The Global Search for Education
“Multiple choice tests have been the dominant type of test in this country since World War I, but that is about to change.” — Roger Benjamin
If not the SAT, What?
By C. M. Rubin with Harry Rubin and Michael Freeborn
What if educators were able to assess the 21st century skills that thought leaders in The Global Search for Education series talk about week after week? What if this 21st century replacement for the SAT was able to measure high school students’ critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and written communication; in other words, all the essential skills that both educators and employers have said students need to succeed in college and the workplace?
Until we are able to assess critical thinking, it probably won’t get taught. PISA’s international problem-solving standardized test does assess this, but according to Harvard University’s Dr. Tony Wagner, when it comes to the forward thinking model for American schools and colleges to watch, “The College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA/CLA) is really in a class by itself.” Wagner sees CWRA as an essential part of what he calls “Accountability 2.0.” But he adds it “should be accompanied by audits of students’ digital portfolios which show evidence of progressive mastery of the skills that matter most, such as critical and creative thinking, communication, and collaboration.”
Naturally, I was curious to learn more about this promising candidate for the gold standard in the future world of assessment. I recently got the opportunity to chat with the President of the New York based CAE (Council for Aid to Education), home of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), Dr. Roger Benjamin. Prior to his role at CAE, Roger was a senior research scientist at RAND from 1990 to 2005 (director of RAND Education from 1994-1999).
“It is becoming clear that schools, colleges and employers are eager to move beyond reliance only on multiple choice tests.” — Roger Benjamin
Do you think that standardized tests should be used to evaluate the abilities of high school students for admission to college? Do you think that GPA alone would be sufficient?
I do think there is a role for standardized tests because of the grade inflation in high school GPA’s, widely disparate metrics used to evaluate students, and the advantages students from affluent high school districts have compared to students from disadvantaged schools. There are students everywhere in the United States that, when given the chance, demonstrate extraordinary potential. Standardized tests are therefore an important additional tool for admissions officers. However, standardized test protocols must become better aligned with the education reform movement underway, including the common core standards movement which calls for open ended tests instead of the heavy reliance on multiple choice tests, which are not worth teaching to.
In your own words, would you describe for me what you believe the current SAT measures versus your own performance assessments?
The SAT measures the aptitude high school seniors have for doing well in college through reasoning and verbal abilities tests. The CWRA measures high school students’ critical thinking, analytical and quantitative reasoning skills, problem solving, writing mechanics and writing persuasiveness skills that educators and employers believe high school graduates need to have to succeed in college and work.
“There are important soft skills such as creativity and collaboration, but the challenge is how to measure them at the same level of scientific reliability as the skills that we are currently measuring reliably.”— Roger Benjamin
Why is the College and Work Readiness Assessment a better option to the SAT?
I would replace the word “better” with the word “different.” The CWRA is more congruent with the requirements of today’s “Knowledge Economy” in which it is more important to be able to access, structure and use information than to only accumulate facts. Multiple-choice questions require the ability to recognize a painting. In comparison, performance tasks require the student to paint. Definitions of learning have shifted to the ability to apply what one knows to new situations. Performance assessments capture this change. We are not sure whether the CWRA+ will compete directly with the SAT or be thought of as additional important information for college admissions officers. However, it is becoming clear that schools, colleges and employers are eager to move beyond reliance only on multiple-choice tests.
Students learn best when they are being taught to learn as opposed to being taught to pass a test. Can we overcome the problem of teaching to a test?
A strong point of the performance tasks (case studies and realistic problems) of the CWRA+ and CLA+ is that it is very difficult to teach to these tests. There are not simple “right” or “wrong” answers. The focus is on how well the student reasons, not on whether they get the “facts” right. Indeed, all the facts needed to answer the tasks are provided to the students taking the test.
The SAT is a multiple-choice test with the exception of the writing test. Grading of the multiple-choice test is easy. The answers are either right or wrong. The CWRA assessment is more about judgment. How do you assure grading consistency across the exams taken in different locations and at different time periods?
Performance assessments such as CWRA have been around a long time. Teachers have not liked multiple-choice tests but we could never figure out how to take to scale the more complicated problem solving assessments that constitute the CWRA. However, we can now train human scorers to score open-ended essays based on scientifically designed rubrics as reliably as multiple-choice tests. Moreover, computer assisted scoring, built on our human scoring protocols, score these responses at levels that are as reliable as human scoring, which further reduces error and cost.
“Multiple-choice questions require the ability to recognize a painting. In comparison, performance tasks require the student to paint.” — Roger Benjamin
What would be your best argument for keeping the SAT?
It is relatively cheap and easy to administer and score. It has a significant number of reliability and validity studies that corroborate its efficacy in predicting a student’s GPA in the first year of college.
You speak a lot about measuring critical thinking skills. How much do these new CWRA assessments require students to have honed their creative skills?
That’s a good question. We know that students in the arts and sciences at the college level do better than students who are in vocational or applied subjects. We think that is probably because they do more analytic based writing and are involved in more open Q and A sessions. However, there is a lot of work to be done on how creativity plays into doing well on assessments like this. So that is an interesting question.
