Students across the country will take finals over the next few weeks. I’m not opposed to the idea of a final. But I’d like to share why I think that they are often problematic for teachers and students and offer some suggestions for how to make the assessment process meaningful and real.
I’m fascinated by the origins of what we do in education and why, so I did a quick investigation into the history of final exams. It seems that finals have been with us since around 1640, shortly after Harvard was founded. The college required that students orally recite everything that they had memorized during their time of study. Fast forward a few hundred years, and the practice of requiring students to use pencil and paper to prove what they had learned throughout a course had been adopted by most colleges and high schools across the country. As an interesting side note, Harvard, the institution that so graciously introduced the country to the final, only administered a final exam in 259 of the 1,137 courses that they offered.
What’s the Problem?
The idea of a final is great. It’s a capstone, serving as an opportunity for students to show what they’ve learned. The application of the final often falls short. Picture an extended selected-response test that covers material from day one to 90 or 180. And then, picture dedicated and conscientious students cramming for days or weeks to place material from throughout the course back into their short-term memories for long enough to successfully pass the exam. To be sure, I’ve spent many nights with little to no sleep preparing for multiple finals on the same day and got A’s on every one of them. But the truth is that even with all those A’s, most of those minute pieces of information are no longer with me.
The best that we can say of these tests is that they provide a life test. The question we pose to our students is: Are you willing to sacrifice and work for the grade? This type of test is fine on one level and awful on all others. Our courses should teach and result in transformative experiences that deeply impact the thinking and creative abilities of our students. Selected-response tests do not possess the ability to measure these skills. If you read those last couple of sentences and thought, “My essay will be great then,” please keep reading because you’ve missed the mark.
What Real Assessment Looks Like
To understand what assessments should be and how we can best use them in our classes, we don’t have to look any further than the world around us. Learning is living. It’s the assessment of how well we live that determines how much we’ve learned. If I want to learn how to build a brick wall, I start to build a brick wall. And I practice building over and over until I’ve honed my craft to the point that I can build a brick wall that is ready for real life. And my test is the real application of my learning. I go and build a brick wall at my house. I’m able to assess my learning by looking at the wall. This is real learning and real assessment. The test is an authentic representation of what I’ve learned.
Most tests that are given in school are artificial. The paper/pencil or online, graded-automatically, selected-response test only exists because it’s quick and easy. And, because it’s quick and easy, it’s an extremely unreliable method for assessing learning. I can’t count the number of tests that I’ve studied for, aced, and forgotten all of the information that was assessed. This is because the majority of tests only assess one’s short-term memory. This is fake and part of the game of school that we must depart from as quickly as possible.
I’m very much in favor of using assessment to measure what’s been learned throughout a course and to allow for the application of that knowledge. It’s the application of the knowledge that is the living. We learn through living. If we design authentic assessments for our students, we actually allow for the assessment to be the vehicle that allows students to learn as we assess what they’ve learned. It’s real, simple, and pretty magical.
Three Ideas to Try
The Podcast
The podcast project allows students to think about everything that they’ve done throughout the course. They then select a topic that is most meaningful to them and create a podcast episode exploring it in an in-depth way. Students or groups can work on these projects with the purpose of publishing them for others to learn from their exploration. Picture a class listening to the robust creations of students who have owned their learning and created meaningful products that teach others. I love the podcast project and would highly recommend using this as The Final Project.
Course Trailer
What’s your course about? How would you summarize the course in two or three minutes? How would your students after they’ve been through the whole thing? The course trailer project allows for all of these questions to be answered. Students are given the challenge of creating a movie-style trailer that introduces future students to the big ideas that your course will cover throughout the year. Students must identify these themes, present them in an insightful and entertaining way, and publish them with the intent of next year’s classes watching them during the first days of school. Your last few days of school with your students are spent watching their trailers and remembering all of the amazing things that were learned throughout the year.
The Class Yearbook
I love authentic assessments that require groups to contribute individual pieces to a larger whole. Think of a traditional school yearbook. There are pictures of students, teachers, teams, clubs, and superlatives. The class yearbook project riffs on this idea and asks the class to create a yearbook of their learning. They replace pictures of students with pictures of the big ideas that were presented. They replace the sports teams and their descriptions with pictures and writings about essential questions and their answers. Individual groups choose the sections that they will create and set out to build them. Each group then combines their work into a complete course yearbook. The final yearbook can be in print and digital form. Think about sending your students home with a book about their learning that they made.
Final Thoughts
I love these three ideas and would like to sit here and write about ten more. However, the best aspects of authentic assessments are that they allow for so much creativity and individual choice. You may have read through these three ideas and thought that they don’t work for you. That’s fine. But there is an authentic assessment out there that will. And I would highly recommend presenting base ideas to your class and then allowing for discussion to mold the assessment into what you and your students want it to be.
I see no possible way that a traditional, selected-response final exam could match the long-term learning impact of an authentic assessment. If you’re worried about trying this, don’t. Don’t think too much about it. Just do it. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions or thoughts. I would love to help on your end-of-the-year assessment journey.
—Miles
Miles O'Shea 