The Testing and Learning Revolution: The Future of Assessment in Education

by Kavitha Rajagopalan, Edmund W. Gordon

Despite a decades-long battle to reform American education, we are still failing to prepare all American students for success in a complex, global marketplace. Increasingly, we have turned to assessment as the tool that will help us fix American education, and yet the ever more elaborate systems of standardized testing we have designed have not done the job. In an age when testing is used to create scores and rankings, enforce standards, and secure accountability, Edmund W. Gordon shows how we can use it instead to support teaching and develop students' competencies. Between 2011 and 2013, Gordon chaired an interdisciplinary commission of scholars and thinkers, who connected transformative research and ideas on learning, teaching, measurement, the nature of tests, intelligence, capability, technology, and policy. Uniting the Commission's work with his decades of experience in the fields of education and psychology, Gordon shows how to create assessments that are integrated into education, serve the needs of teachers and students, and allow learners to flourish. He lays out this vision: when assessment focuses on improving teaching and learning rather than measuring what students have learned, we can achieve excellence in education for all students in America.

205 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 2015

About the author

Kavitha Rajagopalan is the author of "Muslims of Metropolis" (Rutgers University Press, September 2008), a narrative nonfiction examination of migration, integration, and identity formation in three Muslim families in the West -- a Palestinian family in London, a Kurdish family in Berlin, and a Bangladeshi family in New York City. Research and travel for the book was funded by the Fulbright program, the U.S. Department of Education and the American Council on Germany.

She is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, where she specializes on migration and the informal economy, immigrant identity formation, and global migration. She is currently researching a second book.

Kavitha has worked as a research analyst on corporate social responsibility issues in financial services, as a communications strategist for various nonprofit development and social justice organizations, and a journalist in the USA, Germany and India. She received her Master's degree in International Affairs from Columbia University in 2003, and her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from the College of William & Mary in 1999. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband.

Reviews

[Thom Gething · Rating 2 out of 5]

"There is a long tradition of using assessments to inform educational interventions. Yet most of these assessments, even those that have been incorporated into teaching and learning, are still assessments of developed ability. Assessments that are backward looking can hardly be expected to help us move the educational enterprise forward."

This was a frustrating book to read. The authors' main purpose seems to have been to summarise much of the work completed by The Gordon Commission at Columbia University, which has been focussed on the systemic needs of the United States. This means that much of the discussion is at a theoretical or positional level, which would be fine if the authors had set out the positions and theories with more detail, but the pattern is a general overview and then a suggestion to read the individual papers published by the Gordon Commission. There are some golden nuggets in the book and some hints at possible future directions. One, not unexpected, nugget is the recalibration of formative assessment into what the authors call a dynamic system of pedagogy. Essentially, this is the same proposal Dylan Wiliam has made, to move away from the misinterpreted idea of formative assessment towards that of responsive teaching. I would agree with this wholeheartedly, and the book does go on to flesh this out a little, but not to a practical level for teachers in the classroom. There is also a suggestion about how technology might,  in the near future, be able to help us better understand our students learning through the use of dynamic assessment tools, but this is left hanging in the air.