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>>Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? >Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the la

>>Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? >Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum. Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? For example, asking a student to read some text and answer questions about whether they've understood it is a simple way to see if they're actually literate. An assert() if you will. Test-driven education has resulted in an American literacy rate of 99% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_r... The SAT is a test that heavily influences University admissions in the United States. (Not all countries have college admissions exams.) The most selective universities in America are some of the ones who give it the greatest weight. It is hard to argue against a causal link given the level of scholarship and research that is produced in American higher education. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014-15/world-ranking http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki... I am not going to weigh in on what kind of tests should exist. But the idea that testing is a last resort, and you can 'get a bad education' and still pass the test, is like the idea of a function that doesn't work, but passes all the tests. Not to put words in your mouth, but in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education. If so, what makes you think a bad education exists? Perhaps all educations are perfect? Granted this last example is a bit glib of me, since perhaps there are things that are infeasible to test in a normal test setting. But overall, I would say the type of things that make you say someone got a poor education, are also the kinds of things that can be tested for and are, in fact, tested for. You don't mean they can't make an omelette without getting it all over the floor.

ComSubVie 12y ago
> Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? What do you test - memorizing or understanding? Does it test the required minimum, then passing it corresponds to the lowest positive grade (whatever that is in your school system). Or do you also test "nice-to-have" knowledge? Then why do you test it?
antimagic 12y ago
Actually, test-driven development is a pretty decent analogy. Including the shortcomings of TDD, such as the fact that you pass the unit tests doesn't mean you have a working product, which in education translates as students passing tests but not being able to use the subject in real life. You can reduce the delta between passing tests by writing more, better tests, but again you quickly run into a problem - you spend so much time on testing that you start to lose the time to actually learn / write the actual project code. So that's some ways in which the analogy is good. But there are some glaring errors in the analogy. In education, a student can have perfectly mastered the material, but is just really bad at passing tests, getting stressed out by it. In TDD, you can make your test environment match the target environment very closely. For most student exams this isn't true - most applications of higher learning are not done in a race against the clock, and you always have access to the Internet to help you out when you're stuck. By their nature, tests can't validate your capacity to work in a team with any fidelity. So, some of the very important skills that are needed in the application of knowledge are very difficult to test, making tests less valuable as a means of judging a student's acquisition of skills. There's a reason why PhDs require a thesis and a thesis defence, rather than sitting an exam before they are awarded.
- mjevans 12y ago
  Open book, large project 'tests'. Do the job, make the thing, etc. If you have to observe the process.
- arghbleargh 12y ago
  In the same vein, an easy way to get the tests to pass is to add a bunch of "if" statements to handle each test case. Of course, that is counterproductive in terms of the usefulness of the software. However, because so much weight is put on testing, that is essentially what happens in school a lot of the time. For some reason, it seems more obviously absurd in the software context.
neilcrj 12y ago
The tests the teacher is criticizing are standardized summative assessments used to rank, reward and punish students, teachers or both. These usually fail to provide any detailed feedback of instructional value, and frequently aren't even scored until students have advanced to the next grade. How do you use an SAT score to diagnose and then help Johnny with his conceptual misunderstanding of the relationship between exponents and logarithms? It is the wrong tool for the job. On the other hand, TDD is formative testing: You iterate over the code until all the tests pass in a structured way. You don't fire programmers for writing code that doesn't pass all the tests on the first attempt, but deliver actionable feedback at every step. That kind of testing is massively useful in the classroom and teachers practice it with formal and informal assessments all the time.
shiro 12y ago
I mostly understand your position, but I have one perspective. > in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education. Education can teach techniques, such as multiplication table or spellings, and that part of education is easy to test. However, education also builds the foundation---of learning how to study, or of how to educate yourself, or of how to be intellectually responsible---and that part is hard to test. The effect might be only visible years after you leave the school, after you go through tough problems as a responsible adult. I'd love the test-based quantitative approach, and I'm sure there are researches, but this required time span to run test-implement cycle seems to make it very difficult issue to tackle.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dferr 12y ago
The TDD analogy works when youre trying to objectively quantify and rank a person, based on their test result, but i don't think it works as well when youre trying to test a student body, or more roboticly put, a body of objects(really, thats not so TDD as much as it is ranking outputs of a black box) When it comes to testing teacher/school performance through its students, if you reconsider a test framework is given a body of objects: * instantiated outside its control(students are brought, not created at school) * instantiated with unique and unknown inputs(vs given known inputs) * have hidden independent variables(personal traits) * have hidden linked/shared variables(external traits, economic environment, local crime, family etc) * have _few known inputs_ (teachers, school staff, grounds) and then ONLY test pass/fail based on those _few known inputs_ and the results from each individual object, you will learn that the inputs pass/failed, but determining what the cause is will be far harder(strong linked variable or teacher? intelligence sapping virus?). unfortunately the frameworks executors believe that the tests clearly show that given the inputs they control, the results are repeatable. I don't think testing a body of objects-- err --students is pointless, but directly linking their results to teachers and schools discounts so much more than this testing framework can account for. They should be a starting place for conversation, but not a litmus test.
pjc50 12y ago
If your tests are of the form `assert(complexFunction() == 42)` then the easiest way to make the test pass is just to return 42. The analogy in education is "teaching to the test". You can get people to recall small specific bits of information for the test without it actually being useful.
DanBC 12y ago
> Test-driven education has resulted in an American literacy rate of 99% I have a hard time reconciling this 99% figure with other statistics about illiteracy in the US. http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-cant-read/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-... 14% of American adults can't read. 21% of American adults read below a 5th grade level. The difference is partly the definition used. The CIA world factbook (the source of the WP information) uses "age 15 and over can read and write." The CIA World Factbook uses an estimate for the US 99% figure and does not give any explanation how they get that figure. It's an estimate from census data. There are problems with that estimation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The Census Bureau reported literacy rates of 86% based on personal interviews of a relatively small portion of the population and on written responses to Census Bureau mailings. They also considered individuals literate if they simply stated that they could read and write, and made the assumption that anyone with a fifth grade education had at least an 80% chance of being literate. That feels like a pretty big flaw when we know that rates of literacy for 8th graders are below 50%. And the numbers are far worse when we look at math. You are right: testing is important. The problems with testing are bad teachers can teach only to the test and lessons that could be about general problem solving approaches turn into "guess which answer is more likely from the multiple choice selection" - a less useful skill. The other problem with tests is explaining the tests to adults. Two examples here. i) the extensive discussion about common core math. ii) England teaches "synthetic phonics". To make sure pupils are using real synthetic phonics to read and not just learning whole words the tests use nonsense words. This tests a child's ability to sound out the letters and then smoosh those sounds together. This caused some confusion in parents.

