A recent post
making the rounds on Facebook offers a series of text snippets in which the
smartphone autocorrect feature renders the chat hilariously illiterate, often
obscenely so. I confess that I laughed so hard it brought tears to my eyes.
Still, there’s a lesson or two behind the laughs.
You see, the
autocorrect feature is designed to learn. If you mistype—maybe thumb-typing
isn’t your forte or you mumble using voice input—and manually correct your
mistake, then the autocorrect genie figures, okay, whenever you make a similar
mistake, it will correct it to match your typed correction. This is good up to
a point. However, if you are prone to use the f-word with your friends, be
careful to double-check how you spell fuchsia
when you text your mother.
Standardized
testing is to public education what autocorrect is to text chatting—with one
major exception. The errors produced by the overuse and misuse of standardized
tests never seem to get corrected. Not that this worries the test makers who
are making a bundle from perpetuating the current test mania or the policy
makers who are using misinterpretation and overgeneralization of test results
to support efforts to undermine public education. For the rest of us, standardized
testing needs a learning feature.
Support is
growing for a counter-movement to stop relying on standardized testing to
(mis)inform education policy decisions, assess student achievement, and
evaluate teachers and schools. Autocorrect makes assumptions that often are
unwarranted, however grounded they may be in prior conduct. Standardized tests lead some to make assumptions about
students and educators that are unwarranted, though they may superficially
appear to be reasonable. There’s an old saw about assume, that it makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” That’s pretty
accurate. Such assumptions are detrimental to all of the publics in public
education.
Autocorrect
works fairly well for short, simple expressions. Standardized testing works all
right for limited purposes, too. But complex constructions of thought and
expression aren’t amenable to autocorrect, which tends to render complexity
illiterate. Nor are the complexities of teaching and learning well served by
standardized testing, which produces education policy illiteracy and other
problems.
I share the
sentiments of Jem Muldoon (http://jemmuldoon.blogspot.com), expressed in a blog
post last year: “Learning is complex and messy. The most efficient way to measure it must
honor its complexity.”
We avoid the errors of autocorrect by proofreading so as not to appear
to be illiterate (or obscene). We would do well to double-check any
standardized testing with an eye to ridding public education of meaningless
tests and misleading results.
