Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Testing, Testing Every fall I am told that the average student entering UW–Madison has higher test scores and in other ways surpasses the achievements of students in previous years. My personal observation is that these students do less well in their first-year chemistry course, have poorer backgrounds in chemistry, and are less proficient in mathematics, reading, and writing than students of five or ten years ago. Such observations are not confined to the sciences. Andrew Delbanco, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, has observed that despite better test scores, “I do not find a commensurate increase in the number of students who are intellectually curious, adventurous or are imbued with fruitful doubt. Many students are chronically stressed, grade-obsessed, and, for fear of jeopardizing their ambitions, reluctant to explore subjects in which they doubt their proficiency” (1). Both Delbanco and I think our students are wonderful to teach and work with, but we agree that they are far too concerned about grades, graduation, and getting a good job. We fear that they are unaware of the joy and value of learning for its own sake, and we wonder whether they have an adequate perception of what it means to really understand a subject. At least part of this problem can be attributed to overemphasis on testing and test-taking ability—today’s students do have more test-taking savvy. As David Reingold puts it on page 869 of this issue, some students have “learned to get decent grades without understanding anything.” This is a kind of learning we should discourage as strongly as we can. Learning how to take chemistry tests is not the same as learning chemistry. During the past decade or so there has been increasing emphasis and dependence on testing and accountability. Testtaking is a high-stakes game for students, one that determines whether they can advance through the academic system and whether they can attend an institution of higher education whose prestige is adequate to land them the job of their dreams. Some high schools require a certain score on a standardized test as a requirement for graduation, even if a student has passed all the relevant courses with adequate grades. Colleges and universities rely heavily on SAT scores as a criterion for admission. They also use high scores achieved by current enrollees as a device to recruit more applicants for subsequent classes. Is it surprising that many students have become better at taking tests than at learning? Or that they perceive high test scores and good grades as more important than understanding a subject? Academic society appears to embrace these values, so laying blame on the students smacks of hypocrisy. Often testing and accountability represent a business/industrial approach to the problem of educating students. If a region shows greatly increased sales, then promote the regional sales manager. If tests show that students have learned more,
then reward teachers and institutions responsible for imLearning how to proved learning or shift students from less to more suctake chemistry tests cessful venues. Testing provides a relatively simple and is not the same as inexpensive way to measure outcomes, and so it is often learning chemistry. viewed as a way to measure academic accountability. Unfortunately, as we know from experience, using the results of a single, specific test is an inadequate way to measure whether a given student or an entire class has successfully learned chemistry. Certain kinds of tests measure some things better than others. Multiple-choice, machine-graded tests, for example, are excellent at measuring recall of facts, but must be very carefully designed to evaluate higher-order intellectual skills. Students can learn special strategies for taking specific kinds of tests, thereby significantly increasing their scores, but not their true learning. Most of us have known students who had trouble taking tests but blossomed in a research lab or science fair. Tests are a good, but far from perfect, measure of students’ abilities, and we need constantly to be aware of their inadequacies. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the current push for testing and accountability is a negative view of teachers and educational institutions. “Let’s test these students and show what a poor job teachers and schools are doing. Then they’ll have to shape up” seems the attitude of many proponents of accountability. This attitude presumes that, without outside oversight, teachers and schools are unable or unwilling to evaluate their students objectively and use such evaluations to improve education. I do not believe that this is true in most cases, and even if it were, simply introducing testing and accountability is unlikely to solve the problem. Testing and test taking are too easily influenced by factors other than students’ inherent abilities to serve as the sole measure of academic success. Testing and accountability are not a silver bullet that will solve the problems of American education. They appear more likely to be a smokescreen behind which their proponents can abdicate responsibility for providing facilities that enhance learning and dedicated, wellprepared teachers who can objectively evaluate their own students. Literature Cited 1. Delbanco, A. Academia’s Overheated Competition; The New York Times, March 16, 2001, p A21.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 78 No. 7 July 2001 • Journal of Chemical Education
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