I have a not-yet-well-formulated vision that standardized testing could be transformed into an SBAR process. Specific skills would be tested, and reporting would consist of a list of specific skills for which a student has demonstrated mastery.
Instead of subject-based tests where the student is judged "not proficient," "proficient," or "advanced" in a subject, standardized tests would assess mastery of cross-curricular skills. The variety of subject-based tests we administer now would be collapsed into a single test of cross-curricular student skills.
As I stated, my vision of this is not well-formulated, but if it can be well-formulated and implemented it would change the focus of education from content delivery to student development. In the current system, students are receptacles for content. Standards of Learning are written as lists of content to be mastered, and end-of-course tests are written to sample the content.
In the reform I envision, student development becomes the focus. Content becomes a means of achieving student development. Standards of Learning would be written as lists of student skills to be mastered, and standardized tests would be written to assess student skills.
Suddenly, it would become much less important to push a student through a lesson on Le Châtelier's Principle, for example, and much more important to develop the ability of a student to comprehend how manipulation of one variable in apparent isolation can result in complex system-wide changes. Le Châtelier's Principle provides content for developing this comprehension in the student of chemistry, but ecosystem ecology does also in biology, as well as parametric equations in mathematics, historical narratives in social studies, free-body diagrams in physics, and even poetry in English. In fact, the very act of specifying that students must learn Le Châtelier's Principle in chemistry isolates the concept as something peculiar to chemistry without parallel or application in other subjects, something to be remembered for a test and then forgotten.
On standardized tests, a student would be able to demonstrate cross-curricular skills in any of the specific content areas that include the skill, or in several content areas that include the skill. Each year, students would accumulate a longer list of mastered skills in their testing report. A simple pie-chart showing number of skills mastered by content area would indicate student strength by subject.
Diplomas could be individualized, as, for example, "John Doe, graduated 2012, having mastered 567 standards of learning, with a concentration in science and math."
Even test-based teacher evaluation might work under this system: "On average, Jane Doe's chemistry students add 15% more demonstrated science skills to their testing record after taking her course." Reporting new skills added as a percentage of previously acquired skills in a subject would normalize for incoming student ability. A teacher of low-performing students could still demonstrate solid teaching ability through the percentage gain. If her students were grossly behind in their skills and not ready for the rigors of her course, she could engage them to learn the skills they are ready for and still show good teaching performance. The system we have now forces her to do the opposite — to push students through content they are not ready for in hopes that they will retain enough to pass the test.
In our current system, where standardized tests are content-based, "teaching to the test" is a frustrating experience for teacher and students, when students come into a course ill prepared to comprehend the material at the pace required to cover standardized content, as is often the case. In our current system, "not teaching to the test" is also a frustrating experience for teacher and students, because the test does not illuminate the fact that her students have actually made good progress.
In a system of standardized tests based on student skills, "teaching to the test" is exactly what the teacher ought to do. She makes strategic selections from the wealth of content she has at her disposal to address the skills her students are ready to develop. She has the freedom to keep her students in Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, where learning is most efficient.
I invite everybody, everywhere, to help me develop these ideas. Please poke holes in it, and let's see if we can plug them.
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