Do you believe that strong creative skills are important to the process of identifying problems and finding solutions?
There are important soft skills such as creativity and collaboration, but the challenge is how to measure them at the same level of scientific reliability as the skills that we are currently measuring reliably. Hopefully we will succeed in measuring these additional skills that are also very important.
“The CWRA measures high school students’ critical thinking, analytical and quantitative reasoning skills, problem solving, writing mechanics and writing persuasiveness skills that educators and employers believe high school graduates need to have to succeed in college and work.”— Roger Benjamin
How many schools nationally are using the CWRA performance assessment and how many college admissions offices are asking for it? How many will accept it instead of the SAT?
This year, 120 high schools are using it. We are now talking to college admissions officers and leaders of colleges who are aligned with high schools that feed into them, and are also CWRA+ users, about accepting the CWRA+ results in addition to SAT or ACT results. There is much controversy in education at present about standardized testing, with many believing all standardized testing should be eliminated during primary and secondary school, with just one test given at the end of secondary school.
What are the logistical issues you face in getting broader distribution for the CWRA assessment?
We now have a new version of CWRA called CWRA+ to be used in the college admissions space. We have started to market this new assessment through partnerships with colleges who will accept the CWRA+ results as part of admissions’ records. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top program launched the biggest testing educational initiative ever funded by the federal government and we won the right to develop a number of assessments. These newer assessments are becoming mainstream almost overnight. It’s because of the “Knowledge Economy” - content is important but when you can google for facts you’ve got to be able to think about what it is you’re going to be googling for. Multiple-choice tests have been the dominant type of test in this country since World War I, but that is about to change.
Dr. Roger Benjamin and C. M. Rubin
Photos courtesy of Tech Valley High School, Rensselaer NY; New Tech Network and Traverse Bay Area Independent School District, Michigan/Mancelona Public Schools/Joanie Moore.
In The Global Search for Education, join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. Madhav Chavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. Eija Kauppinen (Finland), State Secretary Tapio Kosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Professor Ben Levin (Canada), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (Lycee Francais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.
The Global Search for Education Community Page
C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, “The Global Search for Education” and “How Will We Read?” She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland.
Follow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld
The Global Search for Education
“There is no competitive advantage today to knowing more than the person sitting next to you.” — Tony Wagner
Is Your Child an Innovator
By C. M. Rubin with Harry Rubin and Michael Freeborn
“The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.” — President Barack Obama, January 25, 2011
Welcome to the Innovation Age. Today’s world will reward the most innovative young people. World leaders, business executives, educators, and policy makers have joined in the global debate on how we create the next generation of innovators. Even parents are asking themselves the question: “Is my child an Innovator?”
How do you train an innovator? Which schools are doing it better than others? Are teachers equipped with the new skills required to educate students in this decade? Are curricula incorporating the essential content that will help young people become more innovative? Are parents playing their part so as to ensure their children can face tomorrow’s challenges and ultimately lead richer, fuller lives?
In his must read new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (Scribner, April 17, 2012), Dr. Tony Wagner, Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, Harvard University, addresses these issues. I had the pleasure of chatting with him about the most talked about subject in education today.
There seems to be a wide range of what constitutes innovation, and innovation can also be a matter of degree. How do you define an innovator?
There are different kinds of innovation — incremental and disruptive — and so there are different degrees of the capacity to innovate. Not everyone can create brilliant “disruptive” products — products that transform a market as Steve Jobs and Apple have done. But many young people, given the right encouragement, can bring something extra to whatever they do — that spark of imagination and curiosity, which can lead to the creation of better products, services, and ideas. At its simplest, an innovator is someone who is a creative problem solver.
“The competitive advantage for someone going out into the world is what they can do with what they know.” — Tony Wagner
How do you train an Innovator?
We are born curious. We are born with imagination. The first challenge is to ensure that these very human qualities are not schooled out of us, as Sir Ken Robinson says. Beyond that, in my research, I identified five essential education and parenting practices that develop young people’s capacities to innovate:
1. Learning to work collaboratively (innovation is a team sport!).
2. Learning to understand problems from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
3. Learning to take risks and learn from mistakes.
4. Focusing on creating versus consuming.
5. Reinforcing the intrinsic motivations of play, passion, and purpose versus the extrinsic carrots and sticks.
Information may be free but knowledge also includes understanding, problem solving, communication, and collaboration, none of which is free. Many schools “teach” these aspects of human endeavor to some degree. How much of this is relevant to your model for creating innovators?
Knowledge has become a commodity and is free, like air or water. Knowledge is also changing and growing exponentially. Based on the old premise of knowledge scarcity, the assumption is that it is the job of the teacher to transmit knowledge to students. When only a few people had the knowledge, that model made some sense, but because knowledge has become a commodity, the world no longer cares what you know. That is, there is no competitive advantage today to knowing more than the person sitting next to you. The competitive advantage for someone going out into the world is what they can do with what they know. And this kind of learning needs to take place at all levels. Right now it is more common in some elementary schools where students do projects. The problem arises as students move up through school. While there is a lot of professed interest in teaching the so-called 21st century skills you mentioned, which I wrote about extensively in The Global Achievement Gap, in fact most teachers feel compelled to teach to the tests for accountability purposes—and increasingly so as their jobs may depend on students getting good test scores.
