A Lack of Vision

Each of us aims to create products that will delight our clients. We want to stun them with the ways we have in a cost-efficient manner innovated in order to create a unique product that fills their desires. We look for employees that will bring ideas and talents to the table so that we can develop new ideas, new products, and reach new clients. Helping grow our businesses, our industries, and our success. This is a simple goal that truly hasn't changed since the 1920's. What has changed is our technologies to reach new clients, capacities to build new products, and our ways to interact with each other. Information, once a scarcity, is now something in abundance. We can have all the knowledge in the world in an instant but can we understand what the client needs, work collaboratively to maximize our talents to fulfill this need, and communicate back to the client this is your product and this is how it works.

In a knowledge economy, information-based assessment made sense. The quicker you could get information, the quicker you could react to the client's needs and make a solution. Standardized-assessments, requiring the good-old #2 pencil could quickly assess what each person knew and identify if they knew enough. The trope used to be, there are no trick questions, you can either do it or not. The funny thing is technology has changed dramatically, the interchange within our world changed dramatically, knowledge is no longer at a premium, and yet our tests merely evolve. Our world has tools straight out of Star Trek, computers that answer questions at a verbal whim, communication devices that fit in our ears and our pockets and can call across the globe, we can land spacecraft on a comet over 300 million miles away. Yet our tests are simple substitutions for the prior generation of Scantrons. Now the questions openly try to trick you with linguistic complexity. The questions build on each other. There are videos integrated. One writes, excuse me types, a little bit of extended responses. Our students will sit for hours demonstrating skills almost useless in the modern workplace. They will sit in classes for hundreds of hours preparing skills almost useless in the modern workplace so they can be assessed by these tests. We can spend billions of dollars and quite frankly the creators of Get Smart or Inspector Gadget could have done better.

See, in those shows, the agent was given a mission to complete. A real task in which they really had to do something. Our lack of vision has created substitutional exams within which we have traditional knowledge based tasks and assessments for a world that requires very little of this. An assessment system that had vision would have used those billions of dollars to have students work together to make real products. Wondering how it could look? Try this:

A school receives 20 boxes for their 79 fourth grade students. On each box are 3 to 4 student ID numbers selected at random by the computer. Each group of 3 to 4 students needs to work together to complete the project inside. They have a week to do it. Inside the box are directions and outcome expectations. The project itself can be both explicit in some details and vague in others. At the end of the week, the children fill the box with their product/project and send it off. 

This is real world. One works with people in a group identified by someone else to make a product that someone different requested. One doesn't have a person to constantly ask questions to but instead has infinite access to any knowledge and resource around them. Instead of being bored staring at a screen or a Scantron, our students could be meaningfully assessed based on direct measurable outcomes. Instead of limited knowledge and skill assessment we could be breeding a system that promotes knowledge, understanding, communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. There are lots of ways to spend a few billion dollars. Just ask Steve Ballmer. It is our lack of vision that limits our ability to spend them well.

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