Upcoming MAP and CEM Tests
We haven’t always needed grades to learn. For centuries people learnt quite sophisticated skills without ever being given an ‘A’ or a mark out of 10 to help them understand their progress.
Grading itself was not inspired by any development in educational thought - but by the emergence of industrial production in eighteenth century Britain. William Farish, an innovative Cambridge professor, resented the time spent in talking through ideas with individual students. Britain’s newly built factories meant that tailors no longer had to make coats one at a time: could the same principle be applied to education?
Farish realised that just as the production of clothing could be broken down into an ordered sequence, the learning of particular skills could also be seen as a linear process. At the end of this process, students could write down their understanding, which Farish then ‘graded’ according to quality (just as industrial goods were). A student couldn’t progress unless they met a particular quality standard. Grading was a sorting mechanism that made teaching more efficient; it wasn’t designed as an educational tool. But it is now so embedded in our experience of schools, we take it for granted that it is intrinsic to learning.
ISA aspires to be ‘student centred’. Farish, however talented, was not that. He didn’t pretend to be - he wanted education to be more efficient. Nevertheless, ISA is still willing to use Farish’s idea of written tests; we just handle them with care. If your child is in Grades 3 to 10, they have probably sat MAP tests in the last couple of weeks; IB students have sat CEMs.
If a student walks away from a test with a grade that they think sums up their ability in English, mathematics or science or they use it to compare themselves with another, then these tests were not a useful experience. They have reverted to being an industrial tool for efficiency, not an educational one for learning.
For ISA, tests are one more way we can understand children as individuals so we can better support their progress. MAP sits alongside subject assessments and our experience of the children themselves in and out of the classroom. We also use aggregate information to reflect on the effectiveness of our programmes. Long term, we want students to engage more and more with their own MAP data to inform the kind of reflective conversations that Farish thought inefficient, but are in fact intrinsic to learning.
At ISA, we are educating lifelongs, global citizens in a fast changing world. None of us are ever finished products.
Comments
Post a Comment