It’s time to mobilize around a new approach to educational assessment

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As the scale of formal education has increased, so too has the scale of testing, to the point where it has become a giant business. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on traditional testing of core skills such as numeracy and literacy, and just a few industry giants dominate the field. Annual testing expenditure in just some of the more populous US states, in fact, is far more than it is in the largest international testing programs combined (TIMSS/PIRLS and PISA).

That’s OK. This testing, focused as it is on core skills, is important. Failing to test such skills would have higher economic costs and significant detrimental effects because, at an aggregate or systems level (say, across countries or regions), such assessment data have an important role in setting sensible educational policy.

But there is also much room for improvement, because using traditional testing methods (for example, multiple-choice-format standardized tests) to measure the kinds of complex cognitive abilities that students will increasingly need in the work environments of the future is, in effect, like using a bathroom scale to measure cardiovascular health. We lose too much information when our measurement tools cannot capture complex data.

Solutions are available: there are increasingly more effective ways of assessing complex skills. Alternative testing methods, such as authentic assessments, can have substantial benefits through increased student engagement and learning as the environments where learning and assessment take place come into alignment.

However, the pace at which the approach to assessment is shifting is troublingly slow, even within the education sector. And why isn’t the economics sector more interested in the future direction of learning, and even less in the future of educational assessment? In 2015, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report proposing a new vision for education as an industry agenda. That is a step toward the right ...

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