” “President,” “Supreme Court,” and “Justices,” and asks students to connect them to each other using arrows and arrange them in clusters. *Or, alternatively, you could ask students to write a coherent paragraph deploying the principles of coordination, subordination, and sentence end-focus to express the relationships among these terms.
What to Test Instead by Leon Neyfakh | Ideas | Boston Globe | September 16, 2012
But whatever.
* The other one "asks students to move a pair of street lights around so that a woman shown on the screen casts two shadows."
If we care about what kids understand, then I can see allowing students to make a visual representation of the relationships. A student might fail a written assignment even though he/she actually knows the content because of difficulty with the writing portion (a language-based LD, for example).
ReplyDeleteCertainly, there is a place for testing the student's ability to express himself/herself in writing, but that should be on a writing test.