Autocorrect, and Other Illiteracies

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.