November 21, 2005
Authentic Assessment of Students
MLA Statement

It is my pleasure to rise in the House to respond to the statement made by the member for Vancouver-Kensington regarding authentic assessment of students. The member spoke eloquently about the inadequacy of standard tests. However, the member missed the point.

Besides standard tests in school, there are other tests in school offered in the classroom by teachers. In fact, there is much research done in terms of multiple abilities, how to measure multiple abilities. In the late '70s Prof. Robert Sternburg, a psychologist at Harvard University, was a pioneer in raising the issue of multiple abilities. Over the past two decades Howard Gardner, a cognitive psychologist from Harvard University, has been developing a theory of multiple abilities, skills and talents. Beyond the traditional verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities, we must also recognize many other abilities such as visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. All those abilities are important.

To measure these abilities, we need multi-dimensional instructions — as the member said, learning and assessment. It is necessary to develop tools moving away from a single dimension of learning to multi-dimensional learning, from a single number of measures to many measures, from the contextualized tests of short answers, fill-in-the-blank, true-or-false answers — to contextualized answers and tasks such as performances and projects. I believe that kind of research is available. However, we must also develop test assessment in consideration of the delivery, the organization and the language used.

If we apply the principle of authentic assessment, the delivery is superior. However, we want to put more emphasis on research and content. In applying the principles of authentic assessment to the speech, I would say that it seems the member has failed one of the fundamental aspects of a successful research project, which is to gather all the available information and provide an unbiased evaluation.

In British Columbia an annual assessment known as the fundamental skills assessment is conducted to see how students in grades four and seven are performing in reading, writing and math. The reading, comprehension and numeracy components consist of multiple-choice questions, which is not authentic, but it also contains open-ended questions. The writing test consists of first drafts of two writing tasks. Open-ended questions and writing tasks do in fact satisfy the criteria of authentic assessment.

This year 79 percent of grade four students and 77 percent of grade seven students are meeting or exceeding expectations in reading. These are excellent results. In fact, B.C. students' achievements are among the highest in the world. We have set high standards because we know every student will need a solid foundation to succeed after graduation.

The main purposes of assessment are for students, teachers, parents, administrators and legislators to know how well students are meeting the curricular objectives. The fundamental skills assessment results, together with other information collected by the teachers, are important information for district accountability contracts and school growth plans developed by school planning councils.