Assessing Assessments

As I contemplate my title I am very conscious of the concerns of language reformers of the 18th century.  These esteemed gentlement believed that England's reputation abroad was endangered by the preponderence of "S"es in our language. Certainly they rarely ponder so prevariously as in the upper reaches of your screen now, gentle reader. TThe fear was that our merchants in their dealings abroad would find themselves mistrusted because it sounded so much as if our language was spoken by men with a "mouthful of snakes".

And it is here, with this vivid image, that I wish to draw your attention to a word, that sine qua non of contemporary education; the Assessment, or Exam in old money.

This resembles, I claim, a snake in the sense that any test really says two things whilst delivering one result. It speaks with profoundly forked tongue, and on its prongs is every teacher and student, wrigglingly impaled.

I wish to submit just one question, from the NGRT or "New Group reading Test", a test designed to nominate someone's reading age.

The question is this.  Insert the correct word:

1.  The removal van came for the ______________.

[  ] shopping
[  ] friend
[  ] house
[  ] furniture
[  ] children

Now, clearly the answer "furniture" is the intended one. However, as any moderately intelligent person will be able to point out, the tale of a Man with a Van helping out his wife with the shopping, or abducting unsuspecting children could also be correct, grammatically. 

What you are being asked to do here is to give the expected answer, in exchange for grades.  Another example in the same text asks you to say what Granny keeps on her sofa.  The noun "cushions" is obviously fine, but there are no marks for "plant pots". Now, I have known various people keep things far stranger than plan pots on their furniture from time to time. I simply cannot see why this is "Correct", other than being a test for a certain view of the world which, whilst well and good, is simply not a test of one's ability to read.

What is going on here is a case of Confirmation Bias. We are sure of what the correct answer must be, and so we teach children to be equally sure in the process of teaching them to pass such tests. However, Confirmation Bias is a disaster for learning: it teaches us not to test our propositions, in this case under threat of being found to be educationally subnormal.

The child who does test their suppositions about the world in this way can find themselves labelled and sorted out of the lottery of life with brutally efficiency in the name of "merit" and "natural aptitude".  How I would recover from a judgement that my reading age was subnormal at 12 I do not know. Possibly I never would. And as a reward for testing the limits of my world I would be left to consider my future as a "subnormal" in a world that rewards "merit".

And if that "merit" is the ability to jump through hoops, then reward it it does. However, we cannot very well say that we are encouraging innovation, engineering and critical thinking whilst embedding the training of confirmation bias into our very system of conditioning.

Did I say conditioning? Slip of the tongue.

Hiss.