Before interviews of all types, I've found it valuable to try to match the dress code of the people I'm visiting.
When I go up to the state government offices in Lansing, I wear my brown Oxford-style Dockers. Around the poli sci department, I usually wear a beat-up pair of New Balance, or maybe sandals in the summer. When I'm in the policy school, I often go back to khakis and Dockers because it's a professional school and that's just the way people dress.
Key insight: picking shoes is not about blending in -- it's about shared perspective. By dressing the way others dress, I try to indicate that I see the world the way they see it. Picking the right shoes for an interview is a kind of attiristic* code-switching.
Testing is a lot like checking to see if people are wearing the "right" shoes. As Vihao suggests in his comment, the goal is to make sure that students can make decisions more or less the way that we would make decisions. When they demonstrate the "right" kind of thinking, we know that we can trust their judgment and turn them loose on the world.
In the best case, we know that our decisions are fallible and so we don't try to force too much conformity -- just enough to have a common language for approaching problems. As with shoes, we don't usually demand complete conformity, just an appreciation of the symbolic significance of their actions. In good tests, the real goal is to demonstrate fluency, not correctness.
Examples include: recitals, portfolio evaluations, essays, debates, "show your work" math problems, and discussions, including (I can't resist) the cultural awareness test that Calvin fails in this strip. None of these tests has a right answer, but there are still implicit standards for what constitutes good work.
The subjects with right and wrong answers are exceptions that prove the rule. For elementary math, grammar, and the boring kind of history ("What year was the battle of Waterloo?") correctness is easy to judge because everyone agrees on what the right answers are. But the goal is still to make sure that students are speaking the same language that everyone else is.
Launch point: I've made some big claims about what testing should and shouldn't be. What do you think? Have you seen examples of this kind of testing at work, school, etc.? Or am I all wrong this time?
* Attiristic: adj. An invented word meaning, "pertaining to dress and clothing." (Does anyone know a real word that means what I want to say here?)
2 comments:
Abe,
Have you considered "sartorial?"
(Although the word may not fit your sentence, it does fit your definition at the bottom of the post.)
Doug
I was curious too and did a bit of searching. The word "vestiary" means pertaining to clothes, although your example was shoes, so I'm not sure if it is an appropriate substitute :)
I agree that testing looks at whether people are wearing the “right” shoes or not; however, I would also argue that testing should come only as a reflection of the process of teaching and learning. Testing in its purest and ideal form is simply seeking confirmation that “common culturally-valued knowledge” is passed down from one person to the other. For example, back before formal schooling there was the apprenticeship teaching system. If you were a Blacksmith, you wore the “shoe” of a blacksmith, both figuratively and probably literally. You had a common set of tools, jargon, way of using your hands; you probably even all shared the same scruffy beard or whatever look was popular among old school Blacksmiths. At your first meeting the master may say to you, show me what you got (an assessment of basic skills) in order to know where to start training. Then the real test would be when you started doing the work on your own. Some interesting points about this type of test: one, you were given increasing autonomy on tasks and two, it gave you and your master a chance to make sure you could appropriately do the skills on your own. If you started to mess up during your own work, the Blacksmith may step in. Or he or she may let you complete a so-so product, then discuss with you what could be done better next time.
I tend to think that the same should be true of modern public schooling. Tests are vital in order to make sure that children are learning skills, but they should not guide the content, the teaching/learning process should. Tests should increasingly give students autonomy of their knowledge (e.g., in third grade English you recite poems, in middle school English you write poems, and in high school English you critique poems). These tests should not guide what should be taught, but instead the common values of society should guide what is good work. The goal of test makers is usually to try and capture the society’s goals for its students in a single test. I’m not sure it is possible, since our society values citizenship and other traits not easily tested with paper and pencil. Different members of our society also have conflicting ideas about what it means to be a well-learned student. What we consider critical for students to learn constantly changes along with popular culture, geographical location, and changes in technology, communication, agriculture, and industry.
Although I'm not completely convinced standardized tests are needed, I guess it can be argued that standardized testing is a sort of guarantee that this teaching and learning is actually happening. However I think the next problem happens when the tests come first and then direct the teaching and learning. Teaching is a two way street, the students and teachers play off of each other. Ideal tests would be formed based on what students don’t know, and what they do know and easily display in the classroom or the first time around can be taken off of the next test, just like in the Blacksmith apprenticeship example. Ideal tests would also be updated constantly and reflect the speed and content of the learning. So perhaps in 4th grade you learn slowly because you are picking up a lot of facts, then in 5th grade you start understanding how to connect those facts and you make leaps and bounds in your understanding of the way the world works. I think the apprenticeship is a very natural and ideal form of schooling, where the goals of the teaching/learning process are a mixture of what society wants and what the master/student deem important. Testing should simply be a response to help guide the process, not the end all or goal. Assessment is obviously needed, and subsequent testing will then be revised to include weak spots from before. I think this is in contrast to today’s testing system, where tests are predetermined and teachers are given the standards to teach. Teachers are sometimes given entire lesson plans, and test grades become the goal of the learning process. I worry this may not be the most natural, efficient, and effective way to teach/learn. However, I still fall flat when it comes to feasible recommendations. I like the idea of IEP's for every student as you mentioned in a previous post. My little brother has one and I think why not every child?? Seems very apprenticeship to me.
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