How do we assess if students are learning?  A common answer is if students are passing tests or not. Dr. Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center challenges this notion.  He says "developing better tests of student learning in the 21st century is as futile as attempting to find a faster horse and buggy would have been in the 20th century"(2010).  Our traditional assessments don't let us know how much a student has learned as much as they allow us to sort students.  Sorting students will not help our students become successful in the 21st century economy. To measure student learning in the 21st century Reeves suggests we assess students in three ways: 

   1. In variable rather than standardized conditions

   2. As teams rather than as individuals

   3. With assessments that are public rather than secret

 

By focusing on these three areas we are able to measure growth in a variety of relevant skills beyond content acquisition. In fact, content acquisition becomes a minimum expectation and foundation for learning in the 21st century.  School used to be the only place a person could come to learn new content.  Tests that simply tested content acquisition made sense and were valuable.  Now content is widely available and the purpose of schools is shifting.  Our young learners must learn how to navigate through the content and become digitally literate.  Chris Dede, a professor at Harvard University offers eleven necessary skills to develop digital literacy.  In his model students must experiment with their surroundings, be able to "separate signals from noise", communicate effectively, and see diversity as an opportunity. Here is a graphic representation of Chris Dede's Digital Citizenship skills. 

Since the school's purpose is no longer simply to teach concepts, more emphasis in assessment then becomes focused on what students can do with their knowledge, including working in teams to solve problems.  Shifting from standardized conditions to variable conditions allows for flexibility in what is assessed. When many students were preparing to work in a factory conforming to schedules and assessing basic knowledge was valuable.  Now, these skills are irrelevant.  The current students will create their jobs and innovation will be an expectation.  How can innovation be assessed in a standardized condition when every assessor is trained to look for the same qualities in an answer?  

Our current students will need to be able to contribute to a group more-so than ever before.  In the 20th Century a great deal of our citizens needed to work as part of a team and simply fulfill their roles.  Those days are over. Our current students will need to be able to collaborate with a group to create products and solve problems.  Assigning grades and sorting students is no longer relevant because our teams will only be as strong as our weakest citizens.  We can no longer rely on a few individuals to serendipitously acquire skills such as problem solving, creativity, and innovation, but rather we must expect all of our citizens will learn these skills. 

Finally, public assessments provide validity to assignments.  When the audience is expanded beyond a single teacher, the quality of work increases because the projects mean something more than a letter grade.  Students taking tests to assess content matter sends the message that learning content is the most valued skill in our education system.  Perhaps teams are competing for a proposal for a company.  The assessment can occur throughout the project and thus students are able to process their feedback and apply it directly to the project. A vision is that students would then come to value and seek out feedback because it helps them grow and get better.