If 52% of students couldn’t tell me what the 7th amendment was, I wouldn’t find that to be that much of a problem. But if kids can’t identify the first 10 amendments as the Bill of Rights there is some problem somewhere. Likewise, knowing that The Right to Trial by Jury is a constitutional right is more important than knowing what number it is. Do students know this? Something like Matt’s survey would help us find out.

Additionally I don’t think Matt cherry picked questions and that does not seem to be arbitrary or difficult but on the level of “who was the first president of the United States?”

Finally, without testing how much students know we wouldn’t know how much they learned (maybe that is tautological to say). If we can’t test students on a broad scale, like Matt has done, why on earth do we bother to do it for a single classroom? Should we just trust teachers and schools when they say they have taught students something?

Many of these tests don’t come to the conclusion that education may not be adequately teaching students because they are designed to show that schools fail – many come to this conclusion because schools are in fact failing. At this point, I’m willing to bet that schools even fail to teach proper reasoning and analytical skills and I would eagerly await someone to conduct a test to find this out.

That said, my initial criticism is people cherry picking statistics of arbitrarily tested knowledge to criticize the public education system as flawed, or failing. Any time I hear a statistic like “52% of American teenagers can’t find Iraq on a map,” I immediately challenge the statement and its relevance – what kind of map? regional or world? are the names on it? does that matter? do they have an understanding of its geopolitical significance? can they argue the US policy? does its proximity being west or east of Iran matter?

In my classes, these issues matter – and core knowledge contributes. But many informed students might miss arbitrary questions on dates and names and still be knowledgeable voters. I’m not against amassing as much of this knowledge as possible. I am against using any of this info mentioned above to draw a conclusion that “we have a problem.”

I think demonstrating reasoning, problem solving and writing skills are wonderful. So is attempting to use knowledge to solve a real-world problem. I probably would have done a lot better in school if this is what we were tested on – especially in classes that graded my work based on spelling.

But I believe that none of this can happen unless the student has some understanding of factual information and data on the given subject. Knowledge is shaped from the information we have available. Without information we cannot reason and cannot have knowledge or wisdom.

Without knowing the periodic table how can I create more complex compounds?

Without understanding the division of a circle how can I discover the size and angles of various shapes?

Knowing the facts of history and civics are important if the goal is to have reasoned individuals who are to shape the future of society (for good or bad…and Matt is right, many people have used this as an excuse to have a system of public education).

So I would assume that anyone teaching problem solving and reasoning skills would first have to provide the facts and information to the student. I would conclude that a proper education would have to have some degree of both reasoning and factual memorization.

Finally, without providing information would we really be teaching and testing students reasoning and problem solving skills or merely teaching students what to think?

However, in his book “The Global Achievement Gap,” Tony Wagner offers some intriguing information on the new Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) which is “an open-ended, ninety-minute performance assessment in which students have to demonstrate their reasoning, problem-solving, and writing skills while attempting to solve a real-world problem.” From the description of this test and system, it seems like a great development in assessment, and its components should become more standard even in the classroom. It’s worth more discussion. What do you think?

What kind of test would you design that would test a student’s practical application of knowledge that doesn’t run into the same design problems you’ve highlighted with other tests?

Say what you will about the tenets of testing nihilism, it’s definitely an ethos!