mong the many aphorisms attributed to Winston Churchill is the expression, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Churchill had postwar challenges in mind, but it’s a fitting bit of wisdom for addressing the structural flaws in education that were pushed to the crisis point by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic wreaked havoc on quality and equity in education for learners at all levels throughout the world. It’ll be years before we know its full impact on students’ academic, cognitive, and social and emotional development, in part because that impact is ongoing.
Despite that uncertainty, three things are absolutely clear:
- Schools, districts, institutions, and entire education systems were woefully unprepared for the specific conditions of the pandemic;
- Our systems of education have long been structurally ill-equipped to prepare students for success in complex societies;
- And systemic transformation, rather than incremental reform, is the most promising path to the equitable, high-functioning education systems required by 21st-century societies, economies, and workplaces.
Given the likelihood of future mass dislocations, whether from viral pandemics, environmental catastrophes or political conflict, the longer we wait to rebuild education, the more devastating the next event will be.
We cannot let this crisis go to waste.
As Goes Education, So Goes Assessment
As a core component of education, assessment is also overdue for transformation. Thanks to advances in the learning sciences and the development of such educational technologies as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics, that transformation was already underway when the pandemic struck.
Today, assessment is in position not only to undergo transformation alongside teaching and learning, but to help shape the transformation and the future of education.
We have long known that standardized assessments are limited in what they can tell us about individual student learning and, as a result, in their ability to support teaching and learning. In fact, the more we understand about personalized learning and students' different learning styles, the greater our ability to design tests that give each student an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and knowledge based on their learning and communication styles.
One of the breakthrough insights of recent research on learning is evidence that different students learn differently. Another is that learning occurs in a variety of environments and modes including synchronous, asynchronous, hybrid, and virtual. The pandemic illuminated and hastened both of these dynamics.
Meanwhile AI, data analytics, and other digital tools have shown spectacular ability to generate, sort, and organize data on individual student learning, both in and out of the classroom. These data can support personalized teaching, learning, and testing in ways that was simply not possible before.
For test developers, the challenge is to combine the insights and the technologies to design assessments that can advance teaching and learning, monitor student progress, empower student engagement and individual agency, and support system accountability.
As for equity, if personalized learning is possible, then every student stands to benefit with no opportunity cost to any other student.
To be sure, these trends were underway before the pandemic struck, at ETS and within the assessment industry generally. But the pandemic has ignited the urgency.
At ETS, we are undertaking research on how to ensure student-centered, competency-based, and culturally and socially relevant teaching, learning and measurement that accomplishes several purposes: 1) create opportunities for students to pursue paths of learning suited to their learning styles; 2) develop the means by which they can demonstrate and memorialize their learning; 3) account for and leverage students’ linguistic and cultural diversities; and 4) measure and support development of the social and emotional skills critical to success in society.
Student Centered
Educational technology is ascendant today, but it is not vogue. AI, for instance, goes back 70 years at least, to the Turing Test. Still, as promising as it is, and as central to classroom learning and measurement as it is likely to become, edtech is not education; a school is not a technology market; and a student is more than a computer user. The foundation of education is the student–teacher relationship, with the student at the center.
History has given us the opportunity to undertake real transformation in education. It is an exciting prospect. But it requires a continuing sense of urgency. Given the stakes for us all, I hope that if and when things truly return to normal post-pandemic, education and assessment aren’t among them.
We cannot let this crisis go to waste.
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There’s a Crisis in Education, and That’s a Good Thing
Photo by Mwesigwa Joel via Unsplash.
September 18, 2022
The pandemic wreaked havoc on quality and equity in education for learners at all levels throughout the world. However, history has given us the opportunity to undertake real transformation in education, and we cannot let this crisis go to waste, writes ETS’s Catherine Millett.
A
mong the many aphorisms attributed to Winston Churchill is the expression, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Churchill had postwar challenges in mind, but it’s a fitting bit of wisdom for addressing the structural flaws in education that were pushed to the crisis point by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic wreaked havoc on quality and equity in education for learners at all levels throughout the world. It’ll be years before we know its full impact on students’ academic, cognitive, and social and emotional development, in part because that impact is ongoing.
Despite that uncertainty, three things are absolutely clear:
- Schools, districts, institutions, and entire education systems were woefully unprepared for the specific conditions of the pandemic;
- Our systems of education have long been structurally ill-equipped to prepare students for success in complex societies;
- And systemic transformation, rather than incremental reform, is the most promising path to the equitable, high-functioning education systems required by 21st-century societies, economies, and workplaces.
Given the likelihood of future mass dislocations, whether from viral pandemics, environmental catastrophes or political conflict, the longer we wait to rebuild education, the more devastating the next event will be.
We cannot let this crisis go to waste.
As Goes Education, So Goes Assessment
As a core component of education, assessment is also overdue for transformation. Thanks to advances in the learning sciences and the development of such educational technologies as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics, that transformation was already underway when the pandemic struck.
Today, assessment is in position not only to undergo transformation alongside teaching and learning, but to help shape the transformation and the future of education.
We have long known that standardized assessments are limited in what they can tell us about individual student learning and, as a result, in their ability to support teaching and learning. In fact, the more we understand about personalized learning and students' different learning styles, the greater our ability to design tests that give each student an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and knowledge based on their learning and communication styles.
One of the breakthrough insights of recent research on learning is evidence that different students learn differently. Another is that learning occurs in a variety of environments and modes including synchronous, asynchronous, hybrid, and virtual. The pandemic illuminated and hastened both of these dynamics.
Meanwhile AI, data analytics, and other digital tools have shown spectacular ability to generate, sort, and organize data on individual student learning, both in and out of the classroom. These data can support personalized teaching, learning, and testing in ways that was simply not possible before.
For test developers, the challenge is to combine the insights and the technologies to design assessments that can advance teaching and learning, monitor student progress, empower student engagement and individual agency, and support system accountability.
As for equity, if personalized learning is possible, then every student stands to benefit with no opportunity cost to any other student.
To be sure, these trends were underway before the pandemic struck, at ETS and within the assessment industry generally. But the pandemic has ignited the urgency.
At ETS, we are undertaking research on how to ensure student-centered, competency-based, and culturally and socially relevant teaching, learning and measurement that accomplishes several purposes: 1) create opportunities for students to pursue paths of learning suited to their learning styles; 2) develop the means by which they can demonstrate and memorialize their learning; 3) account for and leverage students’ linguistic and cultural diversities; and 4) measure and support development of the social and emotional skills critical to success in society.
Student Centered
Educational technology is ascendant today, but it is not vogue. AI, for instance, goes back 70 years at least, to the Turing Test. Still, as promising as it is, and as central to classroom learning and measurement as it is likely to become, edtech is not education; a school is not a technology market; and a student is more than a computer user. The foundation of education is the student–teacher relationship, with the student at the center.
History has given us the opportunity to undertake real transformation in education. It is an exciting prospect. But it requires a continuing sense of urgency. Given the stakes for us all, I hope that if and when things truly return to normal post-pandemic, education and assessment aren’t among them.
We cannot let this crisis go to waste.
