"What if we thought of standards and assessments not only as ways to measure current status but also to promote change and development?" asked Dennie Palmer Wolf, senior research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of PACE (Performance Assessment Collaboratives for Education).
"In the last five years, much of the discussion about standards and particularly about assessment has focused on questions of format: How will we diversify the ways in which we assess student learning and understanding? It has been a very serious and profitable discussion about how to break the stranglehold of multiple-choice testing and at least complement it with performance assessment, with open-ended items, and maybe even with portfolios. That's essentially no longer a matter of debate . . . ."
"We've essentially won the discussion of format. The discussion I think we need to have is a discussion about the frame we build around assessment. I would argue that the frame in which we use most assessments is that of the current status of children, or the current status of one school measured against another, one district measured against another, one nation compared to another. The frame we need is not that of current status, but a frame that emphasizes growth and change—fundamentally, one of development—because the essential question here is, Do individual students change over time, steadily, and in ways that they could eventually meet the standards?"
"For assessing understanding, we've got to use more interactive evidence, such as the dissertation-and-defense model, to really get kids to be thoughtful, reflective thinkers," said John Brown, supervisor of curriculum and program development for Prince George's County (Md.) Public Schools.
Brown offered several other suggestions for improving assessment practices. "We need to design scoring to reflect the fact that there can be very different understandings that are nonetheless deep, apt, justified, and insightful. . . . We sometimes lose sight of the need to assess students' ability to verify and criticize ideas and see the big picture. . . . One of the other issues that I think we're all just beginning to explore is the apprenticeship model, where you begin to assess along a novice–expert, naïve–sophisticated continuum. Do we really get a sense of the flow of the student's mastery from the beginning of the learning process to the end of it?"
Brown raised several other questions for educators to ponder: "Do we worry about the interrogative as much as we do the declarative? Do we assess question asking and connection seeking? . . . Do we make certain that assessments are overseen by experts in the field to ensure that the tasks and scoring systems are authentic, particularly as we move into the assessment of understanding?"
"We can make the most of technology only when we think about what it can do for us, not what we must do for it," stated Hilarie Bryce Davis in her presentation Mindware: Technology for the Mind-Full. "We need to use technology for research, problem solving, skill building, communicating, and presenting our ideas. With these goals in mind, our mind's eye guides us to make technology an extension of ourselves, not an unwieldy tool we must constantly bend to our purposes."
"A critical eye pays off when we teach our students to focus their efforts thoughtfully when they use technology. Whether they are building skills, doing research, problem solving, or presenting their ideas, technology will serve them with the power to access information and people, intensify and accelerate their own thinking, and connect them with other minds as windows and mirrors on their worlds."