SCP Testimonials 5/5
On Other Classes and High-Stakes Tests, with Other Reflections
On Other Classes | Students reflect on the extent to which our universal skills and traits have helped them in other academic disciplines and assignments.
On High-Stakes Tests | Students reflect on how this course is explicitly and implicitly preparing them for any and all high-stakes tests, including our focus on making them accountable for their investment in the process.
Other Reflections | Students add any other feedback, insight, testimonial, etc., that they think would be helpful to the further development of this makerspace.
More on Other Classes
This space is also designed to help students in every other class. It does this through a focus on universal skills and traits, and occasionally through the use of other course’s assignments — letting a Social Studies essay function as a lesson in arrangement, for instance, or using a student’s anxiety about a quiz to learn about self-efficacy and metacognition.
I also like this: “I think this class has helped me in terms of doing my work in a more timely fashion instead of procrastinating, because of Fatal Flying Guillotines.” That’s a reference to this post, which is perhaps a bit more metaphorically violent than it should be.
More on High-Stakes Tests
The idea behind this specific question is simple: An innovative space that pushes against traditional instruction and assessment still needs to prepare students for high-stakes tests. So we treat those tests as another problem to solve. It’s called gamesmanship in instructional posts like this one, but the term isn’t a pejorative. It’s a recognition that tests are inevitable, and the scores do tell us something. As one student puts it:
Although it may not seem like this class is preparing us for the high-stakes tests, as we don't study English in a traditional way, it actually is. Rather than drilling the same rhetorical devices into our minds that we've heard since middle school, this class teaches us test-taking skills that will allow us to be much more successful. By giving us little formal instruction, we're becoming more independent and intrinsically motivated
And here is a student perfectly explaining why these high-stakes tests are toxic, even when contextualized well:
This class gives all of the responsibility to the students. Because of the flipped instruction, all of the course work is laid out in front of you, giving you the chance to work on it whenever deemed important. This class teaches you organization, time management, and so many other skills need for high-stakes tests. Even the realization that these tests are not everything is taught when results may be "poor".
Tests remain one of the cheapest and easiest ways for a stakeholder to evaluate the success of a learning environment. They’re also the least accurate. It’s common to take a score, read it as-is, and draw conclusions about the quality of the student, teacher, building, etc., without taking any further steps to unpack the data. And because there’s a grain of truth in all scores, regardless of context, it’s a justifiable heuristic. That grain is isolated, while the heap is ignored — a bizarre form of the soritical paradox that dominates all traditional assessment.
The two instructional posts embedded here cover the test-prep process in more depth.