Some examples you’ve seen in better schools to nurture this kind of learning?
In Creating Innovators, I profile schools and colleges that are doing an outstanding job of educating young people to become innovators. In the better schools I visited (both high schools and colleges), in every single course, students have to produce real products for a real audience as a significant part of their academic experience. In one high school I visited, every student is required to do a team-based service learning project: to go out into the community, research a problem and then figure out a way to solve it. One student I interviewed was a part of a team that discovered there was a local food pantry that had a problem storing all of the food donated to it. And so the team went back to school and used a computer assisted design program to design a new storage system for the pantry. Then they returned and actually built it. What students need is practice in applying their learning to new situations, not just in the classroom, but in the community. Another example at the college level is the Olin College of Engineering, which requires students to spend an entire year working in teams to solve a problem in a corporate setting. It is what they call their Senior Capstone Project in Engineering. These approaches demand a radically different approach to teaching. Teaching students to apply what they have learned requires relinquishing a degree of teacher control, relying far less on textbooks, and encouraging students to take initiative and be responsible for their own learning. Teachers are no longer the experts; they must become coaches. Many teachers find these transitions very hard to make.
“What students need is practice in applying their learning to new situations, not just in the classroom, but in the community.” — Tony Wagner
Teachers follow the accepted process required to get kids into good colleges — the colleges their parents and the kids think they should go to. Thoughts?
Things are changing more quickly than most people realize. Three points:
1. The Advanced Placement curriculum is already radically transforming all AP tests, beginning with AP Biology this year and then AP US History next year. They are moving towards students having to demonstrate that they can apply knowledge learned and not merely regurgitate it. So AP tests, which are themselves considered a gold standard, are redefining what is “rigor” and students will need a different kind of teaching to do well on these new tests.
2. There are now 750 colleges and universities that do not require any kind of test scores for admission. Last year, Tufts University became the first in the country to encourage students to submit YouTube videos with their applications, and they were stunned at the quality of work that was produced and how much more they learned about their applicants.
3. If you look at the CEO’s of most major companies, the majority did not go to an Ivy League school for undergraduate. What matters much more are what graduate school you go to and having had work-based internships where you have had to apply what you have learned. Being preoccupied with getting kids into top colleges, I think, is misplaced. Admission into “name brand” schools is more and more a matter of luck and no longer offers the competitive advantages it did 20 years ago. The push to get all A’s distorts the purpose of school and distracts from acquiring the skills that will give kids a real competitive edge.
For my new book I interviewed Joel Podolny, Vice President of Human Resources at Apple, who has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and he told me that to get into these kinds of schools you learn to play a game. A game of getting perfect scores, building a resume, etc. The problem is, if you have not learned how to collaborate, to take risks and learn from your mistakes, to create as opposed to consume — all the qualities that matter in the world of innovation — then companies like Apple will have no use for you.
“Instead of preaching that all students should be ‘college-ready,’ we should instead establish the goal of all students being ‘innovation-ready’.” — Tony Wagner
To what extent is innovation capability a function of family and external influences?
These days, young people become innovators in spite of their schooling, rather than because of it. In my research, I found both parenting and teaching practices that strengthen the capacity to innovate — emphasizing discovery-based play, limiting screen time, encouraging young people to find and pursue their passion, take risks and learn from mistakes, and instilling a sense of the importance of “giving back” — these were all things that parents and teachers of young innovators encouraged.
What overall rating do you give the US Public School system for training innovators
A grade of F. But it is not the teacher’s fault. They are not encouraged to innovate, and there is no funding for educational R&D. We must prepare teachers differently and develop lab schools for 21st century learning and teaching. Mostly importantly, we need to begin using much better assessments, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Assessment drives instruction, and having the wrong metric is worse than having none at all. Multiple choice, computer-scored test results tell us nothing about the quality of teaching or students’ college, career, and citizenship readiness. Every student should have a digital portfolio as a cumulative record of the development of his or her innovation skills. Finally, instead of preaching that all students should be “college-ready,” we should instead establish the goal of all students being “innovation-ready.” Young people don’t necessarily have to go to college to learn to innovate. Nearly half of Finland’s high school students choose a career and technical education track, rather than an academic track, and Finland has a higher innovation standing than the US.
Dr. Tony Wagner and C. M. Rubin
Photos courtesy of The Dwight School and Dr. Tony Wagner
In The Global Search for Education, join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (US), Dr. Leon Botstein (US), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (US), Dr. Madhav Chavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (US), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (US), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. Eija Kauppinen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Professor Ben Levin (Canada), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (US), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (US), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (US), Yves Theze (Lycee Francais US), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (US), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.
The Global Search for Education Community Page
C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, “The Global Search for Education” and “How Will We Read?” She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland.
Follow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld
