A few days ago I was at a meeting. Some candidates for the school board
were addressing the group. Also present were some candidates for the state
legislature.
Near the end of the meeting, a lady stood up and made a long impassioned
statement, which I can summarize as follows: "If you get a job in industry,
you *will* be evaluated on your performance, again and again. I don't see
why all you education people are so opposed to testing."
I grabbed the microphone and responded: "I have worked in industry. I've
been evaluated. I've also been the supervisor responsible for evaluating the
performance of other people. I agree that people are going to get evaluated.
It's important. However, I guarantee that in the real world, you will *not*
be evaluated on the basis of a multiple-guess test. ...(pause)... I've seen
good evaluations and bad evaluations ... and the test we've been talking about
tonight is not good. Not good at all. To paraphrase what a famous person said:
I'm not opposed to all testing ... I'm opposed to dumb testing."
Now that leads to the topic I most wanted to discuss: IMHO we should spend
less time worrying about the badness of the worst questions on the regents
test, and more time worrying about the badness of the *best* questions on the
test ... and double-especially worrying about the topics that don't appear at
all on this test, even though they should. (The same goes for corresponding
tests in other states.) Previous years' tests can be found at http://www.nysedregents.org/Physics/
IMHO the best questions on this test are pathetic. What's worse, draconian
punishments are applied to students, teachers, and schools on the basis of
this test. This results in an ongoing disaster. It perverts the entire
educational system.
My criticism applies even to the questions that are not multiple guess. For
instance, on the 2011 test, there is a free-response question that requires
you to plug in the coefficient of friction for waxed skis on snow. It would
be weird and grossly culturally biased if they required you to memorize that,
but in fact they give you that information. They don't give it in the stem
of the question, but rather on a separate page of "Reference Tables" http://www.p12.nysed.gov/apda/reftable/physics-rt/physics06tbl.pdf
So, all they are really testing is whether you know how to look from one piece
of paper to another to find the information. Rather than handing you all the
needed information on a single silver platter, they hand it to you on two
platters. Big whoop. Given this level of hand-holding, the question barely
even rises to the level of plug and chug. It's mostly just plug. There is
no multi-step reasoning required. There is no notion of strategic thinking
in pursuit of a distant goal.
In other words, even the "best" questions on this test are trivia questions.
Game-show questions.
Einstein said an education is what remains after you have forgotten everything
you learned in school. I hope he was right about that, because if you ask
random adults what they remember from high-school physics, it's not much. If
what they consciously remember is all they really remember, then we should just
give up. We should not even pretend that the course is worthwhile.
I prefer to express the idea in a more constructive way: What there were learning
in school was not what they thought they were learning.
This leads to an obvious action item: We need to figure out what we are really
teaching! We need more explicit self-awareness. We need to figure it out and
clearly explain it ... to each other, to our students, to our administrators,
to the parents, to the taxpayers, and to everybody else who pays the bills and/or
depends on the quality of our product.
I reckon we should not bother teaching trivia.
I also remark that if we are supposed to be teaching trivia, we are doing
a really lousy job of it, because all evidence indicates that students do
not retain that stuff.
Imposing more multiple-guess tests and other requirements that force us to teach
more trivia is not going to help! We shouldn't be teaching (or testing) trivia
at all.
We need to be teaching people how to solve non-trivial problems. That includes
the skill of being able to "rack your brain" and "sift your memory" to find
all the information that is relevant to the problem at hand. As I mentioned in
the "multitasking" thread, this process is subconscious and massively parallel.
It depends on many billions of neurons acting all at once. It normally does
/not/ consist of consciously and attentively running down a prepared list of
factoids looking for the coefficient of friction for waxed skis on snow.
It's an odd business we're in, teaching people how to think, because it requires
them to make a conscious effort to tell their subconscious what to do.
Note the distinction:
a) reasoning in general, as opposed to
b) conscious, attentive, sequential reasoning.
If a discussion of (a) gets derailed by overemphasis on (b), that's unhelpful,
because it loses sight of 99.999% of the issue. The conscious part of reasoning
is important, but the other 99.999% is important also. We don't understand
exactly how it works, and we don't have good words for talking about it, and
it's hard to teach, but it's still important. Reeeeally important.
Getting through life requires a lot more than conscious, sequential, checklist-
style thinking. It requires a lot more than answering trivia questions. To
paraphrase Mark 8:36: For what shall it profit a man, if he does really well
on the multiple-guess test, if he's a loser in real life?
As long as teachers and students and schools are being judged by a trivia test,
we have a disaster on our hands. It's a progressively-worsening disaster.
To say the same thing another way, I am only mildly worried about the bad stuff
we see on the test. I'm worried about all the truly important stuff that the
test does not even attempt to measure.
-- Integrity
-- Generosity
-- Creativity, originality, and imagination
-- Sense of humor
-- Teamwork
-- Courage
-- Love of learning
-- Learning /effectively/ so that ideas can be applied when needed
-- Reasoning, as applied to nontrivial problems
-- Knowing which rules should be followed and which should not
-- et cetera
The educational system is (for better or worse) relying on the physics class
to emphasize some of those things, especially the "reasoning" item and the
"effective learning" item. The other items may be not quite so quintessentially
physics, but still we should make sure we are encouraging those things, or at
least not discouraging them.
I leave it as a question to each person on this list: What are YOU really
teaching? What do you expect YOUR students to retain years from now?