President Obama Joins the Bubble-Bursting Bandwagon

"And I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test..."

I couldn't agree more, Mr. President. But, as always, the devil is in the details. The Education Sector report Beyond the Bubble details how technology, along with greatly improved cognitive models, can help us build much better assessments that move beyond bubble-filling -- and at the same time offer rigorous and reliable evidence of student learning.

Sherman Dorn, in his friendly critique, warns of overly enthusiastic technology boosterism and fascination with bells and whistles. It's easy to see how a report subtitled Technology and the Future of Student Assessment could be characterized this way.

While the report details the potential for technology as a tool to significantly improve student assessment, the report also offers strong warnings that technology on its own will not get us past the bubble:

Just over half the states, for instance, use computers to deliver a portion of the annual state testing programs mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But, for the most part, these states' investments in technology have not led to fundamental changes in our approaches to testing. Mostly, these investments have simply made old approaches to assessment more efficient. Even the most technologically advanced states have done little except replace the conventional paper-based, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests with computerized versions of the same. Overall, the types of skills tests measure, and what the test results can tell us, have remained essentially the same....without a sound evidentiary model and conceptual underpinning, technology-enabled assessment tools are just more efficient, faster, and accessible versions of the same old tests.

We also need to remember that the use of technology, the Internet in particular, does not necessarily or immediately transform. Businesses, for example, first applied technology in administrative pursuits, improving efficiencies in areas such as purchasing, payroll, and accounting. Forecasts of technology-based paradigm shifts almost always overestimate how quickly change will occur, but more importantly, underestimate the impact of the alterations. John Seely Brown, founder of the Institute for Research on Learning and former director of the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), underscores this point. He writes, "that initial uses of new media have tended to mimic what came before—early photography imitated painting, the first movies the stage, etc."

The large infrastructure investments that states such as Virginia or Oregon have made to digitize testing are very important. They just can't be seen as the end goal.