ComSubVie 12y ago

> Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? What do you test - memorizing or understanding? Does it test the required minimum, then passing it corresponds to the lowest positive grade (whatever that is in your school system). Or do you also test "nice-to-have" knowledge? Then why do you test it?

antimagic 12y ago

Actually, test-driven development is a pretty decent analogy. Including the shortcomings of TDD, such as the fact that you pass the unit tests doesn't mean you have a working product, which in education translates as students passing tests but not being able to use the subject in real life. You can reduce the delta between passing tests by writing more, better tests, but again you quickly run into a problem - you spend so much time on testing that you start to lose the time to actually learn / write the actual project code. So that's some ways in which the analogy is good. But there are some glaring errors in the analogy. In education, a student can have perfectly mastered the material, but is just really bad at passing tests, getting stressed out by it. In TDD, you can make your test environment match the target environment very closely. For most student exams this isn't true - most applications of higher learning are not done in a race against the clock, and you always have access to the Internet to help you out when you're stuck. By their nature, tests can't validate your capacity to work in a team with any fidelity. So, some of the very important skills that are needed in the application of knowledge are very difficult to test, making tests less valuable as a means of judging a student's acquisition of skills. There's a reason why PhDs require a thesis and a thesis defence, rather than sitting an exam before they are awarded.

mjevans 12y ago
Open book, large project 'tests'. Do the job, make the thing, etc. If you have to observe the process.
arghbleargh 12y ago
In the same vein, an easy way to get the tests to pass is to add a bunch of "if" statements to handle each test case. Of course, that is counterproductive in terms of the usefulness of the software. However, because so much weight is put on testing, that is essentially what happens in school a lot of the time. For some reason, it seems more obviously absurd in the software context.

