The following article was originally written for WISE ed.review.
This article is part of a series developed around the following discussion topic: What alternatives are there to standardized tests? (part 1 of 4).
Julia Freeland
Investigadora – Equipo de Educación, Instituto Clayton Christensen
We can all remember the cycle of emotions present when we take an exam: the efforts to try to retain everything in our heads, sitting an exam and, in this case, receiving the mark a few days later, when we are already immersed in another subject. The marks obtained probably told us what we knew on the day of the test. But the opportunity to step back and learn what we lack rarely presents itself.
Competency-based education offers an alternative philosophy about when and under what conditions students should be tested and move on to new materials. In competence-based models, students’ progress on the basis of acquired mastery. A different view of assessment underpins competency-based approaches: students only move on to new or more difficult material when they can demonstrate that they have achieved the most basic skills and concepts. Thus, they will often progress at different rates, and sometimes along different paths. It also means that a competency-based system requires paradigm shifts in both how and when students’ mastery is assessed.
How is mastery assessed in students?
Competency-based secondary schools in the United States use a variety of modalities to assess students. Some of these approaches are used in the US state of New Hampshire, where all secondary schools are required to calculate credits in terms of competences rather than time. Certain schools, such as Sanborn Regional High School, continue to use pen-and-paper exams, but with one key difference: they offer “penalty-free retake” for students who score below 80%. In this way, students do not fail; rather, they study once again the material until they can retake exams to demonstrate mastery.
Other competency-based schools, especially those using blended learning curriculum, e.g. North Country Charter Academy, rely heavily on online assessment. In these schools, students participate primarily in a self-paced online curriculum and receive face-to-face assistance from teachers as needed. As such, the school relies heavily on online assessments to gauge gaps in student understanding and determine when each student is ready to move on to the next online topic or module.
Besides, there are other competency-based models, as in Next Charter School, where mastery is assessed through student projects rather than pen-and-paper or online tests at the end of a lesson or unit. For example, social science students are likely to write a letter to President Obama proposing foreign affairs policy strategies. The letter will likely need to include historical context on past foreign policy strategies, a proposal for action, and a rationale and justification supporting the choice of the proposed action as the best one. In order to assess such projects according to competencies rather than time, the school incorporates additional supports and opportunities to revisit the material. On the way to final projects such as the one just mentioned, teachers use a variety of formative assessment methods, e.g. short questionnaires or less formal questions, to gauge students’ progress towards mastery of various competences as well as readiness for the final project. In this way it is possible to ensure that students are not assessed until they are ready, and not according to a pre-set plan that does not take into account whether or not they have acquired mastery. In addition, if a student fails to demonstrate mastery in a final project, they have the option to revise it or to continue to progress and design a new project to address the issue of the competencies they failed.
Not only are schools designing systems and processes to assess mastery and development on an ongoing basis, but they are also increasingly incorporating performance assessments into their curriculum. Performance assessments are tests that aim to assess a student’s ability to demonstrate competencies in various disciplines and focus on the “application” of competencies rather than on the mere memorisation of facts. For example, a student may be able to answer multiple-choice questions in a mathematics test, but the performance assessment will test his or her ability to calculate change in dollars and cents in the context of a sales transaction.
Certain schools, e.g. Sanborn, design performance tasks that can be administered through traditional pen-and-paper tests, but test concepts in the context of real-world examples. Other schools have incorporated performance-based assessment in projects such as the aforementioned letter to the President, in which students are expected to apply their knowledge of US history and foreign policy in an argumentative essay with a real-world context. And then there is the case of MC2 and other schools, where students are required to defend their learning in front of a faculty panel, in much the same way that doctoral students defend their theses in front of a panel of faculty members.
When are students assessed?
Varying assessment to create a competency-based model requires, in addition to new methods for testing student mastery, more flexible and on-demand opportunities for students to test themselves. Without fundamentally varying the assessment plan so that students can be tested when they are ready, and giving them the opportunity to review material they have not mastered, schools will not be able to achieve a truly competency-based model.
On-demand assessment represents a challenge, as it challenges schools’ traditional approaches to verifying student learning according to a predefined academic calendar. Schools need to rethink their timetable and plan to take a much more individualised approach if they are to assess students when they are ready to do so, rather than on a set day and time. Smaller schools can manage to assess students as needed at any given time. But scaling up such a system requires the adoption of new technological platforms. Such platforms will need to track student progress, help calculate when the student will be ready for assessment and, in some cases, provide appropriate assessment items on demand. Without such capabilities, keeping track of each student’s progress and the appropriate individual assessment plan can be a daunting task for any educator.
Government accountability systems, such as annual reviews, also pose obstacles to the creation of on-demand assessment systems. In order to square these hierarchical regimes of downward accountability and to achieve increasingly personalised learning systems, national or state tests will need to be administered according to a more flexible scheme.
For a more complete picture of how 13 schools are moving to competency-based learning in New Hampshire (USA), take a look:
From policy to practice: How competency-based education is evolving in New Hampshire
