Examinations and global competitiveness
August 17, 2009 at 11:44 pm 2 comments
Prof. Yong Zhao at the Michigan State University School of Education has argued against “standardized tests” in this video. Standardized tests are sort of like the end of the year examinations that are conducted by the state board or the central board in India which tend to assess all students in the country or state on a narrow set of skills and grade/rank them according to their performance in these exams. While Prof. Zhao, in this video advocates against standardized tests in U.S.A, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this video in the Indian context too.
- Firstly, the future global economy depends on niche talents and innovation. But these standardized tests/exams are pushing all students to spend most of their time preparing for these exams, which in turn is forcing all of students into possessing one general category of “intelligence” based on the content of the tests. These students could instead be pursuing what they are passionate about and developing the niche talents that the country needs.
- Moreover, what will happen if the majority of the population are forced to be educated the same way and then the skills needed in the economy changes. Can the workforce of the country keep up with the changes?
- In order for the country to develop innovative solutions to meet the market needs, the citizens should grow up to be creative. For this, the children should be allowed to experiment with their ideas and fail and learn from their failures. An environment that values risk-taking needs to be created for this.
- People think that subjects like subjects like computer programming, math and science are much tougher than subjects like arts and humanities and so on. But this is not the case. These disciplines can be as tough or even tougher. And in order for the society to thrive and remain vibrant, a diverse set of disciplines needs to be encouraged.
Entry filed under: Curriculum, Indian education system, Rethinking the education system, Student assessments, What is worth learning?. Tags: creativity, higher order skills, india education, math and science careers, performance centered teaching, purpose of education, redesign of education systems, rote learning, us education.
1.
nanda | June 22, 2010 at 8:17 am
Nice perspective on the NCLB approach in US.
It is true that a blanket testing system is skewed towards students who have more propensity in those areas, mainly Math and Science. However, I would hazard to guess more than 60% of the high paying jobs need some level of competence in them. Hence the dilemma.
I agree with Prof. Zhao’s assertion that American way of education is better and more balanced and it is not good to try and mimic other countries which have shown success in niche areas.
The problem though with too much flexibility is figuring out which students are just lazy in learning the basics and which ones are truly not interested and would rather work hard in some other field.
2.
gathu1 | June 25, 2010 at 1:49 am
I think the issue really is the excessive focus on reading and math because of NCLB at the cost of other discipline areas. This goes back to the incentive structure in NCLB, which is leading to the imbalance. The question is, at a policy level, how can the incentives be restructured?