Camden’s Blog

I wasn’t eager to read this chapter and through most of the beginning was not overly engaged in the history of standardized testing.  Good thing we don’t have a test on it The first quote I was struck by was “the twentieth-century Western world invented a peculiar way of thing about a person’s capacity for learning: Intelligence represented an upper limit, a ceiling, on how successful a student might become.”  This made me think of our gifted testing, where we use a series of intelligence tests to “select” children for the best and most rigorous learning.  It’s only another form of tracking and privileging a group of students.  It should not surprise us that students of color are underrepresented in gifted classes.  And I ask rhetorically, when will we put our learning capacity dollars where our mouths are if our schools give credence to multiple intelligence theories like Howard Gardner’s (these are actually listed in my county’s 13 essential teaching strategies) but continue to insist our students be tortured and judged by a standardized method of evaluating their learning capacity that takes none of their intelligences into account save one?  Lipton and Oakes attempt to provide alternative routes to assessment that match current conceptions of learning and intelligence but tell us that school districts that have tried them, shortly abandoned them due to their time consuming nature and inability to standardize the results.  So I like my other counterparts, administer the standardized ones and pay close attention to my own alternative classroom assessments to drive my instruction.  I get to know my students learning styles and I strive to make my lessons relevant to their lives and their individual learning styles.  In Kindergarten, I guess it’s much easier to incorporate Gardner’s theories but I believe it’s applicable all the way into higher education.  I believe in giving an amazing amount of praise, just as if my child had taken their first step.  I also believe in inviting students to self-critic and establish rubrics for their assessment.  I have found that students will be more demanding than I would have been if I had created the rubric without them.  Additionally, collaborating with my colleagues to evaluate with me, adding a more eyes and perspective to the assessment. 

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