neilcrj 12y ago

The tests the teacher is criticizing are standardized summative assessments used to rank, reward and punish students, teachers or both. These usually fail to provide any detailed feedback of instructional value, and frequently aren't even scored until students have advanced to the next grade. How do you use an SAT score to diagnose and then help Johnny with his conceptual misunderstanding of the relationship between exponents and logarithms? It is the wrong tool for the job. On the other hand, TDD is formative testing: You iterate over the code until all the tests pass in a structured way. You don't fire programmers for writing code that doesn't pass all the tests on the first attempt, but deliver actionable feedback at every step. That kind of testing is massively useful in the classroom and teachers practice it with formal and informal assessments all the time.

shiro 12y ago

I mostly understand your position, but I have one perspective. > in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education. Education can teach techniques, such as multiplication table or spellings, and that part of education is easy to test. However, education also builds the foundation---of learning how to study, or of how to educate yourself, or of how to be intellectually responsible---and that part is hard to test. The effect might be only visible years after you leave the school, after you go through tough problems as a responsible adult. I'd love the test-based quantitative approach, and I'm sure there are researches, but this required time span to run test-implement cycle seems to make it very difficult issue to tackle.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dferr 12y ago

The TDD analogy works when youre trying to objectively quantify and rank a person, based on their test result, but i don't think it works as well when youre trying to test a student body, or more roboticly put, a body of objects(really, thats not so TDD as much as it is ranking outputs of a black box) When it comes to testing teacher/school performance through its students, if you reconsider a test framework is given a body of objects: * instantiated outside its control(students are brought, not created at school) * instantiated with unique and unknown inputs(vs given known inputs) * have hidden independent variables(personal traits) * have hidden linked/shared variables(external traits, economic environment, local crime, family etc) * have _few known inputs_ (teachers, school staff, grounds) and then ONLY test pass/fail based on those _few known inputs_ and the results from each individual object, you will learn that the inputs pass/failed, but determining what the cause is will be far harder(strong linked variable or teacher? intelligence sapping virus?). unfortunately the frameworks executors believe that the tests clearly show that given the inputs they control, the results are repeatable. I don't think testing a body of objects-- err --students is pointless, but directly linking their results to teachers and schools discounts so much more than this testing framework can account for. They should be a starting place for conversation, but not a litmus test.

pjc50 12y ago

If your tests are of the form `assert(complexFunction() == 42)` then the easiest way to make the test pass is just to return 42. The analogy in education is "teaching to the test". You can get people to recall small specific bits of information for the test without it actually being useful.

DanBC 12y ago

> Test-driven education has resulted in an American literacy rate of 99% I have a hard time reconciling this 99% figure with other statistics about illiteracy in the US. http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-cant-read/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-... 14% of American adults can't read. 21% of American adults read below a 5th grade level. The difference is partly the definition used. The CIA world factbook (the source of the WP information) uses "age 15 and over can read and write." The CIA World Factbook uses an estimate for the US 99% figure and does not give any explanation how they get that figure. It's an estimate from census data. There are problems with that estimation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The Census Bureau reported literacy rates of 86% based on personal interviews of a relatively small portion of the population and on written responses to Census Bureau mailings. They also considered individuals literate if they simply stated that they could read and write, and made the assumption that anyone with a fifth grade education had at least an 80% chance of being literate. That feels like a pretty big flaw when we know that rates of literacy for 8th graders are below 50%. And the numbers are far worse when we look at math. You are right: testing is important. The problems with testing are bad teachers can teach only to the test and lessons that could be about general problem solving approaches turn into "guess which answer is more likely from the multiple choice selection" - a less useful skill. The other problem with tests is explaining the tests to adults. Two examples here. i) the extensive discussion about common core math. ii) England teaches "synthetic phonics". To make sure pupils are using real synthetic phonics to read and not just learning whole words the tests use nonsense words. This tests a child's ability to sound out the letters and then smoosh those sounds together. This caused some confusion in parents.