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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] MULTIPLE CHOICE FLUNKS OUT [[[[[[[[[[[[
by Jacques Barzun (cultural critic and historian) (11/2/88)
Op-Ed Page, The New York Times 10-11-88
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 07656GAED]
Many things have been urged upon the beleaguered public
schools: install computers, reduce class size, pay teachers
better and respect them more and give them bodyguards, reform
teacher training, restore the principal's authority, purge the
bureaucracy and reduce paperwork, stick to the basics, stop
"social promotion," kill social studies and bring back history,
and (the latest plan) pay kids not to drop out or play truant.
Except for the last, all these ideas have merit and some are
being tried. But to the best of my knowledge the central
feature of modern schooling has never been taken up: the multi-
choice test.
This test and its variants--filling in words, rearranging
items, etc.--dominates teachers' and students' minds. [Is this
really what's going on in todays' classrooms? Good God! BG]
Passing and failing, ratings of teachers and schools, national
and state rankings, the rise and fall of literacy, admission to
college and other institutions--all hang upon this instrument
peculiar to our century.
It is harmful to learning and teaching. Yes, I know the
arguments in favor of these "objective" tests: They are easy
to grade; uniformity and unmistakable answers answers imply
fairness; one can compare performance over time and guage the
results of programs; the validity of questions is statistically
tested and the performance of students is followed up through
later years.
If the tests do test what is suppossed, such advantages look
overwhelming, and it must seem perverse to call them harmful.
But since their adoption, the results of the huge effort and
expense of public schooling have been less and less
satisfactory.
Many studies have shown the failure of our schools: High
school graduates cannot read or write acceptably, do not know
which half of the 19th century Lincoln was President and can
hardly identify four states on the map.
What has this to do with mechanical testing? Simply this:
Multiple-choice questions test nothing but passive-recognition
knowledge, not active usable knowledge.
Knowing something means the power to summon up facts and
their significance in the right relations. Mechanical testing
does not foster this power. It is one thing to pick out Valley
Forge, not Dobbs Ferry or Little Rock, as the place where
George Washington made his winter headquarters; it is another,
first, to think of Valley Forge and then to say why he chose it
rather than Philadelphia, where it was warmer.
In subjects that require something other than information--
the development of skill, as in reading, writing and
mathematics--straining toward a plausible choice is not
instructional. Nobody ever learned to write better by filling
in the blanks with proffered verbs and adjectives. To write is
to fill a totally blank sheet with words of your own.
Multiple-choice tests, whether of fact or skill, break up the
unity of knowledge and isolate the pieces; in them, nothing
follows on anything else, and a student's mind must keep jump-
ing.
True testing elicits the pattern originally learned. An
essay examination reinforces pattern-making. Ability shows
itself not in the number of accurate "hits" but in the extent,
coherence and verbal accuracy of each whole answer.
Science and math consists of similiar clusters of thought,
and, in all subjects, composing organised statements requires
full-blown thinking. Objective tests ask only for sorting. So
true is this that some schools have had to set up "courses in
thinking"--as if thinking could or should be taught apart from
curriculum subjects.
This is where the lost art of framing and grading essay
questions comes in; such examinations imply what teaching aims
at.
Thirty years ago the physicist and teacher Banesh Hoffmann
wrote a book, "The Tyranny of Testing," which was attacked by
the test-making industry and ignored by educationists. It
showed how multiple-choice questions, by their form and
substance, work against the aim of teaching.
He pointed out that these questions penalize the more
imaginative and favor those who are content to collect facts.
Therefore, multiple-choice test statistics, in all their uses,
are misleading.
Instead of forcing--and coaching--young minds in form-filling
exercises, telling them "choose and take a chance," schools
would be well advised to return to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Tell
us what you know."
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