Mathematics Assessment – A Travesty of Justice
The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCT:1 1989), likely the most comprehensive mathematics document of the past decade, calls for radical “design change” in all mathematics education. But, the area that receives particular notice and calls for the most radical change is student assessment.
Without changing the manner in which student achievement is assessed, the mathematics curriculum will not be implemented in the classroom regardless of how texts or local curricula change. Explicit in this warning is the perceived power that compulsory outside assessments, such as curriculum designers and textbook publishers, wield over teachers. The tested curriculum is what will be taught regardless of the broader goals and objectives of teachers and mathematics programs. By publishing students’ provincial examination results, and thereby claiming one school’s superiority over another and one teacher’s superiority over fellow teachers on the basis of these findings, high stake testing has become omnipresent and debilitating. Since the stakes are so high and the pressure from school boards, administration and parents is so great, teachers feel compelled to· teach to the test. Imagine the pressure a teacher is under when the principal phones her home at 10 p .m. and asks, ”.Why dido’ t John Smith do better on the test?” To what extent are we as teachers a party to this situation? Do we express feelings of powerlessness as if this testing took over by “right of eminent domain”?
Influencing the powers to change the emphasis placed on provincially-based exams is not easy because people perceive it as politically prudent to do so. However, we must not become complacent and play dead.
Armed with the standards, it is time to strike a counter claim on the mathematics curriculum. Our claim should make students, not test scores, the mathematically powerful. It should make teachers, not testers, the determiners of instructional objectives. It should make learning, not licensing, the focal point of schooling. We have indicators of success in mathematics that are more revealing than the results of standardized tests. Standardized tests only consider the answer and do not recognize the students’ thought processes.
As seductive as tests scores are, their perceived power oust be resisted if teachers are to reclaim their roles as coordinators of curriculum reforms, if teachers are to reclaim their rightful places on curriculum-evaluation teams, and if students are to reclaim their mathematical power and become self-regulating, self-monitoring and self-controlling individuals. To achieve -this, assessment must be tied to larger curricular goals and objectives. Evaluation data must come from a variety of sources, namely, observations, interviews, journal writings, portfolios, extended projects, as well as from norm and criterion reference tests. Evaluation should be determined by an evaluation team consisting of teachers, supervisors, administrators, parents, students and test constructors serving as “tenants” in common to determine the test questions and the actions to make mathematics accessible to all. Only by so doing will mathematics be exciting to teach and to learn. It is time to make our voices heard.
References
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), Commission on Standards for School Mathematics. Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. Reston, Va.: NCTM 1989.
Ellcot, Portia. “Reclaiming School Mathematics.” Arithmetic Teacher 37, no. 8 (April 1990): 4 – 5.
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